Sergeant Harold Devitt of the Dewsbury Constabulary looks so anxious that anyone might think him a novice. Fifteen years’ service as a police officer to his name, fifteen years of ham sandwiches and sweet tea that have lent him an almost buxom rotundity. But now he doesn’t know where to put his pudgy hands, and his stomach has curled itself up so tight that he can hardly stand up straight. His jowls quiver, and points of sweat glisten on his forehead and on the ridge of his nose; he is, suddenly, all humidity and leakage, and under his uniform he bristles and chafes with a sour, nervy dampness as he tries to explain about the cat. In front of him sits a police officer of a higher rank than any he has previously encountered.
There have been two complaints, both lodged according to the correct procedures. Joseph Markham, who moved more urgently on the matter, turning up at his solicitor’s the very day after the incident at the fairground to prepare his legal challenge, has accused Longstaff of the theft of a winged cat from the workhouse. No concrete explanation of how the cat had then found its way to the fairground is given, but there is a whole section in his submission which describes Mr John Longstaff as a notoriously unconventional businessman, and which includes a signed statement from an ex-stable hand claiming that Longstaff beat a horse to death with a wooden club; other statements allege that he kept only improvised financial accounts, and that he regularly overcharged clients and became abusive when they refused to pay. There is even a description, lengthy and showing the hallmarks of Markham’s own prolixical style (though it is unsigned and therefore inadmissible), of the ramshackle hen house that Longstaff built and maintained, and insinuates that more than one of his customers found him to be of dubious and unsteady character, indeed just the kind of man to whom it would occur to steal a winged cat for the purposes of making money. John Longstaff, it is suggested, made a deal with Petronella to share the proceeds from the fairground attraction.
This theory is contradicted by Longstaff’s own documents, which arrive several days later. In them he claims that it was not Petronella but two young gypsy men who stole the cat from New Court, where the animal had been living of its own free will, having arrived there unexpectedly the very day that Longstaff and his family moved in. One of these two gypsies is described in great detail. However, no names are given, since by the time Longstaff set out to find them again, the fair was gone, and all that was left where the tent had stood (and fallen) on the great open field in Dewsbury was a pile of boxwood splinters and a black-and-gold sign announcing the Cat-Icarus. Longstaff, being not wise in such matters, punched and ripped and kicked the sign to bits until it was worthless as evidence.
‘Well, Sergeant,’ the senior officer says, ‘what’s it all about?’
The presence of so high-ranking an official (from head office indeed) is a consequence of the widespread publicity which the case has received. In the weeks since Devitt attended the scene of the collapsed fairground tent and its many attendant altercations, local newspapers have been full of speculation as to how the case might be resolved and, crucially, who will get the cat. From the start Petronella is favourite to carry off the prize. For one thing, descriptions of her appearance and general demeanour make her a sure winner in the eyes of the reading public, and a seemingly endless succession of accounts of her immense size and physical strength keep the newspaper editors happy right up until the trial itself. And with every new mention of this woman-mountain, she gains a little bulk, slowly expanding until she exceeds the boundaries of what is credible. Finally, there seems little doubt that she, like the cat, is a mutant, possibly (as one excitable young feature writer proposes) a strange case of Siamese twins with a single head. The suggestion takes hold, and soon it becomes commonly agreed that her girth is so great that no other explanation can be taken seriously but that she is some sort of multiple being. This line of reasoning develops into a general discussion of whether such a mutation has ever existed before, and within a fortnight the matter is clear: Petronella is the only living example. Since not a single photograph of her can be found, old images of Chang and Eng Bunker, the original Siamese Twins, come to adorn every article on Petronella. Long accounts of P. T. Barnum’s 1862 European tour (in which the twins were exhibited to great acclaim) appear in even the most humble news-sheets, and it is noted that the famous conjoined brothers from Siam had, in 1862, attracted the interest of royalty, a point which allows the citizens of Dewsbury a kind of vicarious pride. The more salacious journals also mention the double marriage of the Bunker brothers, and that between them and their two wives they produced no fewer than twenty-one children, as if this statistic in some way legitimises the gypsy woman’s claim on the cat. Alongside pictures of Chang and Eng are placed diagrams of the possible configurations of Petronella’s own double-bodied form, showing how with just a little more bodily cohesion, plus the loss (or concealment) of one head, her great mass can be explained. But it is pure speculation, and the mystery of what exactly lies under those voluminous gowns – now referred to as ‘mystery-robes’, ‘ghoulish garments’, ‘horrendous habiliments’ – sets Dewsbury (and, it must be said, most of Yorkshire) afire with shivery speculation. On top of this, journalists agree that her mystical and shadowy line of work is most likely to bring her into contact with a world of freaks, monsters and magic. This much can hardly be denied, and there appears, in addition to the interest in Petronella, a new fascination with the fairmen and their exotic lives. Pictures of travellers’ carvans are published, together with plans of their interiors. Could you live in a place like this? asks one headline, and beneath it are printed some recipes which, it is suggested, might be cooked in such cramped conditions. A week later the correspondence columns fill up with letters of praise for the fairmen’s wives, since the horror of cooking dinner in so confined a space seems to many readers something worse than slavery on the high seas.
Despite all this free publicity, though, Petronella has got no benefit from it. Neither has she so much as made a claim on the cat. She disappeared along with the rest of the fair’s itinerant community the next evening. Devitt, aware of this likelihood, made sure that he interviewed her soon after the events of that memorable day. In fact, he made his way back to the fairground the very next morning.
He was invited into the caravan, and Petronella took up position in the armchair, spreading herself about in the usual way until she became part woman, part furniture, part caravan. Max was sent for and after what seemed like an extraordinary amount of time, he skulked in like a scolded dog and leaned against the door, as if he might bolt the minute Devitt looked the other way.
‘Okey-dokey,’ the sergeant began, hoping that this, his first interview on the case, would be the simplest. ‘The Cat-Icarus … How did it come to be here?’
In returning the very morning following the disturbance, Devitt had caught Petronella and Max unprepared. After things had quietened down the previous evening Max, now fearing that his new attraction was ruined and that he was most likely to be tried for larceny, even if Longstaff didn’t get to him first, had spent the rest of the night steadying his nerves on port wine and India ale and, not being a regular drinker, anything else with a likeable name. So when Petronella embarked on her story, telling Devitt exactly how the cat had been offered to her for twenty pounds by an unknown gentleman somewhere on the road from London several weeks ago, and how she had no idea who this gentleman was, though she gave a very full description of him, and even quoted parts of the conversation which had passed between them, when she began all this, then, there had still not been time to settle on a common alibi with Max, who she had not seen since the previous day and who, even now, showed signs that his drinking had gone on not only into the early hours, but on and on, into the later ones. Petronella, though, got quickly into her stride and, unencumbered by the need to keep to an agreed story, let her narrative flow free.
‘And the gentleman assured me,’ she said, ‘that the cat was originally from France—’
At this point Max, already confused, intervened.
‘France?’ he said through a hiccup, and then belched, filling the caravan with sweet, alcoholic fumes, which in their sickliness added a strange hint of dubitability to the whole story.
‘France? No, no, further than that,’ he continued. ‘From Araby she flew—’
‘She? Devitt said.
‘She,’ added Petronella quickly, seizing on this one opportunity to concur with Max, although the truth was that neither she nor her adoptive nephew had any idea as to whether the cat was male or female. And they were not the only ones.
‘So,’ Devitt said, having already used up several pages of his notebook to no obvious effect, ‘it is a lady cat then?’ And only as he noted this down did it occur to him that neither had he asked himself, the previous evening, what sex it was.
‘She flew to us from the East! And,’ said Max, before stopping to swallow, as if preparing to say something of great import, ‘she is a magical, a magical animal and appears and disappears and you can’t know anything about that cat!’
Thus Max’s story began, without much sense of where it might go next. Discovering that he had an enwrapped audience, he became loquacious, and wouldn’t stop. Petronella’s eyes implored him to shut up, since with every word he undid another piece of her alibi, oblivious to the contradictions he was weaving. He described the cat’s magical appearance six months ago at a fair in Hull, where it was said it had landed on a ship from the Indies (by this time he was even contradicting himself), and how the animal was the friend of bats and vampires throughout the continent. Devitt, by this stage more interested in conserving the blank pages of his notebook than in the any notion of the truth, sighed with impatience.
Then, without warning, Max shut up mid-sentence, on his young face the surprised look of a drunk who suddenly realises that he has been talking. Devitt’s sigh, together with the bored, sorry look in his eyes, told Petronella that not a word of her story had been believed either. They had come to an impasse, and the police officer mumbled something about continuing his inquiries and returning to talk to them again within the week. However, both he and the gypsy knew (for she was a fortune teller) that within forty-eight hours her caravan would be many miles away, and that she would have ceded any claim on the cat.
Devitt could also see this far into the future. When it came to looking into the past, on the other hand, his sister had done all the work. For she had recently been a visitor to New Court, where along with a group of friends she had paid tuppence to see John Longstaff’s flying cat, though apparently on that day it wouldn’t fly due to an unfortunate airborne collision with a Canada goose that very morning, which had unnerved the animal and, in addition, may have sprained one of its wings (the cat’s). Petronella, then, was lying. She and Max were very probably guilty of the theft of the cat, but on what grounds could Devitt detain them? And since they were travellers, how could they ever be found again once they rode out of Dewsbury? All in all, the sergeant told himself, the theory that the cat had wandered of its own accord from New Court to the fairground was a far more satisfying one. And if the distance seemed too much for a cat to have managed, then perhaps the thing had flown after all.
Devitt next went the ten miles from Dewsbury to New Court, where he happened to catch the Longstaff family all together, having what looked like a funeral lunch. Longstaff himself came to the door, eyes sunk deep into his shallow, colourless cheeks, and his body only just holding itself together, as if it might fall apart and collapse into a pile of withered pieces if you so much as loosened his necktie. Inside, the other three Longstaffs were in a similar state, mourning the loss of their cat as if it were dead. Flora had developed a nervous twitch, and as she tended to her daughters, stroking their hair and running a calming hand across their small shoulders, she blinked involuntarily, perhaps from tiredness or anxiety, looking as if she had not slept for a week. The girls were mute, and hardly raised their heads when the policeman came into the parlour. They bore the numb faces of those who have endured a pain so great that the soul itself has been sullied by it and will always retain some shadow of that suffering.
Devitt was offered tea, and when he took his cup he found that the tea itself was stone-cold. At last the painful subject of Catty was raised. Heads dropped lower still, and tears welled and trickled. Longstaff, with his voice for the main part holding steady, managed to recount the story of how the cat had arrived on the very first morning that they were at New Court, and how the poor undernourished thing had been taken in as a pet. Meanwhile, his daughters sniffed quietly, and Flora fussed about with plates and cutlery, her twitch getting worse as the story unfolded.
‘Now,’ Devitt said, ‘tell me about the workhouse.’
For a moment Longstaff gathered his thoughts.
‘Haven’t been there in three months!’ he said at last, as if this might be the end of the matter.
‘Three months?’
‘Aye, three months. And I’ve never heard of Markham before yesterday, when that halfwit kept on about him. I sold eggs to the cook up there, and I stopped going when I got rid of the hens.’
‘Three months ago?’
‘Three months ago.’
‘From the Towers!’ said one of the girls suddenly, as if by speaking, her pain was momentarily lifted.
The three adults looked at the girl, whose eyes were big and swollen and pleaded to be believed.
‘Catty flew around at the big building, and then came home for tea!’
‘The Towers?’ Devitt asked, who knew nothing of the area.
‘A big building!’ one of the girls replied, pleased that the policeman was listening to her and sounding proud of herself.
‘With towers!’ added her sister. And then they smiled, forgetting their woes.
‘With towers?’ said Devitt. ‘A big, big building?’
‘Oh yes!’ the two of them cried in jubilation. But then, turning to each other, they burst into such loud and harrowing tears that their mother in the end had to take them out of the room.
‘So, the cat flew here from a big building with towers?’
‘Yes, it flew all the way!’ Longstaff said sarcastically.
‘It did!’ came a high-pitched reply from the door, and then more howls of distress, the sounds disappearing as the distraught girls were taken down the corridor and into another room, and the door shut behind them.
‘It flew here,’ Devitt repeated, and noted the fact down.
Longstaff stood up, unable to contain his rage any longer, pacing up and down on the parlour carpet, his feet never once touching the wooden floorboards beyond its limits, which were painted a sooty black; backwards and forwards he went, as if the limits of the carpet were the only means he had of keeping his temper under control.
‘The bloody thing came here when we did and it stayed. That’s it. Nothing more to it than that.’
‘The same day you arrived?’
‘Yes! And what of it?’
‘And, the cat became a pet, you say?’
Longstaff stopped his pacing and turned to Devitt. ‘Did you see the girls, eh? Their faces? All bloody night like that, they’ve been. All night and us up with ’em as well. All night and all morning. And every bloody night since they stole the cat!’
Devitt kept taking notes steadily, nodding a little, his pencil scratching out its wickerwork of single words and odd phrases, all tied together with arrows and question marks and thick underlinings.
‘And,’ said the policeman, sensing that Longstaff, like his daughters, was reaching some kind of emotional hiatus, ‘it was not an exhibit when it was here, then? Like at the fairground, a business?’
‘It was a pet,’ Longstaff said, bringing both hands up to cradle his face, as if to pull away the mask of anguish and fatigue that he could feel lying there like coal dust and clammy sweat.
A clatter of footsteps approached, and in a matter of seconds the two girls were back, breathless and giddy, bouncing on their feet and knocking into each other. Their mother arrived a moment later, just in time to see them get to the table. One of them held the hems of her dress close to her, as if she were concealing something against her stomach. And her sister, wincing with infantile delight at every breath, began to take handfuls of coins from the dress and deposit them on the table: farthings, old and new, and halfpennies and pennies, some as dull as mud, the occasional glint of a silver sixpence amid the expanding pile of brown metal. So many coins came from the dress that the pile soon spilled halfway across the table, each new fistful dropping with something between a tinkle and a thud onto the rest, and the odd coin rolling to the floor, one of which came to a stop at Devitt’s feet.
When the dress was emptied the two girls stood to attention in front of the money, slightly in awe, but their faces also straining with a silent joyous laughter which seemed almost to be painful around the eyes and mouth.
Longstaff brought his hands away from his face, the fingers dragging with them any last remaining equanimity. His expression froze, lower jaw protruding a fraction, eyes glazed and inattentive.
Devitt shifted in his chair. Then he smiled at the girls: ‘Catty?’
‘Yes,’ they whispered. ‘Catty!’
Devitt next visited the workhouse, where Superintendent Markham not only supplied him with enough material to fill the remaining pages of his notebook, but stopped periodically during the telling, repeating those words which merited special attention, and making sure that the policeman was getting them all down.
‘Ah, that cat!’ he said, shaking his head, rising from the chair in his office and stalking about the room. The memory so pained him that he could not sit still as he talked but had to shake the sadness continually from his bones. ‘Four years I kept that little creature, four years. You know, the day it was born, right here in the kitchens, there were those who wanted it drowned. But I wouldn’t have it. You can ask any of ’em. They’ll tell you. Four years it stayed, and the day its mother died I … well …’ and at this point he found it impossible to continue.
‘And, after the four years?’ said Devitt, as quietly as he could.
‘Eh?’ said Markham, as if awoken from a reverie. ‘What happened next? Why, that scoundrel Longstaff stole it. The very day he stopped bringing the eggs, if I remember correctly. The same day.’
Devitt made a note of this, and Markham was able to give him the exact date. And when asked why the theft had not been reported earlier, Markham was majestic.
‘There is, sir, a difference between true feeling, and responsibility to the law. And I for one know it. Just a cat, that’s all it is, a deformed one at that. But to us it is family. It is … loved!’
Devitt scribbled furiously, trying to get the whole sentence about responsibility to the law down verbatim, since it appealed to him, and he thought it might be of use later on.
‘That was a sad day for us. First, the old ratter died, which broke our hearts. And then,’ and here Markham may even have cleared his throat in order to disguise unmanly sentiments, ‘its poor, deformed kitten …’
‘Which was four by this time …?’ said Devitt.
‘Four, but still a kitten to us! Defenceless, of course. It depended on us, the little mite. Stolen and taken to a circus. You know, our young scullery maid Alice was so upset that she had an attack and went mad.’
Markham now explained how Alice and Tom were both present, four years earlier, at the discovery of the winged kitten; how their romance had been nurtured through those four years, growing and strengthening along with the cat, which had been born at the same moment as their deep, ill-fated love. The theft of the cat had not only pushed the poor scullery girl into a state of madness, but had clearly sent Tom the same way.
‘But I have hope!’ Markham said, hoisting a pointed finger into the air as if to puncture the atmosphere of gloom which his own pathetic narrative had created. ‘Tom tried to liberate the cat from that monstrous fair. But it was an act of affection, of true feeling, not madness. And when the cat is returned to its home here with us, I feel sure that the poor boy’s recovery will begin. You know,’ and here he made a proud little cough, ‘I have decided to take the boy in. He’ll come and work with us here. No, Longstaff has forced one innocent young person into madness, but perhaps, Sergeant, I might be able to save a second from the same fate.’
Markham made the slightest bow. His story was told.
Since the investigation began, Devitt had come to regret his part in the whole affair. Petronella had disappeared, but against this there was a growing clamour in the newspapers (and, indeed, amongst his colleagues) in favour of her keeping the cat. And as the days passed, public support grew for the gypsy woman, whose photograph had still not been procured (she was by now in Clapham, taking a sabbatical from the fairgrounds) and who, as a result, had grown in physical as well as psychical stature, finally becoming ‘Petronella, last of the Romanies and Queen of the Spiritual Kingdom’ but also, sometimes in the very same publications, ‘Petronella, mutant Siamese mystery’ and ‘Petronella, hideous double-bodied mammal-woman!’
Devitt began to find himself suddenly awake in the cold, silent hours of night, wheezing, his arms aching. There was only one dream, but it came to him now with a worrying regularity. In it he is walking down a dusty street, perhaps in Mexico; the sun burns him like scalding porcelain against the skin, and around him is a wall of noise – distant piano music, shrieking women, the odd pistol shot, a cockerel at full cry. In the midst of it all, as he continues down the street, he feels the dry dust under his feet, the gritty crunch of uneven sand, and in his mouth the taste of it, fine and bitter. People move past him going the other way, men and women in twos and threes, laughing, grimacing, as if drunk and on the edge of some act of unnecessary violence.
Devitt looks up towards the sun. Its heat cuts him, like razors in each fold of his screwed-up face; and against the sun’s white glare are tangled stains of black, flashing one after the other across his vision, their shapes fractured and irregular, each one like a sudden ragged tear in the screen of light. He realises that his arms are moving, his hands turning hot then cold, and looks down to find that he is juggling. He can see, below his fast-moving hands, that his feet are still taking him forward; his back is upright and stiff, and he is juggling cats as he goes. He is shocked that he can walk and juggle at the same time, and for a moment suffers a flush of anxiety lest he drop one of the animals, which he notices are alive, their limbs in motion as they attempt to stabilise themselves each time he tosses one up in a high arc through the burning air. But then, just a second or two later, he is once again calm. There are three cats, all black, or at least that’s how it seems, and he senses that not only is his juggling regular and assured, but that the cats feel this too; they land in his outstretched palm without discomfort, letting themselves fall onto their backs or their bellies, quite without their normal instinct to land paws first. As they hit his hand, he whisks each one sideways, his arm down low, and then launches it again quickly with a flick of the wrist. On he goes, past saloons and sideshows and tethered horses that shake their heads to get free of the flies around their ears. Then he sees Petronella, bigger than ever, as big as a horse at least, sitting under a parasol which itself seems to stretch right across the space where a building should go. She wears the same enormous drape of a dress, and he peers at it, forgetting the cats. Under the dress there are shapes that he cannot account for, big, rounded forms, and between them angles and bulges and valleys, and – does he see? – the flutter of two hearts. Her eyes beckon him over, their stare luscious, more inviting than any woman’s he has ever seen, and her breasts are huge and swollen, two, four, twelve of them perhaps, for they bobble and multiply, a moving pontoon of flesh for her tricky, tempting head and its many chins to rest on. He is about to say thank you, feeling his burning face turn into the beginnings of a smile, when around him someone screams. Then another, men and women together, their cries full of drunken terror. He is no longer walking forwards, and now, panicked by the noise, he looks up and sees one of the cats rise from his hand in a steady ascent. On reaching its apex it takes flight, dashing free into the air and circling above the heads of the crowd on the street before making its way up higher. Devitt then sees that another of the cats has already escaped, soaring high in the sky, until it finally disappears towards the sun. Before he can stop it, the third and last cat takes flight and is gone.
‘Well,’ says Devitt, and can think of nothing to say, no obvious way of beginning. Because although the senior officer in front of him wants the full story, there must be a proper place to start, and Devitt has no clear idea where it is. He has carefully weighed the evidence after interviews with Petronella and Max, Longstaff and family (twice), Markham (three times in all), as well as a futile meeting with Tom (who Devitt thought quite beyond recovery, which made Markham’s commitment to take the poor, mad boy in look like an act of even greater kindness). After all this, there seems to be no obvious point of departure, and in the end Devitt relies entirely on Markham’s words: Longstaff is a scoundrel. Such a conclusion is hardly the way to open a report, so Devitt does his best to reconstruct events leading to the fairground debacle, relying (perhaps too enthusiastically) on several dozen of Markham’s other choice phrases, and for the main part keeping New Court as the centre of the action. The senior officer is very grateful for this, since he has previously made it clear that his good friend Mr Broadbent is to be kept out of the case altogether; and now, having made the effort of coming personally to see the investigating officer, he is especially pleased to note that Devitt does not find it necessary to mention either Broadbent or his daughter once in the long, rambling account of events. Devitt, over the previous three weeks, has been left in no doubt as to what should and should not be uncovered in the case, so he is doubly nervous about the results of his investigation.
All in all the interview goes well, and it is duly decided that John Longstaff will be charged with larceny, to be tried at the Quarter Sessions. Whereas the more modest Petty Sessions would have been the natural place to hear a charge of stealing a cat, by now it is clear that the case has come to represent something beyond simple theft. There is intrigue and an attractive grimness in every last detail, and the Petty Sessions could never confer a sufficient gravitas, nor indeed would the courtroom be large enough for the crowds expected at the hearing. Broadbent could easily have used his influence to limit press interest in the case. However, the best way of keeping his daughter’s name out of the whole affair was to let unbridled speculation over Petronella reach its dizzy heights; in this way, when the public realised that the case was not about a mutant gypsy fortune teller, but the far less compelling claim that a removal man had stolen a cat from a workhouse superintendent, then the business would be quickly forgotten.