Cat Out of Hell (10 page)

“I don’t understand.”

“We’re talking about the one that got killed at the cottage?”

“Yes.”

“Neighbour’s cat.”

“But –”

“There was this black cat hanging around the house, you see. Went by the name of Inca – isn’t that a good name? I’ve never been good at naming animals. With a black cat, you see, you’d think of Blackie, perhaps –”

I interrupted. “But the black cat hanging about
was the Captain
,” I pointed out.

“Oh no, no, no!” Winterton laughed. “That wasn’t the Captain!”

“The cat Jo had photographed on her phone wasn’t the Captain?”

“No, no, no, no, no.”

I was baffled.

“Jo might have
thought
it was the Captain. She probably did think that. But it was just some neighbourhood black cat.”

“Really?”

“This is something Roger has remarked on before. He says there’s always a black cat in any neighbourhood; he says once you plant the idea of the Captain with people, they start noticing black cats everywhere. But it was just this pet cat Inca that got attacked by Wiggy – in the wrong place at the wrong time. Completely innocent. Wearing a collar, he was; which is a pretty big giveaway. Little identity tag with a phone number on
it, you see. But when Wiggy found Jo in that cellar next door, he was all worked up, wasn’t he? Inca strolls in. Oops. Black cat, bang splat. Roger had made himself scarce, of course. He isn’t daft, our Roger!”

I wasn’t sure I wanted Roger described as “our Roger.” Winterton seemed to be taking it for granted that I was part of this story already.

Looking back, I should have asked him then and there about Jo. Did he know why had she hidden next door? How had she become trapped? Why hadn’t Roger told Wiggy where she was? But he still hadn’t answered my original question.

“How did Mary get involved?” I asked again, steadily.

“They banned me from the library ten years ago, you see,” he said.

“Oh good grief!” I said.

It was time to adjust to the reality of this situation. I had been expecting Winterton to talk with the authoritative tones and narrative control of a story by M.R. James. I required a strategy. And the main thing was: I needed to stop asking open-ended questions.

“Did you meet Roger on the Acropolis?” I said.

“Oh.” He was a bit surprised by the sudden change of direction, but he answered me simply (which was a relief). “Yes. Yes, I did.” He thought about it some more, and then added, “Yes. I was very young.”

“Is his story about his nine lives true?”

“Oh, I think so. Yes.”

“Do you mind my asking rather abrupt yes/no questions like this?”

“No, no,” he said, cheerfully. “It’s probably best, you see.”

“Are you in cahoots with Roger?”

“Cahoots. Oh, um. Yes. I suppose so, yes.”

“Does he do your bidding?”

“Oh no! What? No, quite the opposite.
Quite
the opposite. I’m his creature, oh yes.”

“Does the Captain exist?”

“Oh, I’m afraid so.”

“Does he really have – I don’t know,
powers
?”

“Oh my God, yes. Oh yes. Powers, yes. Sometimes he kills; sometimes people kill themselves. Oh yes, powers.”

“Is Roger telling the truth about their relationship in the files?”

“I don’t know. What does he say?”

I was rather shocked that Winterton didn’t know the full contents of the folder he had sent me, when I had studied it myself so closely.

“Mainly, that the Captain is jealous of Roger’s closeness to humans, so he always arranges in some supernatural way for them to ‘lose the will to live.’ ”

“What was the question again?”

“Is that the relationship between Roger and the Captain?”

“No. Nothing like it.”

“No?”

“Well, perhaps it used to be. But Roger hasn’t seen the Captain for years and years, you see.”

“Does he look up to the Captain?’

“What? No.”

“No?”

“Not any more.”

“So?”

“He hates him. Basically, he wants someone to help kill him, you see. He was working on Wiggy, telling him the first part of the story, building up to the big stuff when he and the Captain were reunited after the war, but then it all turned nasty when Wiggy found out about Jo. So he’ll have to start again now.” He thought for a moment. “To be honest, he has already
started again. On you. That’s why he wanted me to send the file. It’s all coming to a head, you see.”

I didn’t like the sound of that.

“Can the Captain even
be
killed?”

“Ah. There’s the rub.”

He gave me a significant look. He took a sip of wine. “I’m enjoying this,” he said. “Mary used to ask me a lot of questions too. At this very table. She would keep saying, ‘Don’t ramble, Geoffrey. You’re rambling!’ ”

He laughed at this pleasant memory. I closed my eyes, and he must have noticed.

“I’m sorry,” he said.

I waved it away. I wasn’t going to share my agonies with Winterton.

“Look,” I said. “This is what I really want to know.”

“All right.” He assumed a look of seriousness.

“It’s a simple question.”

“OK.”

I took a breath.

“Winterton, were you responsible in any way for Mary’s death? Did the Captain come here?”

He sucked his teeth, and pulled a face. I waited. And then he answered, quietly, “Yes. I think he did.”

I put my head in my hands.

“I’m so sorry I got Mary involved,” he went on. “Roger thought she was the perfect ally because she thought his story was all nonsense. We were getting very close to something, you see. If you help us now –”

I had so many other questions, but for the time being, I could manage only one more.

“Have you ever heard of a publication entitled
Nine Lives: The Gift of Satan
?” I said.

The effect on Winterton was electric. He jumped up, and
set Watson off, barking. “No! How do you know about that? Have you got it? Where is it?
Is it here
?”

That night it was windy and bitterly cold. Winterton left at around 10:30; Watson and I escorted him to the main road, where we saw him into a taxi. The bare winter trees were bending and rolling in the wind; light from the street lamps was both feeble and stuttering. We shook hands before he got into the cab. He really was a ridiculous little man, but if he had managed to evade the wrath of the Captain all these years, then there could be no doubt he had hidden depths. We quickly ran over the highlights of the plan we had made.

“Saturday at six,” I said. “Back entrance, near the cycle parking area.”

“Right.”

“You have to be in position, because I’ll only have a few seconds.”

“Right.”

“This doesn’t mean I’m willing to be part of Roger’s story,” I said.

He laughed.

“It’s not Roger you have to worry about,” he said.

Back at the house, I went back to the kitchen and sat for a while at the table. The idea of Mary sitting right there and saying to Winterton, “Don’t ramble, Geoffrey” was both painful and comforting at the same time. I drank the last of the wine and patted Watson. Then I held up a treat above his head and said, with as much confidence as I could muster, “Do the trick?” – and what do you know? He just looked up at the treat and whined, so I gave it to him.

As I blankly stared around the kitchen, I started to wonder whether I was any better than Wiggy, really. Was I missing
vital clues staring me in the face, as he had done? After all, I now knew something quite important about Mary’s death: when she had come home from the library on that Monday morning, she had known she was in danger. Working with the shambolic Geoffrey Winterton had attracted the attention of an evil cat – an evil cat capable of devastating a small room and its contents; an evil cat looking for a book written by a famous diabolist on the subject (presumably) of supernatural longevity in cats. Whether she believed in any of this paranormal stuff was immaterial. The point was: what had she done? Being Mary, she had acted. Putting two and two together from what Tawny had told me, I now believed that Mary had retrieved the Seeward pamphlet from the devastated carrel and hidden it elsewhere in the library. My wife was enough of a Sherlock Holmes fan to know that a library was the very best place in which to secrete a book. Behind the inquiries desk in the reading room, she had ascended the small, staff-only spiral staircase to the stacks above. From this I knew one thing for certain: she had not returned the book to the Seeward collection.

Feeling I should do something, I looked up Seeward on the internet. The result should not have surprised me, but it did. I was astonished. Although he had been deceased for 50 years, Seeward was still very big news as far as the internet was concerned; thousands and thousands of followers were out there in the so-called global “community” (what a wicked misnomer) of lonely, gullible nutcases.

“Shit,” I said, when I saw the scale of it. Watson looked sharply up at me, and I apologised.

It turned out that Seeward could be googled in umpteen ways –
John Seeward diabolist, John Seeward suicide, John Seeward collector, John Seeward immortality, John Seeward cat master
. Scanning quickly through the various sites, I found that opinion was divided on whether Seeward was a diabolist
himself, or merely the cause of diabolism in others. What was generally agreed was that, having “investigated” a famous haunted manor house in Dorset in the early 1930s for a newspaper feature, he had gone on to buy the property and convert it into a satanic weekend retreat for séances, devil-worship, pagan rites, licentious blood-quaffing and so on. Harville Manor became a by-word for depraved goings-on, and after he moved in permanently after the war, he hardly ever left the grounds until the day in September 1964 when his lifeless body was found hanging from a tree in the garden.

Miraculously, there were photographs. There were press shots of Seeward with some of his celebrity house-guests, many of them elfin young men with emphatic side partings wearing exotic costume and eyeliner: presumably, Seeward and his friends made larky home movies – the sort of thing you see with the young Evelyn Waugh wearing an ill-fitting blonde wig and pretending to puff on a pipe. In the photographs, I spotted Charles Laughton and Elsa Lanchester among the guests; also Ivor Novello and other musical stars. The Duke and Duchess of Windsor appeared in pictures so frequently, you could believe they lived there. But the most notable thing was the cats. Seeward kept scores of them. In every picture there would be half a dozen or more. In one disturbing image, one of the elfin young men lay prone in an orchard, absolutely surrounded by cats – about fifty of them, arranged in ranks, and all apparently on the point of pouncing.

In the end, I decided to make a file of these cat pictures, and started dragging them off the websites, hardly looking at them as I did so – and then I spotted him – the Captain – and I shouted “Yes!” Because, well, yes, there he was. I knew him at once. In several pictures, Seeward was holding the Captain in his arms (which can’t have been easy, given his size). “Ahoy there, Captain!” began one of the extended captions,
but I didn’t care; I hardly needed the confirmation by now. A debonair Seeward posed with his arms folded beside the Captain sitting on a gate post. With a cigarette suspended from his lower lip, Seeward manfully pushed a wheelbarrow with the Captain on board, wearing a jaunty sailor’s cap. The Captain sat in the bucket of an old-fashioned stone well in the grounds (imagine any other cat doing that!), while Seeward appeared to be turning the handle. The Captain challenged Seeward at chess, sitting on a table across from him, his paw resting on the White Queen, as if about to announce checkmate.

As I was scanning through the various websites, something struck me.

“Hold on,” I said. “Of course!”

I opened the old “Roger” file. That Elizabethan chimney I had spotted in one of the old photographs: was the picture taken at Seeward’s house? Not remembering which jpeg was which, I opened both of the old black-and-white photographs – the first of Roger with an unknown man among the bluebells; the second of Roger and the Captain lazing in the long grass with the mysterious blur high in the foreground.

I whistled. There was no doubt about it. The unknown man with the cigarette was unknown no longer: it was John Seeward, celebrated ghost hunter and over-the-top cat fancier. And to judge by the dating of the other pictures I’d been looking at, this had been taken at some point in the 1940s. The other picture in the “Roger” file was – from the trees and the distinctively tall and curly brick chimney there was no doubt – taken in the garden at Harville. Studying it now, I noticed for the first time a date scratched in the corner of the negative – September 3rd, 1964. It sounded familiar, and for a good reason. This was the day that John Seeward hanged himself, leaving no note. The significance of this picture was revealed at last. This was the place he had done it. And while the cats
lolled carelessly in the grass beneath, like Charles Ryder and Sebastian Flyte in the early, hedonistic chapters of
Brideshead
, the image in the blurry foreground was of Seeward’s feet – the brogue shoes of a man dangling from a tree, on a beautiful late summer’s day, in his own historic garden.

Watson was woofing and scratching at the study door, wanting to get out. I ignored him. I was lost in this search. Where had Seeward got the money to fund this lifestyle? Surely not from writing the occasional piece about haunted houses for the illustrated weekly press? There was no suggestion he had come from a moneyed background.

“
John Seeward wherewithal
” I typed into Google, but of course the word meant nothing to the internet. “
John Seeward means
” got me no closer. “
John Seeward money
” I finally typed – and here, at last, was some information, though it was sparse and speculative. Evidently, Seeward’s earnings as a journalist came nowhere near accounting for his seriously wealthy lifestyle; especially, it could not have paid for the collection, which was extremely valuable. Did the Devil himself subsidise John Seeward? You would be surprised by the number of sentient beings, capable of typing on a keyboard, who believe that he literally did. As far as many people were concerned, moreover, rural Dorset was virtually the Devil’s second home. I found a news feature about Seeward, printed by a local paper after his death, in which various residents of the area attested to the “goings-on” at Harville Manor, and complained of such things as spooked livestock and an oak tree splitting down the middle at midnight on a cloudless Halloween. They also complained about the cats. A Mr Corbett (aged 65) alleged that there were rituals at the “big house” in which cats were sacrificed and otherwise used in devil-worship. His own cat Tina had once disappeared for three months, and he was sure she was at Harville all that time. When she came back, she was never the same
again. For one thing, she would sit staring at him, until he felt queasy. And she would also go into fits – foaming at the mouth and writhing and spitting – whenever the church bells rang out, or
Songs of Praise
came on the telly.