“There’s the old well over there,” said Roger. I looked, obediently. My stomach made a little growling noise.
“There’s a story attached to it, of course, about witches, but it takes 48 minutes so I shan’t start.”
I laughed. “That’s a shame,” I said.
“I know, but there you are. There’s the tree where Seeward hanged himself. I expect you want to know all about Seeward?”
“Yes, please. I’ll get a chair.”
“Oh, but that would take at least an hour.”
I located a chair and pulled it over to the window. I needed not to be standing.
“There,” I said, with a puff as I sat down. “It was a long drive.”
“Of course, yes,” said Roger, understandingly. “And what time did you run over the Captain?”
He said it as if he were inquiring what time I’d come through Dorchester.
“I’m sorry?” I said. “What time did I do what?”
“You ran him over, Alec. It’s OK. I just need to know roughly when you did it.”
“Well, it was just now.”
“Good. So we’ve got about an hour before he comes back.”
“You mean – ?”
“Of course.”
“He’ll come back?”
“Of course he will. That’s why we’re here, Alec.”
“Right, yes.”
Deep down, I had known this. But it was sad to see that my scorecard was as undependable as the sat nav. It had just reverted to:
Alec 0 Cats 0
“Pay attention, Alec,” said Roger. “This is no time for one of your mental digressions. The Captain must be stopped, and the book you stole will help us. Seeward wrote it all down, you see. How to dispose of Nine Life cats – and their master – for good and all. That’s why Seeward left instructions for it to be burned. That’s why the Captain has been so desperate to get it back. Now, there are two stages to defeating the Captain, the method for both of which is specified in Seeward’s book –”
I interrupted him. I couldn’t help it. I was nearly in tears. Someone was actually telling me something! “Roger,” I gushed, “thank you, thank you for telling me all this.”
“You’re welcome. But –”
“It’s been really hard!”
“Yes, I’m sorry. It must have been.”
“So thank you. That’s all I wanted to say. Thank you.”
“Right.”
“That’s all. Sorry.”
“That’s fine. Now where was I?”
“You were saying there were two stages to destroying the Captain.”
“Oh yes. The point is, we must deprive him of both his powers and his immortality. The first requires us to employ the Great Debaser – which we might not have access to. But the second is by far the more important in any case.”
“Roger?” I said.
“Yes?”
I hesitated. I wanted to say that I loved the way he had said “more important” rather than “most important” in that sentence. But perhaps it would be inappropriate to comment on matters of correct English at such a critical moment, so I just said, “Nothing. Go on.”
“I happen to know,” he said, “that all Nine Lifers lose their immortality if the Great Cat Master is killed by one of his own cat minions.”
“Yes?”
Roger took a deep breath and then said quietly, “I have vowed to kill Prideaux and I will do it this day.”
My mind raced. This was quite a big development. Didn’t it mean that now Roger would be mortal himself?
I didn’t know what to say. What I wanted to say was, “Roger, I can’t even remember why I’m here any more; I’m losing my grip.” Instead, I said weakly, “Roger, have you got a plan, then? I thought I had a plan, but you know what it’s like when you wake up from a dream and the plan isn’t a plan after all; it turns to water in your brain? It’s like that! But it sounds like you’ve got a good one. Have you? Have you got a plan?”
He laughed.
“You know about Prideaux?” he said, jumping down from the windowsill. “Of course you don’t know everything about Prideaux, but if I told you everything about him it would take 106 minutes and that’s no good because he’ll be here in half an hour. My plan concerns Prideaux first, and then the Captain, and then … me.”
He paused. It was fascinating watching his great cat-brain at work. I felt totally useless – and it must have showed, because Roger evidently felt the need to console me.
“Your running over the Captain gives my plan much more chance of success, though, Alec.”
“Really?”
“Yes. And actually, by the time Prideaux gets here, the snow on top of the Captain’s body will be quite deep, so with any luck Prideaux will run him over again, giving us yet another hour of breathing space.”
This seemed a little cold-hearted. However, I was hardly in a position to judge, given my callous reversing-over-the-body-and-running-over-it-again thing from earlier.
“So first, I need to see the pamphlet for myself,” said Roger. “You did bring it?”
I went to the car and retrieved Seeward’s pamphlet from the back seat. I did this with a certain feeling of defeat. People had died on account of Nine Lives. I myself had stolen it from a library. The fact that I’d gained virtually no enlightenment from it made me feel unbelievably stupid.
“I’ll gladly give you this,” I said, when I returned indoors, “If you’ll fill in the gaps for me, Roger. You do know everything, don’t you?”
“Yes,” said Roger. “Yes, I do.”
I handed over the pamphlet. Expertly, he turned the pages with his claws, and found what he was looking for.
“Good. I just needed to see this in hard print,” he said. “You never know with a PDF …”
Watching him read – watching those beautiful green eyes devour the information on the page – I was quite overcome. I had never admired anyone so much in my life.
“Ah,” he said at last. “It really is as simple as that!” He held up a paw and flexed his claws. He purred with happiness. God, he was beautiful.
“What does it say?”
“I’d like to tell you, but it would take – hang on.” He made a mental calculation. “It would take three days.”
“You keep saying things like that, Roger. I wish you’d stop saying that there isn’t time to tell me things! I have to know more. That’s why I stole that thing and drove down here.”
I sounded peevish, but I was too exhausted to correct my tone. “Why did Jo have to die in that cellar?” I demanded, and started using my fingers to indicate where I was on a long list of points. “Why didn’t you tell Wiggy where she was? What did the Captain do to Mary? What happened to you after the war years in the British Museum? What did Wiggy find on YouTube that I didn’t? Why did you fall out with the Captain, when you’d been such very close friends? Why has the Captain turned out this way?”
Roger seemed surprised by the intensity of my questioning.
“Winterton didn’t tell you anything?”
I made a “Ha!” noise. “He was hopeless! Winterton started every story in the middle. It drove me mad.”
Roger sighed.
“Look, Alec. I’ve got time to tell you this much. What happened at Lighthouse Cottage was this. Prideaux tracked me down.”
“He’s your master?”
“He’s my master. I’ve eluded him for decades, but in the end he always tracks me down. The Captain helps him. It’s been the same pattern over and over: I find a human I want to live with quietly; I start to tell my story, which is fairly lengthy –”
“I know.”
“– and I am always stopped by Prideaux, one way or another, before I can tell anyone the terrible truth of what happened here at Harville.”
“What did happen here?”
“Oh, Alec,” Roger said, with a catch in his voice. “You don’t want to know. All I can say is that it sometimes involved –” (and here h
e found it hard to speak) “– it involved kittens.”
As he said the word “kittens,” he closed his beautiful eyes and a great shiver of horror rippled right through him, from the end of his beautiful tail right up to the top of his head.
“Seeward was a monster,” he went on. “Prideaux worshipped him. He has given his life to preventing the truth of Seeward’s experiments from getting out. This time, having traced me to Lighthouse Cottage, he planned to snatch me away – and my greatest regret now is that I didn’t just co-operate. But it got complicated. Jo spotted Prideaux prowling about.”
“The binoculars?”
“Exactly. She made notes of dates and times. And then she started seeing that big cat as well, she got frightened, and I felt I couldn’t leave her.”
“And then you killed that poor little dog.”
“Of course I didn’t kill the dog!”
I bit my lip. “I’m sorry, I thought you did.”
“Well, I didn’t. Oh Alec, I loved that dog. Prideaux killed the dog because it was protecting me. When Jo found poor Jeremy dead, she got hysterical, and that’s when I suggested she hide in the cellar next door. I thought it was quite a clever idea; I knew she had those keys; I thought she would be safe. Jo loved me, Alec. You’ve seen the photograph of her holding me; you know she painted beautiful portraits of me. Didn’t she phone Wiggy to say, “Help me take care of Roger!” on the day it all happened? She begged me to hide with her, you know. But I was afraid it would make things worse for her if I did.
“My mistake was to scarper. It was only after I was sure Prideaux had gone that I came back to the cottage and realised Jo was missing. I tried to get in to the house next door but it had been locked up. From the window sill, I could see in to the kitchen – and I could see that a heavy trunk had been placed over the cellar trapdoor, making it impossible for Jo to get out. This was typical of Prideaux’s sadism: if he couldn’t catch me, he could teach me a lesson – This is what happens to people if you try to tell your story, Roger. He knew what it would be like for me, enduring Jo’s slow death, knowing it was all my fault and powerless to help. I don’t ask for your sympathy, Alec. I know I don’t merit it. But don’t forget, I am the one person you will ever meet who knows from their own experience what it’s like to die like that, slowly and horribly, in a vile, airless hole.
“It was three days before Wiggy arrived. And I know what you’re going to ask, and I want to set something absolutely straight. You keep asking, ‘Why didn’t Roger tell Wiggy where Jo was? Why didn’t Roger say?’ Well, you’re forgetting something, Alec. You’ve got quite accustomed to a crucial idea that a month ago you would have dismissed as utterly preposterous. How long do you think it takes for me to break the news to each new person that I am a talking cat? Well, check back in your precious files. It was several days before I said those first clear words to Wiggy, “Let me out” – and if you recall, he was freaked out by them and refused to believe his ears. By the time I could talk to Wiggy properly, the scratching noises had long since ceased. By the time he was writing James Bond scenes for me, my lovely brave Jo was most definitely dead.”
It would take a while for me to process all this. In the meantime I had just one question.
“So why did you pee on the phone when it was charging?”
“To destroy that terrible picture of the dog. Prideaux took the picture and replaced the phone on its charger. Alec, can you imagine how dangerous it is to pee directly on to a phone that’s charging at the mains? If any more proof were needed that I cared about Jo and couldn’t bear what had happened to her, it’s that I risked electrocution of the penis to destroy that terrible thing.”
Half an hour later, as darkness finally engulfed the house, we heard a car on the drive. We both strained to hear whether Prideaux would run over the Captain, and were relieved to hear the unmistakeable ker-bump from the drive that meant we’d been let off getting swiped at by gigantic beastly claws for at least another 60 minutes or so. I even let out a small cheer (“Yay!”), which was heartless of me, but also fairly understandable in the circumstances. Roger was worried that Prideaux would guess the cause of the bump, and maybe stop to dig the Captain’s body out of the snow – but there were no sounds of car doors, or shovels, or indeed cries of horror, and in due course Prideaux arrived at the house.
He was older than I’d remembered him. He stood up straighter. But when was the last time I had seen him? Casting my mind back, it was probably the retirement party for old Hopkins in the classification department. Hoppy (as we affectionately called him) had made a dreadfully ill-considered speech about how – if asked – he would set about classifying some of his colleagues according to the laborious “Beacham” university system, and it had been an unmitigated disaster, offending everyone present. Prideaux had walked out! Poor Hoppy had died within a few months of retirement, of course. As I now remembered (with a familiar sinking feeling), it was said that Hoppy’s newly-adopted cat had tragically tripped him at the top of the stairs.
“Charlesworth! Unbelievable!” huffed Prideaux now, as he entered. He was evidently not at all pleased to see me here. Roger and I were sitting on a pair of the office chairs, in a patch of moonlight from one of the leaded windows. Roger had arranged the furniture for Prideaux’s arrival in a sort-of circle. I had lit a few of the old wax candle stubs. Basically, it looked (ho hum) like the setting for the inevitable séance.
“Why on earth are you here, Charlesworth?” he went on. “This is between me and the cats. Nothing to do with you. Now piss off!”
Now, before I proceed with this account, I feel I have to make something very clear. It’s true that I was sensationally light-headed by this point. It’s true that I was weak and hysterical due to a fundamental lack of sausage sandwich. I had crashed the car. I had fallen in love with a pair of green eyes. I had thrown an infantile tantrum when a cat called Roger wouldn’t tell me immediately everything I wanted to know. And now I was reeling with all the new knowledge that Roger had helpfully supplied. Nevertheless, I stand by everything that happened at Harville, however far-fetched, and I am telling you that when Prideaux turned his face to me and said “Piss off!,” his eyes went red. I don’t mean they went a little bit red-rimmed like Kenneth Branagh’s when he’s being Wallander on the telly. When Prideaux said “Piss off!” to me, his whole eyeballs were not only bright red but illuminated, like traffic lights.
I was so startled that I giggled. This man can’t have satanic eyeballs, I thought. He’s a librarian.
“Where’s the Captain?” he snapped. “And what’s that dog doing in here? Seeward would turn in his grave! And as for you –” He pointed to Roger. “Have some damned respect!”
Roger jumped down from his office chair, and looked up at Prideaux. “Hail, oh Cat Master,” he said.
I giggled again. I don’t know why I couldn’t take it seriously; I just couldn’t.
“That’s more like it,” said Prideaux. “Roger, come here. Approach.”
Roger turned his back on Prideaux, and then did something I didn’t imagine a cat could do. With all four legs bent obsequiously low, he crawled slowly backwards towards Prideaux (it was something like moonwalking), and sat down demurely at his master’s feet.
Prideaux reached down and stroked Roger’s ears as a reward. Roger narrowed his beautiful green eyes, thrashed his tail a couple of times, and then (apparently) submitted.
To my own surprise, I piped up, “Can we have a light on?”
“Where’s the Captain?” Prideaux demanded again (ignoring me). “He said he’d be here before me.”
“He was detained, oh Great Cat Protector and Servant of Beelzebub,” said Roger. “But he isn’t far.”
“That’s true,” I said, and pulled a face. I wasn’t drunk, I swear it. But I couldn’t seem to control myself. Those flashing red eyes had been more than I could take.
Prideaux turned to me. “You have two things that belong to me, Charlesworth,” he said. Hi
s voice went big and echoey and the traffic-light eyes came back. I burst out laughing again. Honestly, it was hilarious.
“Two?” I squeaked.
“Seeward’s book and the Great Debaser. And I want them now!”
This time, when he flashed his red eyes at me, a spark of flame flew out and set fire to the floorboards.
“Oh my God, be careful!” I said, stamping out the spark. And then everything went swimmy, and I found I was gazing at Roger, sitting so demurely at Prideaux’s feet – his green eyes glowing almost as much as Prideaux’s red ones.
“He hasn’t eaten for days, oh Cat Master,” said Roger. “He’s not important. He knows nothing.”
“Huh,” said Prideaux.
I tried to say something but my mouth wouldn’t move, and I fell sideways off the chair. I had always said I’d been captivated by Roger, but previously I had meant it metaphorically.
Obviously, I’m sorry I missed a whole chunk of the proceedings of that big night as Harville. Just when things started getting truly interesting, I lapsed into a coma! Looking back, I can’t help wondering: was it Roger’s doing, or was I just very tired? Either way, it’s safe to say that when I woke up, things had radically moved on. From somewhere Prideaux had found a sort of wooden throne, and was now seated on it with Roger on his lap, and he was making an incantation. I was still lying on the floor where I’d fallen, next to the office chair. I wondered, should I let anyone know that I’d returned to the land of the living? Would it be wise to put my hand up and ask if we could watch the telly? I glanced at Roger, and he shook his head at me, so I stayed where I was. And that’s how I witnessed it all – a bit like Watson playing dead for the sake of a biscuit, I was playing dead in order to see all this: the candle-flames leaping up, gold and red, to the ceiling; the doors and windows pulsating to a mighty wind; red sulphurous smoke rising from the floorboards. Although I had never been in such a situation personally before, it was clear to me that someone was coming, someone was definitely coming – and it wasn’t, probably, the man from the fourth emergency service.