Cat Out of Hell (16 page)

6. How do you feel, facing the future?

Happy
Relieved
Numb
Don’t ask

7. Would you consider a holiday in Dorset in the near future?

Yes
No
Not on your life

So, I went to Harville Manor. I set off shortly after sending my last email to Wiggy – which I find, looking back, was timed at 6:03 a.m. on the Tuesday after Winterton was murdered. In retrospect, I now think I should have waited to make a proper plan. I should also have tried to get some sleep. But I was angry and agitated and I couldn’t go home, and I
loathed
the smell of that bloody air-freshener, I can’t emphasise enough how disgusting it was, and I also felt compelled to do something. So I strapped Watson into his car-seat harness, de-iced the windscreen as well as I could, turned up the heater and set my sat nav for Dorset. It was a freezing, frosty morning in Cambridge, and heavy snow was predicted for the whole of the south of England before nightfall – but such a cheerless forecast did not deter me; quite the reverse. It made me all the more eager to get started. My sat-nav predicted a journey of under four hours (arrival time 10:02 a.m.), but I sensibly took this information with a pinch of salt. Sat navs are always making precise – but totally irresponsible – prognostications of that sort. The main things were to arrive in daylight and beat the snow. My plan, as I set off, was to stop for breakfast once I was safely southwest of London. And then, having steadied myself with a bit of necessary nutritional ballast (I hadn’t eaten a proper meal since before the library adventure the previous Saturday), I would properly –
at last
– study the Seeward pamphlet. I had every confidence that, with the priceless information I found there, I
would find a way –
at last
– to put an end to the big black devilcat that, first of all, had terrified my wife at the library by ripping a small inoffensive study room to splinters, and then had come to our house and felled her in the garden with a single Satanic hiss.

Watson went to sleep on the passenger seat. Looking at him snoozing peacefully beside me, I wondered whether he had remembered to bring his old service revolver. To wake him up just to ask him, however, would be taking the joke too far – even though this was the one and only occasion in our lives when it would be appropriate to say the line. The
Today
programme held my attention for about ten minutes – but then I had to switch it off. News from the real world, concerning such burning topics as budget deficits and Syria, seemed just bizarre to me in both its scale and its irrelevance. I realised it had been a long time since I’d cared a bean about any other topic than the evil that cats do. Given my previous character, this development was quite remarkable. Who ever would have thought that a chap like me – who took the
Guardian
daily; who had never missed a
Newsnight
unless deeply indisposed or out of the country; and who sent funny letters to
Private Eye
(which they sometimes printed) – could turn so completely metaphysical overnight? But so it was. In fact, it seemed to me that every single item on the news – concerning economic doom and political hypocrisy and social breakdown – was not “news” at all. What I could hear was just a series of utterly transparent ploys to frighten and alarm the listeners – and frighten them, moreover, about the wrong things.

The snow started to fall just after I’d skirted London; the added urgency made me decide – rather stupidly – not to stop for breakfast after all. It was a day, I must confess, in which I made countless errors of judgment. Deciding not to eat anything, when I was already phenomenally light-headed,
was arguably at the root of many of my subsequent mistakes. Of necessity, I did make a stop for fuel (and the lavatory) at a bright Esso petrol station, where I gave Watson a quick chance to stretch his legs and sniff some filthy roadside grass, but otherwise I considered it wise to keep going. Drive now, eat later – this was my over-confident scheme. The snow fell more heavily as I crossed the county border into Dorset – on either side of the road, fields and roofs and driveways were turning to a solid white, but the roads remained passable while it was daylight and I drove on steadily, with my old-fashioned windscreen wipers noisily knocking the snow to the edges of the glass, and the view ahead (in the headlights) made vertiginous by streams of atoms all apparently rushing to collide with the car. Formerly, on such mentally exhausting drives as this, Mary and I would have taken turns at the wheel. But now I was alone, and travelling at 15 miles per hour, and I kept myself amused just by checking the way the sat nav airily adjusted my predicted time of arrival (10:53 a.m.! 11:27 a.m.! 1:32 p.m.! 2:07 p.m.!) – with never an apology or acknowledgment, of course, for having been so absurdly optimistic up to now.

A hundred yards short of the gateway to Harville Manor (“
In one hundred yards you will reach your destination
”), I stopped the car in a lay-by under a street lamp next to an ancient wall, switched off both the engine and the windscreen wipers, and allowed the snow to settle, slowly and silently, on the glass. I needed to think. Something Wiggy had written to me had nagged me while I drove – that he was now aghast to realise that having been so caught up in Roger’s story, he had neglected to look for Jo. Had I let something similar happen to me? Had I forgotten to grieve for Mary? Of course, both Wiggy and I could argue that the cat story concerned us personally – but I had to face facts. When Tony Whatsit from next door had told me about Winterton looking for me (when
I first returned from the coast), it had made me happy. I had felt excited; I had been thrilled that I was going to learn more; I was so agog to “fill in the gaps.” And at that point, I had no idea that Mary’s death had any connection to Roger, or the Captain, or even to Winterton himself. It was all right to argue that my eager and obsessive pursuit of this story had been about avenging Mary: there was some truth in that. But at the same time I needed to admit that pursuing these evil cats had also been a very effective way of putting her dreadful loss right out of my mind.

Sitting here now, inside this rapidly cooling vehicle that Mary and I had purchased together eight years before, I felt desolate, stupid, tired, a bit cold and (above all) weak with hunger. With a sort of morose satisfaction, I watched as the falling snow silently and inexorably coated the windscreen, effectively sealing Watson and me from the view beyond. When there was no view left at all – when a weird yellow darkness filled the car – I allowed myself first to close my eyes; and then I allowed myself to cry.

Naturally, Watson bore the brunt again. “Watson, I’m sorry,” I said. What had I done? Why were we here? I had driven halfway across the country, in a heavy snowfall, possibly putting myself and the dog at unnecessary risk – and all because of a story that needed an ending. As if stories ever did end anyway.

I undid Watson’s harness and pulled him onto my lap – and he licked the tears from my face, the ways dogs always do, because they like the taste. I thanked him and smiled, and started to pull myself together. “Watson,” I said, with a sigh. “If this isn’t all classic displacement activity, I’d like to know what is.”