The Range Rover is hosting a different drama, three acts in one. Mathilde de Villeneuve has recovered her composure. She has located her cell phone and has called in the cavalry—a firm of lawyers specializing in the art of the super-injunction. Already the advocates have set many clocks ticking and dispatched a representative—posthaste—to the scene of the alleged incident in which their client has been an unwitting and wholly innocent bystander. M’lud. Senior partners are launching the telephonic equivalent of a Grad missile onslaught to various mainstream media editors and website operators to ensure that no mention is made of her. Surprisingly, at one tabloid where the upholders of the law and beneficiaries of the legal system usually expect resistance and counterattacks, their interlocutor seeks guarantees from them that the super-injunction does not cover reporting of golf, Nazis or cats. Once satisfied on that score, the news editor—a bastion of journalistic probity—agrees to the terms of the order about to be issued by a compliant judge. Not only will there be no mention of Mathilde de Villeneuve, there will be no mention of the order preventing publication of her name, image or any form of identification. Webbie types go to work with their pixelation tools. Photoshop will do for the rest. Publicly, Mathilde has ceased to exist.
But not Gerald Tremayne. As a precaution, he has quickly swallowed the rest of his stash, figuring erroneously that, with any luck, a mild cardiac episode will win him a sympathy vote and head off close scrutiny by the increasing numbers of perplexed law enforcement officers milling around. To his amazement, Mathilde de Villeneuve has wriggled free of the air bag and transferred herself to the rear seat of the vehicle, opened her carry-on bag and with remarkable speed changed her clothing into a houndstooth business suit. Through the still intact rearview mirror, he watches, transfixed by her quick thinking and decisive actions, as she rearranges her hair, removes the more excessive flourishes of her artiste’s makeup and puts on a pair of dark glasses. Shielded from public view by the tinted rear windows, and carrying only a handbag stuffed with essential accoutrements—passports, credit cards, bearer bonds, jewelry, and cash in large denominations of several currencies—she scrambles over the backseat into the voluminous luggage compartment, where she activates the emergency locking device to slide out of the Range Rover and disappear among crowds of people too distracted by the overall drama to absorb the full significance of such minutiae.
To look at her, Gerald thinks, you’d think she was born and raised to the ways of evading detection and arrest. And probably, she was. She has gone. Jumped ship. Scarpered. Flown the coop. Just as he would, if he could.
He is alone in the car, but not in the world.
Outside the driver’s side window, Stephen Nkandla’s face is set in a rictus of rage. Gerald cannot hear what his father-in-law is saying but he understands well enough the general drift. I knew, from the beginning, that you were a scoundrel, a mountebank, a charlatan, a rogue, a villain. White trash! I knew you were not worthy of my daughter. And now you have brought eternal shame upon us.
Through the crowds, Gerald notices a lithe, muscled man wearing a chauffeur’s uniform and carrying an African-looking club. He has been beating on the side of the white van as if he wished to destroy its relative symmetry forever. But now he is elbowing his way forward, nodding in a familiar sort of way to the senior police officers on the scene. There is some discussion between them. A decision is being weighed, though Gerald cannot know this, between the illegality of abetting the departure of a witness from the scene of a crime and a diplomatic incident that will bring all kind of besuited intercessions at Scotland Yard from the mandarins of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office in King Charles Street. Wisdom prevails. The chauffeur approaches the father-in-law. Better leave now while we can, sir, he is saying. Don’t want to cause all kinds of démarches and whatnot, do we, sir? He conceals the short, stubby knobkerrie under his jacket. He leads the crestfallen warrior away. There will be another day. Another Isandlwana. You haven’t heard the last of this, Stephen Nkandla calls back over his shoulder. Already his chauffeur-savior is on his phone, phoning the embassy’s legal attaché to ensure that a word is had with people who know how to put the genie back in the bottle. It will be a good day for the lawyers.
Though not, as noted earlier, for Gerald Tremayne.
He does not know how his wife knows all that she knows. But he knows she knows everything. It is something to do with the cat, evidently, the cat that led the bipeds in a merry dance all the way to Kentish Town tube station. The cat that spied on him, tailed him, infiltrated his secret domain. Nibbled his prophylactic. Enraged his all-too-irascible mistress, who has now turned on her heels and is walking back toward the apartment house, stiff with humiliation and vengeful fury.
The cat that spilled the beans to his wife.
How had she known to return precisely at this moment of cathartic craziness? Should she not be high above the Atlantic, en route to Detroit?
Through the windscreen he looks balefully at Dolores and his two daughters and their cat, all interwoven with arms and paws. His novelist’s inventive imagination offers him best-case scenarios. He will explain all. His side of the story. Cats can be mistaken, you know, honey. They don’t see things like you and me. Nothing really happened. I did not have sex with that woman. Well, okay, just a bit. Almost a virgin. And the entertainer? An old friend from before. Just giving her a lift.
From Heathrow? On a school day?
But I saved the day. Knight in shining armor. Broadsided the bounder. Rescued our daughter from a fate worse than death.
You mean Rosemary Saunders? Your partner in this venture? Another of your trophies? And how, for God’s sake, had it gotten this far with some pedophile pervert about to make off with her in broad daylight?
Contrition. Full disclosure. The only route. Counseling. Addictive personality, Your Honor. He looked again at Dolores and knew from her granite glare that it would not wash. Over Dolores’s shoulder, beyond the crowds and the policemen and the fire trucks and the news crews, his Wordsworthian inner eye that will be the bliss of future solitude conjured the bleak reaches of the M1 highway unfurling northward through endless snarl-ups and speed traps and trucks, past Milton Keynes and Watford Gap and Northampton and Leeds—all the way back to where he had started in the northeast, a small-town dealer who had stumbled into the limelight, dazzled and doomed.
Maybe his face in the news would help sales. Genius in freefall. Icarus.
Maybe there was a book in it.
And then again.
Maybe not.
As if waking from a dream, Stephen Nkandla breaks away from his chauffeur’s solicitous, guiding hand and hurries to his daughter’s side. He embraces two generations of his descendants. Plus a cat. He gestures to his driver to prepare the Mercedes for the getaway, shepherding his tribe away. A tyro paparazzo raises a camera but there is a lightning flash of a knobkerrie and it falls to the ground in several pieces. A man in a chauffeur’s traditional dress—dark suit, white shirt, black tie—retrieves the data card from the debris. Then the family members are piling into the plush cocoon of the car—Dolores and her girls in the rear seat, her father riding shotgun up front. X is experiencing strange things. A burden has been lifted; a demon has been excised from deep within, though she has lost the ability to articulate such notions.
The last Gerald sees of his family is the cameo of his daughters’ puzzled and tearful faces, framed in the rear window of the big black car as it pulls into the thinning crowd and nudges forward. And the last vision they have of him on that awful day of rescue and recrimination is of a police officer prizing open the door of his crumpled chariot and leading him away.
epilogue
They took a long break, the three of them, leaving X with her parents, and Gerald to his own devices.
Everyone, suddenly, seemed to have a lot more time on their hands.
To the satisfaction of her father—now enjoying early retirement far more than he had anticipated—she chos
e southern Africa as her destination. Victoria Falls. Chobe game reserve. Paddling in makoro wooden canoes through the Okavango Delta, amid crocs. Locations chosen not so much as routes to her roots, but as places that were a long, long way from North London, Munich, Detroit, Osaka, Kentish Town, Gerald.
Her employers had seized gleefully on her public misfortune to suggest that she depart the company forthwith and cash in her stock options in lieu of payment, thank you very much. But after very confidential verbal exchanges with her—revolving around her knowledge of the whereabouts and content of encrypted emissions software concealed in safety deposit boxes—they had agreed to write a glowing reference for the benefit of prospective bosses, reinforced by generous amounts of severance pay.
She refused to sign a nondisclosure agreement.
Trust me, she told them with a smile. She had the drop on them. For once.
Dolores and Portia and Astra traveled on southward. They flew some of the way. They drove other bits, on long ribbons of highway that unfurled through brittle savanna where people in ragged clothes offered small pyramids of tomatoes and corn for sale at the roadside. They took an overnight luxury train. Portia said she was sorry and wept bitterly. And Dolores told her she had nothing to apologize for. She had been lonely. Her kindness had been taken advantage of. By a very bad man. She would not be lonely again.
Astra asked if she could have a puppy and Dolores said she would seek X’s permission.
At the back of the mother’s mind, there was the question of permanent removal to these southerly latitudes, once charted by navigators on their way to the East Indies. She contemplated real estate agents’ brochures and translated the local money into her own kind of money and figured she could afford a whole mansion, not just a mansion flat. Portia and Astra accompanied her with no apparent enthusiasm—indeed, with deep suspicion—to several sunlit schools where everyone seemed to play sport like Olympians against the backdrop of a famous, craggy, flat-topped mountain.
“Can we go home now?” Portia asked.
“Not this new home? Here? In Africa?” Dolores said.
“Real home,” Astra said. “Where Daddy is.”
“We’ll see,” Dolores replied, although she has already decided on her course of action.
Indeed, her lawyers are drawing up the paperwork in her absence and when he receives them, Gerald will probably count himself lucky that the visitation terms are so generous, even if his alimony is so modest as to enforce lifestyle changes on a significant scale. No more Range Rover. No more dizzy highs. Quite a lot of lows. And bus journeys. And abstinence.
Still, the outcome has not been all bad. After the debacle at Kentish Town, the cops agreed to look the other way on the matter of certain quantities of alleged class-A drugs—personal use only, m’lud—and focus on sending down John Gillingham, aka Lionel Jones, for as long as possible. Gerald’s clients for his trade in the aforementioned narcotics bolted to safer suppliers. His mistresses, too. Jenny Steinem did not even call when she moved out of her apartment—after a quiet but unmistakably ominous word from Dolores—and flew back to America. There has been the question of a motoring misdemeanor—driving without due care and attention, failing to halt at a traffic signal—but that did not merit a mention in the press. Intrepidly, Reg Crouch tried to interest his news editor, but the hoary veteran just told him with a wheeze that could have been laughter: “No point flogging a dead Nazi, Reg. Not even with a golf club.”
Once, in a newsagent’s shop, Gerald espied a copy of Hello! magazine proclaiming the marriage-made-in-heaven of a billionaire named Mark Danvers and an heiress called Mathilde de Villeneuve. The cover photograph of her in a luminous white wedding dress with train and veil coaxed a rare, wan smile. The virgin Madonna. And mark. Her new husband. Mark by name, mark by destiny.
He understood, now, how Marriage—in fact, marriage—ended. He did not relish writing it. But, in his rented “garden” flat, whose security-barred windows offered a sunless prospect of the lower legs of people scurrying by in the rain and early, wintry darkness on the sidewalk above him, he knew he would try hard, stabbing at his laptop, before Death was all that was left on his agenda.
This time, he printed out his chapters as he finished them and was pleased with the slowly mounting pile of typescript.
All work and no play. That was his life now.
And X? What happened to X?
She was found in a pool of blood where Astra’s puppy, which had turned out to be a pit bull, not a poodle as the pet store owner insisted, snapped her neck in a fit of bloodlust and feasted on the furry repast.
No. That is not what really happened. Thank goodness! That is Gerald’s dream of what should happen when X figure-of-eights through his legs and looks up at him with a kind of vague, mocking recognition on those prescribed days when he may visit with his daughters or fix a leaky tap in their kitchen or escort them to their new school in a different part of town where their story—like all our stories—is theirs to invent.
about the author
ALAN S. COWELL is a British writer whose career spanned four decades as a foreign correspondent, first for Reuters and then for The New York Times. Alongside news coverage, he authored works of fiction and nonfiction, including The Terminal Spy, a definitive account of the life and death of Alexander V. Litvinenko, a former KGB officer poisoned with radioactive polonium in London in 2006. You can sign up for email updates here.
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contents
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Dedication
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Epilogue
About the Author
Copyright
This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
CAT FLAP. Copyright © 2018 by Alan Cowell. All rights reserved. For information, address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.
www.stmartins.com
Cover design by Lesley Worrell
Cover photographs: front cat © Susan Schmitz/Shutterstock.com; cat back © Valerio Pardi/Shutterstock.com
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Cowell, Alan, author.
Title: Cat flap / Alan Cowell.
Description: First edition. | New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2018.
Identifiers: LCCN 2017059651 | ISBN 978-1-250-14651-9 (hardcover) | ISBN 978-1-250-14652-6 (ebook)
Classification: LCC PR6103.O97 C37 2018 | DDC 823/.92—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017059651
ISBN 978-1-250-20249-9 (international edition)
eISBN 9781250146526
Our ebooks may be purchased in bulk for promotional, educational, or business use. Please contact the Macmillan Corporate and Premium Sales Department at 1-800-221-7945, extension 5442, or by email at [email protected].
First Edition: July 2018
Cat Flap Page 18