Crime Writers and Other Animals

by Simon Brett

  He looked up at his mistress with that insolence cats don’t just reserve for kings, and Seraphina Fellowes felt another twist of the dagger in her heart. She stared dispassionately down at the animal. He’d never been very beautiful, just a tabby neutered tom like a million others. Seraphina looked up at one of the publicity shots on the wall and compared the cat photographed five years previously with the current reality.

  Time hadn’t been kind. Mr Whiffles really was looking in bad shape. He was fourteen, after all. He was thinner, his coat more scruffy, he was a bit scummy round the mouth, and he might even have a patch of mange at the base of his tail.

  ‘You poor old boy,’ Seraphina Fellowes cooed. ‘You’re no spring chicken any more, are you? I’m rather afraid it’s time for you and me to pay a visit to the vet.’

  And she went off to fetch the cat-basket.

  At the surgery, everyone made a great fuss of Mr Whiffles. Though he’d enjoyed generally good health, there had been occasional visits to the vet for all the usual minor feline ailments and, as the fame of the books grew, he was treated there increasingly like a minor royal.

  Seraphina didn’t take much notice of the attention he was getting. She was preoccupied with planning the press conference at which the sad news of Mr Whiffles’ demise would be communicated to the media. She would employ the pained expression she had perfected for speaking about her invalid husband. And yes, the line ‘It was a terrible wrench, but I felt the time had come to prevent him further suffering’ must come in somewhere.

  ‘How incontinent?’ asked the vet, once they were inside the surgery and Mr Whiffles was standing on the bench to be examined.

  ‘Oh, I’m afraid it’s getting worse and worse,’ said Seraphina mournfully. ‘I mean, at first I didn’t worry about it, thought it was only a phase, but there’s no way we can ignore the situation any longer. It’s causing poor Mr Whiffles so much pain, apart from anything else.’

  ‘If it’s causing him pain, then it’s probably just some kind of urinary infection,’ said the vet unhelpfully.

  ‘I’m afraid it’s worse than that.’ Seraphina Fellowes choked back a little sob. ‘It’s a terrible decision to make, but I’m afraid he’ll have to be put down.’

  The vet’s reaction to this was even worse. He burst out laughing. ‘Good heavens, we’re not at that stage.’ He stroked Mr Whiffles, who reached up appealingly and rubbed his whiskers against the vet’s face. ‘No, this old boy’s got another good five years in him, I’d say.’

  ‘Really?’ Seraphina realized she’d let too much pique show in that one, and repeated a softer, more relieved, more tentative, ‘Really?’

  ‘Oh yes. I’ll put him on antibiotics, and that’ll sort out the urinary infection in no time.’ The vet looked at her with concern. ‘But you shouldn’t be letting worries about him prey on your mind like this. You mustn’t get things out of proportion, you know.’

  ‘I am not getting things out of proportion!’ Seraphina Fellowes snapped with considerable asperity.

  ‘Maybe you should go and see your doctor,’ the vet suggested gently. ‘It might be something to do with your age.’

  Seraphina was still seething at that last remark as she drove back home. Her mood was not improved by the way Mr Whiffles looked up at her through the grille of the cat-basket. His expression seemed almost triumphant.

  Seraphina Fellowes set her mouth in a hard line. The situation wasn’t irreversible. There were more ways to kill a cat than enlisting the help of the vet.

  2. Fighting Like Cats and Dogs

  ‘Are you sure you don’t mind my bringing Ghengis, Seraphina?’

  ‘No, no.’

  ‘But I thought, what with you being a cat person, you wouldn’t want a great big dog tramping all over your house.’

  A great big dog Ghengis certainly was. He must have weighed about the same as the average nightclub bouncer, and the similarities didn’t stop there. His teeth appeared too big for his mouth, with the result that he was incapable of any expression other than slavering.

  ‘It’s no problem,’ Seraphina Fellowes reassured her guest.

  ‘But he doesn’t like cats.’ Seraphina knew this; it was the sole reason for her guest’s invitation. ‘I’d hate to think of him doing any harm to the famous Mr Whiffles,’ her guest continued.

  ‘Don’t worry. Mr Whiffles is safely ensconced with George.’ The mastiff growled the low growl of a flesh addict whose fix is overdue. ‘Maybe Ghengis would like to have a run around the garden . . . to let off some steam?’

  As she opened the back door and Ghengis rocketed out, Seraphina looked with complacency towards the tree under which a cat lay serenely asleep. ‘No, no!’ her guest screamed. ‘There’s Mr Whiffles!’

  ‘Oh dear,’ said Seraphina Fellowes with minimal sincerity. Then she closed the back door and went through the passage into the kitchen to watch the unequal contest through a window.

  The huge slavering jaws were nearly around the cat before Mr Whiffles suddenly became aware and jumped sideways. The chase thereafter was furious, but there was no doubt who was calling the shots. Mr Whiffles didn’t chose the easy option of flying up a tree out of Ghengis’s reach. Instead, he played on his greater mobility, weaved and curvetted across the grass, driving the thundering mastiff to ever more frenzied pitches of frustration.

  Finally, Mr Whiffles seemed to tire. He slowed, gave up evasive action and started to move in a defeated straight line towards the house. Ghengis pounded greedily after him, slavering more than ever.

  Mr Whiffles put on a sudden burst of acceleration. Ghengis did likewise, and he had the more powerful engine. He ate up the ground that separated them.

  At the second when it seemed nothing could stop the jaws from closing around his thin body, Mr Whiffles took off through the air and threaded himself neatly through the outer cat-flap into the passage, and the next one into the kitchen.

  Seraphina Fellowes just had time to look down at the cat on the tiled floor before she heard the splintering crunch of Ghengis hitting the outside door at full speed.

  Mr Whiffles looked up at his mistress with an expression which seemed to say, ‘You’ll have to do better than that, sweetie.’

  As Seraphina Fellowes was seeing her guest and bloody-faced dog off on their way to the vet’s, the postman arrived with the day’s second post. The usual thick rubber-banded wodge of letters.

  That day two-thirds of the envelopes had paw-prints on the back.

  3. Letting the Cat Out of the Bag

  It was sad that George’s mother died. Sad for George, that is. Seraphina had never cared for the old woman.

  And it did mean that George would have to go to Ireland for the funeral. What with seeing solicitors, tidying his mother’s house prior to putting it on the market, and other family duties, he would be away a whole week.

  How awkward that this coincided with Seraphina’s recollection that she needed to go to New York for a meeting with her American agent. Awkward because it meant for a whole week neither of them would be able to feed Mr Whiffles.

  Not to worry, Seraphina had reassured George, there’s a local girl who’ll come in and put food down for him morning and evening. Not a very bright local girl, thought Seraphina gleefully, though she didn’t mention that detail to George.

  ‘Now, Mr Whiffles is a very fussy eater,’ she explained when she was briefing the local girl, ‘and sometimes he’s just not interested in his food. But don’t you worry about that. If he hasn’t touched one plateful, just throw it away and put down a fresh one – OK?’

  Seraphina waited until the cab taking George to the station was out of sight. Then she picked up a somewhat suspicious Mr Whiffles with a cooing, ‘Who’s a lovely boy then?’ and opened the trap door to the cellar.

  She placed the confused cat on the second step, and while Mr Whiffles was uneasily sniffing out his new environment, slammed the trap down and bolted it.

  Then she got into her BMW – she couldn�
�t wait till it was a Ferrari – and drove to the executive parking near Heathrow which she always used when she Concorded to the States.

  Seraphina made herself characteristically difficult with her agent in New York. Lots of little niggling demands were put forward to irritate her publisher. She was just flexing her muscles. She knew the sales of the Mr Whiffles books were too important to the publisher, and ten per cent of the royalties on them too important to her agent, for either party to argue.

  She also aired an idea that she had been nurturing for some time – that she might soon start another series of mysteries. Oh yes, still cat mysteries, but with a new, female protagonist.

  Her agent and publisher were both wary of the suggestion. Their general view seemed to be ‘If it ain’t broke, don’t mend it’. An insatiable demand was still out there for the existing Mr Whiffles product. Why put that guaranteed success at risk by starting something new?

  Seraphina characteristically made it clear that the opinions of her agent and publisher held no interest for her at all.

  On the Concorde back to London, she practised and honed the phrases she would use at the press conference which announced Mr Whiffles’ sad death from starvation in her cellar. How she would excoriate the stupid local girl who had unwittingly locked him down there in the first place, and then not been bright enough to notice that he wasn’t appearing to eat his food. Surely anyone with even the most basic intelligence could have put two and two together and realized that the cat had gone missing?

  There was indeed a press conference when Seraphina got back. The story even made its way on to the main evening television news – as one of those heart-warming end pieces which allow the newsreader to practise his chuckle.

  But the headlines weren’t the ones Seraphina had had in mind. ‘PLUCKY SUPERCAT SUMMONS HELP FROM CELLAR PRISON.’ ‘MR WHIFFLES CALLS FIRE BRIGADE TO SAVE HIM FROM LINGERING DEATH.’ ‘BRILLIANT MR WHIFFLES USES ONE OF HIS NINE LIVES AND WILL LIVE ON TO SOLVE MANY MORE CASES.’

  To compound Seraphina’s annoyance, she then had to submit to many interviews in which she expressed her massive relief for the cat’s survival, and to many photographic sessions in which she had to hug the mangy old tabby with apparent delight.

  Prompted by all the publicity, the volume of mail arriving at Seraphina Fellowes’ house rocketed. And now almost all the letters were addressed to ‘Mr Whiffles’. Seraphina thought if she saw another paw-print on the back of an envelope, she’d throw up.

  4. Playing Cat and Mouse

  In July 1985, in a speech to the American Bar Association in London, Margaret Thatcher said: ‘We must try to find ways to starve the terrorist and the hijacker of the oxygen of publicity on which they depend.’

  Seraphina Fellowes, a woman not dissimilar in character to Margaret Thatcher, determined to apply these tactics in her continuing campaign against Mr Whiffles. His miraculous escape from the cellar had had saturation coverage. The public was, for the time being, slightly bored with the subject of Mr Whiffles. Now was the moment to present them with a new publicity sensation.

  She was called Gigi, and she was everything Mr Whiffles wasn’t. A white Persian with deep blue eyes, she had a pedigree that made the Apostolic Succession look like the invention of parvenus. Whereas Mr Whiffles had the credentials of a streetfighter, Gigi was the unchallenged queen of all she surveyed.

  And, Seraphina Fellowes announced at the press conference she had called to share the news, Gigi’s fictional counterpart was about to become the heroine of a new series of cat mysteries. Stroking her new cat, Seraphina informed the media that she had just started the first book, Gigi and the Dead Fishmonger. Now that ‘dear old Mr Whiffles’ was approaching retirement, it was time to think of the future. And the future belonged to a new feisty, beautiful, young cat detective called Gigi.

  The announcement didn’t actually get much attention. It came too soon after the blanket media coverage accorded to Mr Whiffles’ escape and, though from Seraphina’s point of view there couldn’t have been more difference between the two, for the press it was ‘just another cat story’.

  The only effect the announcement did have was to increase yet further the volume of mail arriving at Seraphina Fellowes’ house. At first she was encouraged to see that the majority of these letters were addressed to her rather than to her old cat. But when she found them all to be condemnations of her decision to sideline Mr Whiffles, she was less pleased.

  Seraphina, however, was philosophical. Just wait till the book comes out, she thought. That’s when we’ll get a really major publicity offensive. And by ceasing to write the Mr Whiffles books, she would condemn the cat who gave them their name to public apathy and ultimate oblivion. She was turning the stopcock on the cylinder that contained his oxygen of publicity.

  So Seraphina Fellowes programmed the letter ‘G’ as the shorthand for ‘Gigi’ into her computer, and settled down to write the new book. It was hard, because she was canny enough to know that she couldn’t reproduce the Mr Whiffles formula verbatim. A white Persian aristocrat like Gigi demanded a different kind of plot from the streetwise tabby. And Seraphina certainly had no intention of enlisting George’s help again.

  So she struggled on. She knew she’d get there in time. And once the book was finished, even if the first of the series wasn’t quite up to the standard of a Mr Whiffles mystery, it would still sell in huge numbers on the strength of Seraphina Fellowes’ name alone.

  While she was writing, the presence – the existence – of Mr Whiffles did not become any less irksome to her.

  She made a half-hearted attempt to get rid of him by means of a plate of catfood laced with warfarin, but the tabby ignored the bait with all the contempt it deserved. And Seraphina was only just in time to snatch the plate away when she saw Gigi approaching it greedily.

  Mr Whiffles took to spending a lot of time in the middle of the study carpet, washing himself unhurriedly, and every now and then fixing his green eyes on the struggling author with an expression of derisive pity.

  Seraphina Fellowes gritted her teeth and, as she wrote, allowed the back burner of her mind to devise ever more painful and satisfying revenges.

  5. The Cat’s Pyjamas

  ‘I’ve done it! I’ve finished it!’ Seraphina Fellowes shouted to no one in particular as she rushed into the kitchen, the passive Gigi clasped in her arms. The author was wearing a brand-new designer silk blouse. Mr Whiffles, dozing on a pile of dirty washing in the utility room, opened one lazy eye to observe the proceedings. He watched Seraphina hurry to the fridge and extract a perfectly chilled bottle of Dom Perignon.

  It was a ritual. In the euphoria of completing the first Mr Whiffles mystery, Seraphina and George had cracked open a bottle of Spanish fizz and, even more surprisingly, ended the evening by making love. Since then the ritual had changed. The love-making had certainly never been repeated. The quality of the fizz had improved, but after the second celebration, when he got inappropriately drunk, George had no longer been included in the festivities. Now, when Seraphina Fellowes finished a book, she would dress herself in a new garment bought specially for the occasion, then sit down alone at the kitchen table and work her way steadily through a bottle of very good champagne. It was her ideal form of celebration – unalloyed pampering in the company she liked best in the world.

  When her mistress sat down, Gigi, demonstrating her customary lack of character, had immediately curled up on the table and gone to sleep. So the new mystery star didn’t hear the rambling monologue that the exhausted author embarked on as she drank.

  Mr Whiffles, cradled in his nest of dirty blouses, underwear and silk pyjamas, could hear it. Not being blessed with the kind of anthropomorphic sensibilities enjoyed by his fictional counterpart, he couldn’t of course understand a word. But from the tone of voice he didn’t have much problem in getting the gist. Continued vigilance on his part was clearly called for.

  Seraphina Fellowes drained the dregs of the last glass and ros
e, a little unsteadily, to her feet. As she did so, she caught sight of Mr Whiffles through the open utility-room door. She stared dumbly at him for a moment; then an idea took hold.

  Seraphina moved with surprising swiftness for one who’d just consumed a bottle of champagne, and was beside Mr Whiffles before he’d had time to react. She swept up the arms of the silk pyjama top beneath the cat and wrapped them tightly round him. Then she tucked the bundle firmly under her right arm. ‘You’re getting to be a very dirty cat in your old age,’ she hissed. ‘Time you had a really good wash.’

  She was remarkably deft for someone who’d had a woman to come in and do all her washing for the previous ten years. Mr Whiffles struggled to get free, but the tight silk tied his legs like a straitjacket. Though he strained and miaowed ferociously, it was to no avail. Seraphina’s arm clinched him like a vice, and he couldn’t get his claws to work through the cloth.

  With her spare hand, she shovelled the rest of the dirty washing into the machine, finally pitching in the unruly bundle of pyjamas. She pushed the door to with her knee, then turned to fill the plastic soap bubble.

  Claws snagging on the sleek fabric, Mr Whiffles struggled desperately to free himself. Somehow he knew that she had to open the machine’s door once more, and somehow he knew that that would be his only chance.

  The right amount of soap powder had been decanted. Seraphina bent down to open the door and throw the bubble in. With the sudden change of position, the champagne caught up with her. She swayed for a second, put a hand to her forehead and shook her head to clear it.