Ghostwalk (14 page)

Thirteen

I
f it was the smudge on the bridge that made me find Dilys Kite’s telephone number, it was Pepys’s death that made me pick up the phone and call her. When I got home that afternoon, the cat’s body was lying on the doorstep. From a distance, even before I saw that his legs had been tied with wires, I knew something was wrong. Even asleep or sunning himself on the front step, he didn’t lie like that.

The blood was still wet, darkening as it dried from crimson to brown. It had fanned out from the first incision with coagulating skirted folds of red velvet. His eyes were open, head thrust forward. What did he see and hear in his final moments? How many hooded figures in black had gathered round him? They had bound his feet with wire, sending a message to Cameron Brown, to you, through me, Elizabeth’s ghostwriter, marking out their territory. Using Pepys as a surface to write on, to save the others, to change the world. I didn’t understand till later how much more complicated that message was. I couldn’t have understood then, though you would have. You would have known what that dead cat meant. Things might have turned out differently if I had told you, if you had received the warning, meant for you, that Pepys carried.

But I couldn’t tell you. It was a postponement of telling, not a conscious evasion. All I knew then was that you couldn’t see Pepys’s body mutilated like that. Not so soon after Elizabeth’s death. There had been too many deaths at The Studio. I buried him in the garden near the riverbank where the soil was already turned over, so you wouldn’t notice. I could keep all of this from you, I thought. Stand between you and it. I tried to unbind Pepys’s feet before I slipped him into the ground—it seemed right—but when his front paws twitched for a second as I untwisted the wire, as the blood rushed back into his feet, I thought he might be still alive and I dropped him from my lap back onto the step. I had blood on my clothes and hands. There were ants already working around his wounds. I couldn’t do any more for him. It was beyond me. So Pepys went into the ground with his back legs still tied. I don’t like to think about that.

Burying Pepys there in that peaty ground beside the river made me think of the bodies they pulled from the bogs of Ireland, humans slaughtered to appease the gods: young women with their hands bound, buried alive, or drowned in bogs, their skulls smashed in. I imagined someone digging there at the riverbank some hundred years from now, raising Pepys’s bones on his spade and finding the wire binding his back legs together, contacting the archaeology unit at the university.

If you were the archaeologist driving out to Chesterton to see the cat bones laid out for you in the rain on the riverbank, you’d be thinking of witchcraft, wouldn’t you? A cat with cut marks on its bones, feet bound, and buried beside a river just outside the city’s boundaries. You’d be excited. Date? Oh, seventeenth century at the latest—part of the witch trials of the seventeenth century, you’d say. A cat, a witch’s familiar, tortured and buried. You might have started to imagine a project, research assistants, a dig. If the cat was buried as part of a witchcraft trial, you’d say to yourself, you would need to look for the remains of an old woman’s body too, close by, and that would take time. Once you’d found her bones and determined whether she’d been burned or drowned, you’d almost certainly be able to tell when she was executed with carbon dating. You’d be expecting to find the burned remains of a house too, and perhaps the shadow of an herb garden.

But on your arrival at the riverbank the wire would be an instant disappointment. Naturally, in your excitement you wouldn’t have thought to ask the caller how the cat’s feet were bound. Garden wire. Dated in the lab to the early twenty-first century. No witch’s cat. No witch. No burned house or shadow of a garden. No article in the future equivalent of
New Scientist
or television interviews. So what do you do with your nameless cat? He has to be placed, an explanation found, if only for curiosity’s sake. A search in the online local history database tells you that in the first years of the twenty-first century there was a spate of animal killings in and around Cambridge that were part of a new and more violent animal-liberation campaign that would get uglier yet. And once you had found those articles and found the descriptions of the type of killings—the seven slashlike cuts, the bound legs—that would be your answer. You would have looked no further. This would be evidence enough to provide the explanation, fill out the quota of footnotes for a short scholarly article that would swell your number of publications for that year.

And would anyone have blamed you for not asking any more questions? For returning in a moment of speculation to your first instinct, that there was something decidedly seventeenth-century about this dead cat, buried by a river with its feet bound. What was that, exactly? Revenge, blood rites, and scapegoats. The children of the Duchess of Malfi strangled. Macduff’s children murdered. The fierce violence of the act of vengeance, its appalling motivelessness; the villain, who, even with the blood of murdered children still warm on his hands, cannot say
why
he acts. Ferdinand in the
Duchess of Malfi
knows that his villainy is beyond explanation as well as redemption, that he is as unfathomable as quicksand (or a fen): “He that can compass me, and know my drifts, / May say he hath put a girdle ’bout the world, / And sounded all her quick-sands.”

Did
you
think you knew me? Had you fathomed me, Mr. Brown? You haven’t yet. Though you watch my every move. I’ve not told you everything yet.

They asked me in the court why I hadn’t reported the cat’s death. There was a lot of criticism about that in the papers. Knowing about the cat’s mutilation might, they said, have given the police a chance to stop the NABED campaign before it had escalated to murder. But how was I to know that, then? I told the prosecutor that I picked up the phone to call the police but at that point I realised that they would almost certainly need a statement from you. And I didn’t want you to know. I didn’t report the death because I was protecting you, I told them.

“Why did you need to protect Mr. Brown, Dr. Brooke?”

“Because he was still grieving for his mother. Pepys was his mother’s cat.”

“And that was a strong enough reason to decide not to report a crime?”

“Yes, sir. It was. I didn’t want Cameron to see his mother’s cat cut about like that. And, frankly, I didn’t know whether killing a cat
was
a crime.”

“Did anyone else know about the cat?”

Though Will had never known about Pepys’s death, I said: “Will knew about the cat. She was with me when I found him. We had been walking all day, up to Fen Ditton.” There was a good deal of noise from the gallery at that point, where the journalists were sitting. Will picked at the skin around her fingernails.

“And how did she react?”

“She was upset. She told me to phone the police. She was angry when I didn’t.”

Will stopped picking her fingers and sat very still. She looked confused. The prosecutor repeated my statement in that way that prosecutors do, with clear implications, slowly, stressing certain words, glancing at the jury to check that they understood the import of my words, repeated, headlined.

“She told you to phone the police?”

“Yes, and she was right. I should have called the police. But what would I have said? We hadn’t seen anyone in the garden or in the house. There were no footprints. Someone had got into the garden, found the cat, and killed it. It was terrible. An act of brutality. But we couldn’t add anything to what the police already knew.”

There was now a lot of noise in the courtroom. I heard a woman say something about irresponsibility. Yes, I know now how stupid it was not to have reported the cat’s death. The police might have been able to trace the wire around his legs or find some fingerprints on the gate. But at the time Pepys was just a dead cat. None of us knew how it was all going to spiral. That there were to be human lives at stake as well as animal ones.

“How did she seem—emotionally?”

“She seemed agitated and upset.”

“Was she fond of the cat?”

“Yes, I think she was. We all were. Pepys was a very affectionate cat.”

Distortions. A few words here and there. A few words to pull a story in new directions. It doesn’t take significant untruths to do that, just a few words like drops of arsenic into wine. Why did I do it? I had no plan. But I had an instinct to do what I could to slow the process down. I couldn’t do much. But I could be a stone in the stream. I would be like one of Edgar Allan Poe’s narrators, I thought. I would be seductive and mendacious in the courtroom.

You learned about lying on the river when you were working as a punt chauffeur. To lie on, to lie under, to lie close, to lie in wait for.

That was around the time when we first met. You had a postdoctoral fellowship; I had just started working on my Ph.D. I knew who you were, of course; you had something of a reputation. Not for womanising, but for general misrule. Then there were the stories people told about how brilliant you were. People always wanted to talk about your brilliance as if it explained your misrule. Someone who knew you, a geneticist, I think, had used phrases like
cutting edge
and
paradigm shifts
and, yes, everyone used the word
clever
about you. Elizabeth said that once: “Oh yes,” she said, “my clever son.” It had a sting in it, that word
clever.

In your postdoctoral days you had short hair, which made you look aggressive. Funny that. Most undergraduates had long hair. We were at a pub called the Fort St. George. It was a Friday night in October and I was with Kit. We’d bought our drinks and were looking for a table. There weren’t any; the pub was dark, candlelit, like a series of smoky caves by the river. Kit saw Sarah sitting with you and Anthony in a corner by the fire—the best seats—and she walked over and introduced us. Anthony found some stools.

When I told you I was doing a history Ph.D. you laughed and said you were a historian too. “Ask me about any aspect of Cambridge history,” you said. “I am a punt chauffeur, the very best kind of historian. I know everything there is to know about that stretch of the river and the colleges along it. Just that—nothing more.”

“I guess,” I said, “that makes you a liminal historian with a fluvial specialism.” Kit glared a warning at me, but I was thinking of you standing on the end of the long sliver of a boat, pole in hand, slipping it deftly into the depths of the water, pushing against it, muscles flexed, propelling the boat forward.

“I like that,” you said, and repeated the phrase. “A liminal historian. Limen. Threshold. A historian of thresholds. Go ahead, Lydia Brooke, ask me any question. A pound for every question I can’t answer.” You laid out five pound coins on the table. Anthony went to get another round of drinks. There were oars from famous boats lining the walls like primitive weapons. Crossed.

“OK,” I said. “When was Trinity founded?”

“My college. Far too easy: 1546. Founded by Henry the Eighth.”

“How are we to know if that’s right?” Kit asked.

“It just is. You’ll have to believe me.”

“Hah,” said Kit. “Trust Cameron Brown? That will be easy.”

You ignored her taunts, downed your pint, and pulled off your sweater, brushing the sleeve across the candle flame. It didn’t catch. Sarah caught her breath. Her eyes were on me. What was she looking for? What was she looking at? Me caught in the beam of your charm. I dared not catch her eye. What did she see that I hadn’t even begun to guess? I reached for your cigarette box.

“May I roll one?” I leaned forward to smell the acrid fragrance of the tobacco. A gesture to give me something to do, I thought, to give me a reason to get out of your gaze, but that was not how you wanted it. You were slightly drunk.

“Please do. I love watching women roll cigarettes. Especially if they have long fingers like yours.” Even in this low light I knew my rising colour would be visible to Sarah. I pulled out a cigarette paper from the packet.

Kit rounded on you. “I’ve heard you lot down there on the punts, making up stories. The dates are almost always wrong.”

“My dates are never wrong,” you said. “I take a great deal of pride in the accuracy of my dates. I just embroider some of my stories, that’s all. Improve on history. The tourists want to be entertained, so we entertain them.”

“Does anyone ever challenge you?” I asked, putting the rolled cigarette to my lips. You leaned forward and lit it with the candle from the table. One of my hairs caught the candle flame and hissed.

“Not so far. Academics wouldn’t dream of hiring a punt chauffeur, so we’re usually safe from challenge. Plausibility is the key.”

Sarah was scornful and irritated. “Plausibility? That’s ridiculous. Most of your stories aren’t at all plausible. You just romanticise everything. That’s what the tourists buy into. They’ll never challenge anything you say so long as it’s beautiful or fascinating.” She turned to me. “He made up a story about Trinity Great Court being haunted by the smell of oysters. Told the tourists that Great Court was haunted by the ghost of a fifteen-year-old oyster seller who’d been Byron’s lover and whom he’d taken swimming in the well there. Now how plausible is that?”

“She caught a cold and died, leaving the smell of oysters perpetually in the dusk of Trinity Great Court,” Cameron interrupted self-mockingly. “But it’s
almost
true. Byron did smuggle girls into his rooms at Trinity. As often as he could. He was an iconoclast. God. Imagine how suffocated Byron must have been here. So the
spirit
of my story is true.”

Anthony passed me another pint of bitter from the tray he carried from the bar, and a pickled egg in a paper cake case.

“Ever had one of these before?” he asked, grinning. “Speciality of the house. Egg, vinegar, and beer. Perfect combination. As is Cameron’s story. The smell of oysters is an objective correlative for sexual repression. It’s perfect.”