It was to a sad and comfortless house that I returned after cutting short my wintry sojourn by the sea. A film of dust had settled on everything during my absence; the windows looked smeary; Mary’s favourite fern beside the front door had bent and cracked from thirst; meanwhile various damp items of unimportant post, many of them tactlessly addressed to my dead wife, littered the tiles for quite some distance along the musty hall, as if they had exploded through the letter-box. On what appeared to be a happier note, the dog seemed glad to be home. He scratched at the garden gate, and panted excitedly. This I found rather gratifying, until, as he was straining at the lead coming up the garden path, it dawned on me: was he expecting to see Mary? It was soon distressingly clear that such was indeed the case. Once inside, I’m afraid I grew quite impatient with him as he stupidly ran round and round, romping upstairs and down, barking and wagging his tail, pawing at closed doors.
“Stop it!” I said. “Come here, Watson! Watson, stop it. Come here!”
I could not catch him. He raced in circles, scattering rugs, madly knocking against the furniture. It was only when he had searched the entire house three or four times that he was prepared to admit defeat. He crawled under a chair and glared at me with an accusing expression that was all the more tragic because, in happier times, Mary and I had often imitated it, for each other’s amusement. “Oh, Bear,” she would say to me (we had pet names for each other, I’m afraid). “Bear, how could you?” And then she would pull the accusing doggie face, and we would both laugh. No wonder I couldn’t bring myself to look at him right now. I deeply envied him, though, in a way. All this time, had he simply forgotten that Mary had gone? What a blessing such oblivion would be. Imagine if I could have forgotten all about the last couple of months, myself – cheerfully bursting back into this house, calling for Mary, “We’re back! You were right not to come, it was freezing!” But imagine, also, the unbearable pain of remembering the truth; of having that happy oblivion freshly shattered. To re-experience the devastating news, overcome the disbelief once more, and crumple yet again under the blow, would be beyond endurance. It would be like dying twice.
I filled the kettle, adjusted the thermostat for the central heating, and considered the unpacking. Mary, of course, had perfected a very efficient system for unpacking, which rendered it quite painless, at least as far as her husband was concerned. The house, with all our possessions restored to it, would be back to normal within just an hour or so. I very much approved of Mary’s system, because what it required of me, principally, was that I just keep out of the way. I would retire to my study with the accumulated letters and bills, and re-emerge at dinner time to discover that the emptied bags and suitcases were already stowed in the back bedroom, the washing machine was half-way through a cycle, all the toiletries were back in their normal places, even the books were ready (in piles) to go back on to the shelves. Could I face the unpacking by myself? Could I recreate Mary’s system, based on my tiny sideways knowledge of it? I looked at the heap of boxes and suitcases in the hall, and quailed at the sheer scale of the difficulty. In order to make life bearable at the cottage, I had taken with me (in the old Volvo) simply everything I could think of: cooking pots and radios and the laptop and towels, and a box of books, and a big blanket, and two phone chargers, a box of stationery, and all the dog bowls and all his balls and toys and his special towel. And on top of all the cargo returning to the house, I now had additional freight – acquired on voyage, as it were: the obligatory bag of left-over groceries such as porridge and butter, tea bags and eggs – plus, of course, those time-honoured souvenirs of the outraged self-caterer: some minimally-used washing-up liquid, a minimally-used bottle of olive oil, and a 99 per cent full extra-large container of very ordinary table salt.
Did I have the patience to cope with the organisational demands of all this? Of course not. In that case (I heard Mary ask), would I prefer to unpack piecemeal over the next few weeks? No, Mary. I would not. I would hate that more than anything, as you very well know. Once clothes started spilling out of suitcases in the hall, I would have to move out and live in the car. But for heaven’s sake, why was I even thinking about this? As a fresh wave of sadness broke over me, I had to sit down and swallow the emotion, while Watson – who might have been a real comfort to me at this point, had he made the requisite effort – continued to observe, still accusingly, from under his chair.
It was Mary who’d had the idea of naming him Watson. At first, she’d liked the idea of saying to an enthusiastic puppy, “Come, Watson, come! The game’s afoot!” But it turned out to be a rather clever inspiration, and the name stuck. We both enjoyed finding “Watson” quotations that fitted perfectly with the dog. My own favourite was: “You have a grand gift for silence, Watson. It makes you quite invaluable as a companion.” Meanwhile, Mary preferred to quote the famous telegram summons: “Watson. Come at once if convenient. If inconvenient, come all the same.” She even used to call it out in parks and woods, when Watson was off the lead. Mary never cared much what people thought of her. While others were trying to attract their own dogs by shouting, “Monty! Monty, teatime!” Mary would be calling, “Come at once if convenient, Watson! If inconvenient, come all the same!”
With the dog still watching me, I got up. In the hall, I found the box with his food and bowl. I opened it, extracted just the things I wanted, and (feeling guilty) closed it again. Guessing what was occurring, Watson came out from under the chair – but after wolfing down his dinner, he retreated once more. His grand gift for silence was not quite such an asset right now. I sat down again; I got up again. I took off my coat. Finally, with an effort, I put some tinned soup in a saucepan, and began to heat it up; while this was happening, I went to the gloomy study, switched on my computer and started to download (slowly) 216 e-mails. Back in the kitchen, I realised all the wooden spoons were still packed – so I managed without. Sitting down again, I sipped the soup and tried to start a list of things to do. Without thinking, I looked up at the wall, half-expecting to see a board with GET THIS, DO THAT and TAKE CARE OF as the headings. I looked for the peg where next-door’s keys ought to hang. But of course neither of these items was in my own house. Although I could picture them quite clearly in my mind’s eye, I had to accept that I had never, personally, seen them in my life.
I had, as yet, made no decision about Wiggy and Roger, but my instinct was strong: forget it. Try to forget Dr Winterton’s file and all of its contents. What good could it do to dwell on this story? Was it even true? Why on earth was it sent to me? Was it perhaps sent in error? On the drive home, all the way, I had maintained a running internal dialogue. Was Dr Winterton in desperate danger? No, stop thinking about this. Dr Winterton means nothing to you. A smell of cloves, you said. That’s all you remembered about him. A bit tough that poor Peplow had to die – although I have to say it was very classy of him to have chosen hemlock. Why had Jo put her phone on to charge and then gone next door to hide in the cellar? Why hadn’t she taken it with her? You’re right, this is a detail that makes no sense, but just don’t think about it because there is no way you will ever know the answer. Why did she think a next-door cellar was a good place to hide, anyway? I can’t imagine – especially if it had a heavy trap-door that could make it your living tomb. Imagine the sight Wiggy found when he opened that cellar trap-door. No, don’t. Don’t ever try to imagine that. You realise he heard the scratching for several days? If he hadn’t been such an idiot, he might have saved her! Don’t say that. Please don’t think like that. Roger said that the pit was the worst of all deaths. You’re quoting a cat now. An impossible cat, at that. So just desist. All of this story, remember, is based on the completely unacceptable and ludicrous premise of an evil talking cat called Roger that travelled romantically in the footsteps of Lord Byron in the 1930s and now solves cryptic crosswords torn out daily from the Telegraph.
At six o’clock the doorbell rang. It was one of the neighbours – Tony Something. He and his wife have lived in the house next door for six years or so, so I suppose I really should know their surname by now, but I’m afraid I left that kind of thing to Mary. I picked up Watson and opened the door with him under my arm. Mary and I both had a horror of Watson running outside when the front door was open, so we made it a rule to pick him up.
“Alec,” Tony said. “I noticed the lights were on.”
I realise I haven’t mentioned my name before. I do apologise. I suppose it was because this wasn’t my story.
“Everything all right?” Tony asked. He and his wife Eleanor have been very solicitous since Mary died. It was Eleanor who called the ambulance on the fateful day. She looked out of an upstairs window and saw that Mary had collapsed in the back garden. Her heart had just stopped, they said. It just stopped. As I stood there with Tony, I realised I had never thanked his wife for what she did, or even talked to her about it properly. Did she think me very ungrateful and ill-mannered? Or did she understand that, when someone dies, there is so much to do, and facing people is the hardest part?
It was still very difficult talking to people. I certainly didn’t want to face Tony right now. I didn’t know what to say.
“Just having some soup,” I said. “Come in?”
“No, no. That’s OK,” he said, but he remained shuffling on the doorstep – which was annoying, as it meant I had to continue holding the dog, and letting all the newly-generated warmth in the hall go straight out of the house.
“How was the coast?” he asked.
“A trifle bleak,” I said. “Are you sure you won’t – ?”
“I was just checking. You’re back a little earlier than you said.”
“Yes. I’d had enough.”
“Well. You must come round for supper.”
“Thank you.” I looked at the dog in my arms. I was hinting that I should like to shut the door and put Watson down. Tony thought I was hinting at something else.
“Bring Watson.”
“Oh. Thank you.”
He turned to go, and then made a decision to say something more. I tensed up. I was afraid he was about to say something nice about Mary. But he wasn’t.
“Someone was looking for you,” he said.
“Really?”
Instinctively, I held Watson more tightly, but otherwise I tried to show no reaction.
“We told him you were away, but he said he’d come back.”
“Oh. Well, thank you.” I tried not to smile, but I felt – what was it? To be honest, I felt excited. A mysterious visitor? A moment before, I’d been advising myself not to think about the Roger file ever again, and now I was secretly thrilled at the idea of this man who had been looking for me. What if it was Winterton?
“Was he … quite old?” I said.
Tony laughed. “Incredibly old!”
I laughed as well. “A bit dusty?”
“Incredibly dusty!”
“Dishevelled?”
“Incredibly dishevelled, yes!”
He seemed relieved that I knew who he was talking about.
“He said he was a friend of Mary’s?” he said, with that modern upward inflection that suggests a question.
“That’s it,” I said. I sounded quite hearty, which indeed I was. Perversely enough, the idea of a visit from Winterton was quite cheering me up.
“Apparently she worked with him on some project at the library.”
“Exactly,” I said. “Some project at the library.”
He went back down the path and I shut the door. Then I put down the dog and laughed. Watson looked up at me with a quizzical air and wagged his tail, but I could hardly explain to him why I was so happy that the game was afoot; I didn’t remotely understand it myself. Surely I didn’t want to know more about the evil Roger? In the end, just to say something, I resorted to Mary’s standard address to Watson, whenever he came back dirty from digging in the garden.
“Ah,” I said. “You have been in Afghanistan, I perceive.”
Three days were to pass before Dr Winterton called on me. Perhaps he wanted to give me time to finish my unpacking – which turned out to be such a lengthy and demoralising process that I loved Mary all the more for the way she had stoically undertaken it so many times on my behalf. In the interim, while I waited for his visit, I tried to adopt a normal domestic routine, but being at home brought me closer than ever to my sense of loss. In the evenings I tried to watch television, but quickly gave up: everything touched me too deeply. Nature programmes, detective dramas, and worst of all, the news – everything mercilessly underlined the same theme: it was all death, death, death, and all entirely unsupportable. Polar bear cubs starved in the snow, prostitutes were stabbed in urban underpasses, old age pensioners opened the door to teenage psychopaths armed with screwdrivers. The only recourse was to watch quizzes; but, sadly, those were impossible, too. Mary and I had watched University Challenge together, and she had invented a game whereby we would shout answers to the science questions in unison, and keep a running score of our (random) successes. Over the years we grew rather good at identifying types of mathematical question, and would take it in turns to shout “Minus one!” – which more often than not (odd, but true) was the correct answer to the seemingly meaningless questions involving x and y. We laughed a hollow laugh at the astronomy questions; we were seriously competitive on history and literature; she was shocked by my terrible ignorance of art; we were both hilariously bad at identifying great composers from even their most famous compositions. “Giotto!” I would say, regularly, to the art questions. “Haydn!” she’d say to anything musical. Not long before she died, there was a week when Minus One and Giotto and Haydn were the correct answers to starter questions. We laughed and laughed. It was the triumph of hope over ignorance.
Speaking of literature, since Mary had died, there were two lines from Hamlet that I found I couldn’t stop thinking of. One was “How all occasions do inform against me,” and the other was: “And a man’s life’s no more than to say ‘one.’ ” I know it’s fashionable to think that Shakespeare was not personally bereft when he wrote Hamlet (or that he didn’t need to be), but I am positive, from that second line, that he was. Since Mary died, I have looked at people bothering about ridiculous things and I simply cannot bear it. How can they be ignorant of the fact that – in a second – we are gone? Any sort of cruelty or stupidity dismays me. And as for being conscious of the fragility of existence, one morning, as we walked to the newsagent’s shop, a cyclist on the pavement shot past Watson, narrowly avoiding him, and instead of yelling in outrage, I just went to pieces. I had to sit on a bench at the bus stop and hold the dog in my arms until I stopped shaking. Here is the truth of life’s fragility: one moment you are a witty female senior part-time librarian of 53, clearing weeds from the side of the garden path, and the next you are nothing but clay. One moment your heart is beating in your breast; the next it is a mass of bloody muscle, inert and dead. One moment you can say the words “I am.” And the next, you have no first person, no present tense, and no entitlement, as a subject, to act on verbs of any kind.
In the end, while I waited for Winterton, I decided to visit my old colleagues at the library. I felt I had already left it too long. I also thought the familiarity of the building might be comforting. But I should have known better. Revisiting a place of work nearly always makes you feel like a ghost. Well, when you feel like a ghost already, it is the greatest folly; and at every hurdle, I wanted to turn back. At the turnstiles, I found that there was a new security person; on the membership desk, a new assistant. Awkwardly, I explained to both of them who I was. I then had to wait while a humiliating phone call was made, and then apply for temporary membership! “I ran the periodicals department for thirty years,” I said. “I officially left only at Christmas.” But it was like speaking into a void. Once I had breached the walls, the stately marble catalogue hall felt more like home, thank goodness, but it was also stuffy (far too warm after the cold outside), and smelled overpoweringly of furniture polish and body odour (as I suppose it always has). As I looked round, I started to feel faint. I wished I had worn a lighter coat. Avril, the deputy librarian, greeted me warmly, but was then called away to deal with a student having a battle with a photocopier. I asked after my old periodicals assistant, James, who is now in charge of research services; unfortunately, he was in a meeting. So I was just wondering why I had put myself through this unnecessary psychological ordeal, when Mary’s dreamy colleague Tawny happened to come along. To be honest, I had forgotten about Tawny. She was someone I had quite happily let slip from my mind.
“Tawny,” I said, and smiled hypocritically. “How are you?”
I had always felt sorry for her on account of her owlish name – presumably the proud handiwork of irresponsible hippie parents. As Bertie Wooster famously remarked, there is, from time to time, some raw work pulled at the font.
“Alec! Awww. I was going to call you.”
“Oh?” I said.
Tawny had a sing-song sort of voice and wide eyes, and looked at you with a funny pursed-lip expression, like a kitten in a classic Disney animation. She had hair down to her waist, no make-up, and wore ballet pumps even when it was snowing. She was about forty-five years old. It used to drive Mary absolutely insane to work with her.
“Awww, I’m glad you’re back. Awww, how’s Watson?”
“Thank you, he’s very well.”
She pointed a finger at me.
“I,” she said again, “was going to call you.”
“Well. That’s nice.”
“Have you got time to come and see?”
“See what?”
“What I was going to call you about,” she said.
I had promised myself not to risk going into the great reading room on this first, experimental return to the library. But now here we were, suddenly, in Mary’s old domain – through the heavy swing doors, and into that perfect, hermetically sealed world of panelling and high windows and book dust and polish (and BO), and soft, continuous keyboard clatter. Over the years, the usage of the room had inevitably changed – from being a silent reading room, it had become a silent writing room. But its seriousness had survived the transition. Where many other campus libraries had become more like internet cafes, our great reading room was a place of intense, solitary learning. Mary had been ideally suited to her position here, presiding over so much heightened mental processing. Others might have been intimidated by it, but not her. Down each side of the room were the individual, lockable carrels that she could, at her discretion, allocate to research students and academics. It had surprised me to find out, when she first assumed her position, that not all students aspired to a carrel. I would have thought that having a tiny private panelled room of one’s own within the library, with a book shelf, lamp and desk, would have been any studious person’s fantasy environment. But the rental fee was perhaps off-putting; whatever the cause, they often stood empty. Mary had told me that, once in a while, she would take a key to an unused carrel and lock herself inside for a couple of hours – “Just to get a break from Tawny,” was what she used to say.
It was to one of the carrels that Tawny now led me. She held the key.
“Now this is really strange,” she said, in a whisper. “We think it must have happened the weekend before Mary – Oh.”
She stopped. She couldn’t say it, so I had to say it for her. It is the common lot of the grieving, I’ve discovered, to spend half your time saving other people’s feelings.
“The weekend before Mary died?” I said, helpfully.
“Yes.”
I braced myself. I looked around. I didn’t know yet what she was talking about. She had said the words, “It must have happened.” But what could happen here? Nothing had “happened” in this reading room, aside from some gargantuan efforts at mental application, for about a hundred years. We had stopped outside carrel number 17, which I now faintly remembered was the little private space that Mary had joked about retreating to. Tawny turned the key, but I almost stopped her. Was I up to this? What if there was something in here – something personal to Mary – that would break my heart afresh?
“The thing is,” Tawny said, very quietly, “the caretaker said he had seen a cat prowling about in the library, and he’d tried to catch him. But of course he never expected this.”
“A cat?”
“Shhh,” she said. I had forgotten to whisper. Some of the “readers” looked round. We looked back at them, and I weakly gestured an apology.
As if to compensate for my outburst, she lowered her voice still further, and turned her big wide eyes to mine. “We don’t know how he got in,” she said. Her voice was so low that it was little more than aspirated mouthing. “But he’s on the CCTV. He’s huge. Anyway, there’s a bit of a smell, so you’d better –”
“Tawny, could you hang on a minute –” I said, but it was too late. She had opened the door.
“Oh my God,” I said. I stumbled back.
“Alec! Quick, oh, sit down. I’m so sorry. Wait here, I’ll get someone.”
“No, no. Stay,” I said. “Oh my God.”
I held on to the door jamb and tried to make sense of the scene inside the carrel, holding my hand over my face. The best way I can describe it is this: imagine you had placed a small, orderly panelled room in a jungle clearing and come back a week later when all the larger wild beasts had taken turns frenziedly tearing it to pieces, slaughtering inside it, and treating it as a lavatory. That’s what this little carrel looked like inside – it had been both savaged and defiled. The walls were slashed and splintered, papers were torn and scattered, books looked as if they had exploded, blood was spattered in flying arcs. The smell, of course, was cat urine; and you could almost hear the echo of the feline shrieks and yowls that must have accompanied such a violent attack. How big was this cat? It was hard to believe that any animal smaller than a bear could have caused such horrific damage. There were claw-marks on the walls a good six inches across. And to think that all this violence had been done – in a way – to Mary!
“It’s this bit that freaks me most,” Tawny said. She pointed to the drawer in the desk, which must have been locked when the cat got in. The area around the drawer was cut and slashed so badly that splinters and chips had flown off. Grimacing, Tawny pointed to where, embedded in the shattered wood, there was a large claw, its end coated in dried blood. It had evidently been dug so deeply into the desk that the cat had not been able to withdraw it.
“I know I’m being stupid,” she whispered, “But it’s as if it wanted to get into the drawer.”
“What’s in there?” I said.
“Nothing. It’s empty,” she said, and drew it out to show me.
Tawny decided I had seen enough. She shut the door again, and we moved to the corner of the reading room, where we could speak a little more loudly. One thing above all I needed to know.
“Did Mary know about this?” I said. “Oh God. Tawny, did she see this?”
“We think she did,” said Tawny.
“Oh my God. Oh, Mary.”
“Actually, I’m sure she did. It was on the Monday morning, you see. Do you remember, I called you and said she had gone home, not feeling well?”
Of course I remembered. Mary had died later that day.
“This must have happened over a weekend, you see; and I remember she took the key on the Monday morning and came down here, and I was getting on with something and not really paying attention, but I’m sure she came straight back to the inquiries desk and said she didn’t feel well. She had something with her – a small, slim book, I think, in one of those old university slipcases. She went up the spiral staircase behind the desk – I remember that, because she usually preferred to take the long way round to avoid it. She was gone for a while. And then she came back down and went home. And – oh, Alec. I never saw her again!”
A tear rolled down her face. I suppose she must have cared for Mary, working with her all that time. It had never occurred to me. I patted her awkwardly on the shoulder.
“She took away the key with her, which she shouldn’t have done. But that’s why we didn’t find out what had happened in there until a few days ago, when Avril came up with a duplicate. The smell – well. We’d noticed the smell, of course, but we didn’t realise it was coming from here. Some of the readers – well, you know what they’re like.”
I nodded. I did indeed.
“Anyway, they’re going to clear it out on Sunday when there are no students around. Did you see what it did to the books?”
I was still reeling. “I can’t take it in,” I said. There was no doubt that this carrel had been Mary’s. In the debris, I had recognised her handwriting on some of the ravaged papers. But why hadn’t she told me what she was doing in there? Why had she lied to me? Had Dr Winterton really been working on “a project” with Mary? Why had she never told me? I was furious. What had she got herself into? And what, by extension, had she got me into, too? This destructive act had been done, without question, by a large and powerful cat! Oh God. Until this moment, it had been of no real concern to me whether the Captain existed or not. I could believe in him, or disbelieve in him: it was all the same. It had nothing to do with me. But now disbelief was not an option. For heaven’s sake, I had seen one of his actual claws, violently embedded in a piece of venerable oak library furniture!
“Can you open it again, Tawny?” I said. “I have to know what she was working on in there.”
Tawny pulled a face. “I don’t think you ought to touch anything, Alec.”
“I have to see,” I said.
“Ooh, I’m sorry,” she said. “But technically I’m not supposed to show it to anyone. I just felt you should know.”
“Can I see the CCTV?”
“No, of course not!”
This was very frustrating.
“All right, where are the books from, at least?” I said. “Do you know?”
“Oh yes.” Thank goodness, Tawny could see no harm in telling me this. “They’re from the Seeward Collection.”
I closed my eyes and took a deep breath.
“Of course,” I said. “Of course they’re from the Seeward. Well. I see.”
The Seeward was a world-famous collection, donated to the library on the collector’s death in the 1960s, and classified as “arcana.” Since that time, it had been housed in a twenty-foot-square steel-mesh cage, deep in the library stacks. John Seeward is no longer a household name, but he had been a celebrated journalist-cum-“ghost hunter” in inter-war Britain – the sort of chap who made friends with (instead of running a mile from) self-styled diabolists such as Aleister Crowley. His collection had been used, in his lifetime, by the occult writer Dennis Wheatley. Seeward had collected books on ancient mysteries; also ghosts, witches, satanic rites and so on. In the library’s on-line catalogue, books from the Seeward were indicated with the sensational (and not uncontroversial) symbol of a hand-drawn pentagram, complete with drip-marks – to suggest it had been drawn in blood on a wall. Many of us had, over the years, objected to the continued presence of the Seeward Collection in a respectable academic library, and argued quite forcibly for its removal or sale.
“Are you all right?” Tawny said.
I smiled. Unsurprisingly, I was a little distracted.
She tried to comfort me.
“In the end, it’s only books and papers that were damaged, Alec. No one was hurt, I’m sure. I think the cat must have just got locked in and gone berserk. An aunt of mine got back to her house in France once and found that a bird – just a single bird on its own – had virtually trashed the place. It came down the chimney, they think. And before it died, it had pooed everywhere, broken a lot of my aunt’s favourite things, and the worst thing was, it had eaten all the spines off the books.”
I had to think quickly.
“Is Julian in today?”
Julian Prideaux was the keeper of the special collections, and was very rarely seen. Mary and I despised him. He seemed to think that leaving an old threadbare cardigan (with a sprinkle of dandruff on it) over the back of his chair – sometimes for weeks on end – was a brilliant bluff, and that, seeing it there, we would all exclaim, “Look! A cardigan! This means he can’t have gone far! See, this dandruff is quite fresh!” How he kept his position had always been a mystery to me. He never once turned up to a departmental meeting; Mary and I had jointly decided he was the laziest librarian on the planet. I enjoyed asking Tawny whether he was in today. Tawny would know as well as I did that if it was a month with any letters in it whatsoever, the answer was probably no.
“I don’t know, but I shouldn’t think so,” said Tawny, choosing her words carefully. “But look. Julian doesn’t know about what’s happened in there. Only a very few people have seen inside. We’re waiting to get a better idea of the state of the books when we sort through everything on Sunday. Alec –” She turned the big eyes to mine, and seemed concerned. “Alec, I think we should get you a glass of water, and then you should go home.”
I allowed Tawny to lead me to the staff room, where I drank some water and left her there, promising that I was absolutely fine – the sight of the carrel had been a shock, that’s all, I said. Also, I’d found the atmosphere in the library very stifling. Next time I came, I would remember to leave my coat in the readers’ cloakroom in the basement! It was easy to forget to do this, I said, when you used to have an office of your own with coat pegs in it. She seemed satisfied, and she said goodbye. I gave her the impression that I would be heading home immediately. In this matter, I misled her, I’m afraid, quite deliberately.
By the time I did indeed leave the building, an hour later, my mind was spinning. I realised afterwards that in all my years at the library, I had never used it myself to search for information. Now that the occasion had arisen, however, I had every advantage. Comprehensively, I knew the ropes. Just to begin with, I knew that Julian’s office was never locked, that it was accessible from staircase B, and that even if (as aforementioned) Julian was the laziest librarian in the world, my dear wife Mary was the most conscientious. If she had borrowed books from the Seeward Collection, she would have left a record. Within a couple of minutes of larcenous (but surprisingly un-stressful) trespassing, I had obtained a list of the books she had borrowed. The loans had been carefully hand-written by Mary in Julian’s ancient log-book – presumably in his absence. I quickly made notes of them all. The books mostly concerned funerary archaeology – which chimed with Winterton’s already-established academic interest in animals as ancient afterlife companions. A couple of the titles were in German – which I happened to know was a language Mary didn’t have.
What captured my interest, however, was the last item Mary had borrowed. It was a rare item: a leaflet written by John Seeward himself, privately printed in a small edition in 1960. My heart sank as I saw the title. Oh, Mary. It was called Nine Lives: The Gift of Satan. Next to the title, Mary had carefully added a note on the book’s size, pagination, and so on. It was typically thorough of her to do this. Such a small pamphlet, after all, would be easy to mislay. What her notes indicated was that Nine Lives was of octavo size; it was a mere 16 pages long; and it contained woodcut illustrations. Checking with the online catalogue for more details, I discovered that Nine Lives wasn’t listed. This was frustrating. In my impatience, I tried entering key words such “EVIL CAT,” “CAT EVIL,” and “EVIL TALKING CAT,” but it still did not come up. Fortunately, however, I knew that with a donated collection such as the Seeward, the card catalogue of the original classifier would have been preserved. It didn’t take long to discover that the Seeward card catalogue was, in fact, one of several dusty cases stacked behind Julian’s desk. It had not been very respectfully preserved, it seemed to me: in the back of one of the card drawers there were stuffed some random bits and pieces – I saw a bit of old leather with a buckle on it, as well as some little plaster statuettes. Carefully, I riffled through the cards to find the right one. I then removed it from the drawer, and took it to the photocopier on the fourth floor, where fortunately I saw no one I knew. I then quickly returned to Julian’s office and replaced it in the drawer, but not before its unusual classification had caught my eye.
It was one I had heard about but never seen before. The great Public Library in Boston, Massachusetts employed it in the nineteenth century. The other items, you see, had been catalogued according to the antiquated “Beacham” system, with lengthy call marks, such as:
SEEWARD
W55a
Gruns 934
By contrast, stamped in red ink on the corner of the Nine Lives: The Gift of Satan card was the just one word, in capitals: “INFERNO.” Its meaning, simply, was that it should be burned.
Winterton was not at all how I had remembered him. Yes, he was old, dusty and dishevelled, but my memory had conjured someone tall, gaunt and wraith-like, whereas Winterton was short and florid with an enormous head. He came to the house wearing a duffle coat, a gardening hat, and some muddy wellingtons: I was hugely disappointed. For some reason, I had been picturing an impressive monk-like figure, possibly with long iron-grey hair, high-domed forehead and dark, beetly eyebrows: basically, I had been bracing myself for a cross between Christopher Lee in Lord of the Rings and the dementors in Harry Potter. But if Winterton looked like anyone at all in children’s literature, it was actually Paddington Bear.
He arrived at dusk on the day I had been to the library. Watson barked at his approach. I took a deep breath, picked up the dog and opened the door in anticipation, and found Winterton outside, on the path, distractedly rummaging through an old Marks & Spencer’s carrier bag. He looked up, stopped rummaging, and smiled broadly. I was confused. Could this be Winterton? Or was it someone who had knocked randomly on my door, having lost his memory on the way home from his allotment?
He seemed to think he was Winterton.
“Hello,” he said, warmly. “Alec, at last we meet properly!” he said, holding out his hand for me to shake. “And Watson, my little friendy-wendy! How are you? How are you? How are you?” Watson, tucked under my left arm, started furiously wagging his tail.
I shook his hand. “Winterton?” I said, incredulously.
“Yes indeedy,” he said. He went back to rummaging in the bag and found what he was looking for: a dog biscuit for Watson.
“Ah, here it is. Can he have it?”
I was taken aback.
“Oh. Yes. I suppose so. Come inside.”
Once inside, I put Watson down and Winterton held the biscuit above his head. Watson sat and looked up at it, his tail wagging. He looked extremely happy.
“Do the trick,” Winterton said. And to my astonishment, Watson fell over backwards and lay still, as if he’d been shot.
“Good boy,” said Winterton. Watson rolled back onto his feet, took the biscuit, and happily trotted into the living room to eat it.
I couldn’t help laughing.
“Good heavens,” I said. “I can’t believe he just did that.”
“Oh, that’s a grand little dog. Mary let me teach him a couple of things. I can show you later if you like. He got that one in half an hour. Now, are there any windows open anywhere? Any doors? Can we block up the fireplace? We’ve got a lot of things to catch up on.”
Contrary to all expectations, it was a jolly evening I spent with Winterton and the dog in the kitchen. We had a pleasant supper of soup and cheese; we drank red wine. There was just one problem: I had expected Winterton to explain everything to me (I had made a list of questions), and he didn’t. He possessed all the knowledge; he had all the answers; but getting a straight reply from him on any matter at all turned out to be frustratingly difficult. Unlike Roger the cat, with his beautifully lucid (and rigidly linear) narratives, Winterton started everything in the middle. If he had been a book, I would have hurled him across the room. The trouble was not with his intentions, which seemed genuine. The trouble was with his brain. He had all the right thoughts, but not in the right order. This explained a lot, of course. Formerly, I had assumed that his lack of scholarly publication credits (other than the work with the recently-deceased Peplow) was due to the nature of his subject area. What I now realised was that publication for Geoffrey Winterton, PhD (on his own) would have been a laughably far-fetched ambition. Coherent, organised argument was completely beyond him. No wonder he had turned to Mary for help.
“How did Mary get involved in your work?” I said, when we first sat down to our supper.
“She had a marvellous mind,” he said. He fed a sliver of cheese to Watson, who thereafter sat beside the table throughout our conversation, looking hopeful.
“I know,” I said. “I know she did. But how did she get involved? When? What did she know?”
“She felt very bad about deceiving you.”
“I’m sure she did.” This was something I was still coming to terms with. I was so shocked that she had been working with Winterton behind my back – good heavens, he’d apparently known Watson long enough to call him his friendy-wendy! But I wanted an answer to my original question. “So when and how did it all start?”
“Mary said she’d found something for me in the Seeward, Alec. I need it. The Captain is closing in, you see. He got Peplow!”
I huffed.
“Can we come back to that?” I said. “Please, for now, can you just please tell me how it all started with Mary?”
He looked at the ceiling. I think he was genuinely trying to focus on the question he’d been asked. Instead, he dropped a bit of a bombshell.
“Roger helped me put the folder together for you. We felt we owed you that.”
This was such a large piece of new information that I had to pursue it.
“I thought Roger was dead,” I said. “Didn’t Wiggy cut his head off?”
Winterton looked surprised. “No.”
“But –”
“But Wiggy attacked a cat and did unspeakable things –”
“Oh, that! Sorry.” He laughed. “Neighbour’s cat. Neighbour’s cat.”
He waved the back of his hand at me, as if to say it was nothing.
“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.
Few of the locals had ever seen Seeward, though. He kept himself to himself, especially after a scandal in 1952 involving a local schoolgirl. The case was never proved, but unsurprisingly, the hoo-ha did nothing to make him less unpopular with his suspicious neighbours. For the last twelve years of his life, he never left the grounds of Harville, and he allowed very few visitors inside. It was believed that he concentrated on reading and curating his impressive collection of arcana, and he also wrote the majority of his books in this period – books that he published privately and circulated secretly.
I checked back on my notes. When was Nine Lives written? It was published in 1960. I had to find it. More than that, I had to make sure it never got into the hands (or paws) of the Captain. But why should I be taking sides with Roger? Roger was an evil cat who not only deliberately ignored the sound of a woman dying in a cellar, but also fiendishly urinated on people’s mobile phones as a matter of course to electrocute their insides and destroy incriminating evidence! What should I do? I kept thinking of poor Mary, caught up in this thing purely because she was clever and helpful and organised, and soft-hearted enough to take pity on someone like Winterton. And all this time, while I was trying to think, Watson was being incredibly tiresome, scratching at the study door, and whining to be let out.
“All right!” I said, impatiently.
I let him out, and he raced to the kitchen, barking. I went straight back to the computer.
I had decided to have one last trawl on Seeward, and then go to bed. It was midnight by now, but it couldn’t be helped. When I had finished my research, Watson would have his bedtime chicken treat and we would go upstairs together as we had done every night since Mary died. But before we did that, there was something on YouTube I hadn’t looked at yet, and I had a feeling I shouldn’t overlook it. It had come up when I was looking under “John Seeward, cat mastery,” and it turned out to be a five-minute black-and-white silent film, shot at Harville Manor in the 1930s.
It started with a make-shift stage curtain rigged up in the garden on a sunny day. Seeward, smoking, entered from the left of the screen, and addressed the camera directly. Dressed very smartly in tweed, he had a slim figure and a light step; he might have been about to break into dance. There being no soundtrack, one could only guess at what he was saying. He indicated the curtain, and smiled. A breeze caught the curtain and Seeward waited for everything to settle before continuing. He evidently asked the cameraman if he was ready, then he walked to the right-hand side of the frame, and ceremoniously (with cigarette clamped between his teeth) used both hands to pull a cord to open the makeshift curtain.
Watson was now barking frantically in the kitchen. He was getting quite annoying. I paused the film and called to him. “Watson, stop it! I’m doing something!”
Seeward came forward again to explain, indicating what the curtain had revealed: a covered table with a cage on it. Inside the cage was a rabbit, cheerfully nibbling some lettuce. Seeward opened the cage, gently lifted the rabbit out, and placed it on the table, while putting the cage on the ground. Then he looked to the right, and a large tabby cat jumped up. Seeward beamed at him, and spoke to him. He fondled the cat’s ears, and stroked his fur. The cat pressed its face against Seeward’s chest. All this time, the rabbit (sensibly) backed off; but it didn’t have the requisite athletic skill to jump to the ground and run away. Seeward placed the rabbit facing the cat – about two feet away. And then, in the blinking of an eye, three things happened. The cat looked up at Seeward, who nodded. The cat made the slightest dart forward with his head, as if hissing. And the rabbit fell back, dead.
Seeward then approached the camera, and went behind it; there was a wobble as the camera was handed over to him; then a second figure – presumably the cameraman, relieved of his duties – walked to the table, to examine the body. He was a pale young lad in agricultural attire, nothing like the sort of person normally seen at Seeward’s house parties.
He looked astonished. He held the rabbit up by the leg. “It’s dead,” he mouthed, looking towards the camera. He pulled a face. Then three things happened very quickly again. The cat looked quickly in the direction of the camera, then made the same small hissing motion as before, and the farmer boy instantly dropped to the ground.
It was the end of the footage. I switched off the computer. There was a buzzing in my head, but otherwise it was quiet. I rubbed my temples and sighed.
It was only then that I realised Watson wasn’t barking any more.
“Watson?” I called. “Watson, where are you? Are you all right?”
There was no response. The house was silent. I stood up and went to the hallway. “Watson? Watson, where are you?” I went to the kitchen – and he wasn’t there. I tried the back door; it was locked. Where had he gone? Why wouldn’t he come when I called him?
“Watson!”
Not a sound. No pitter-pat of claws on the floorboards; no woof; nothing. I shiver of dread went through me. Oh no. Oh no, not Watson. He’s all I have.
I stopped breathing and closed my eyes. In all my resolutions about finding Seeward’s book, keeping it from the Captain, and not trusting Roger further than I could throw him, I’d forgotten the most important thing of all: protect Watson. Protect Watson from everything: from evil cats using the hinges of heavy gates as a kind of nutcracking device; from evil cats who could cause instant death with a single application of overpowering malevolence. To lose my dog would be beyond endurance. What had he been barking at, just now? Why hadn’t I paid attention to him? What had he been barking at?
“Watson!” I called, from the hallway. “You’re not hurt, Watson? For God’s sake, say that you’re not hurt!”
I stood still and listened. I could barely keep myself from weeping. How Mary had loved him. How we had both loved that little dog. How I needed him now, more than ever.
“Watson?” I tried to say it calmly. And at last I got a response.
“Alec, in here.”
I jumped in the air.
“Alec, in the living room. Don’t turn the light on.”
It was a male voice, with a clipped, authoritative, unflappable tone. I stopped breathing. Who was it? Who was in my house? How had he got in? What had he done with Watson? He was telling me to go into the living room, but I wasn’t obeying. Not because I was brave or defiant, but because in this situation I just couldn’t move my legs.
I forced myself to take a deep breath. “Where’s Watson?” I demanded. “What have you done with him?”
“Listen, we have to get out of here, and I’ve got a plan. Pack enough chicken treats for a fortnight.”
What can I say? It was Watson. And believe it or not, he sounded exactly like Daniel Craig.