Case Histories

Binky was over ninety and was the widow of "a Peterhouse fel-low," a philosophy don (despite living in Cambridge for fourteen years, Jackson still thought of the mafia when he heard that word). "Doctor Rain" -Julian – had long gone to rest in the great Senior Common Room in the sky. Binky herself had been brought up in colonial Africa and treated Jackson like a servant, which was how she treated everyone. She lived in a bungalow in Newnham on the way to Grantchester Meadows in what must have once been a perfectly normal between-the-wars redbrick, but years of neglect had transformed it into an overgrown Gothic horror. The place was crawling with cats, hundreds of the damn things. Jackson got the heebie-jeebies just thinking about the smell – cat urine, tomcat spray, saucers of tinned food on every surface, the cheap stuff that was made from the parts of animals that even the burger chains shunned. Binky Rain had no money, no friends, and no family and her neighbors avoided her, and yet she effortlessly maintained the facade of aristocratic hauteur, like a refugee from some ancien regime, living out her life in tatters. Binky Rain was exactly the kind of person whose body lay undiscovered in her house for weeks, except that her cats would probably have eaten her by the time she was found.

Her complaint, the reason she had originally engaged Jackson 's services, was that someone was stealing her cats. Jackson couldn't work out whether cats really did go missing or whether she just thought they went missing. She had this thing about black cats in particular. "Someone's taking them," she said in her clipped little voice, her accent as anachronistic as everything else about her, a remnant, a leftover from another time, another place, long turned into history. The first cat to go missing was a black cat ("bleck ket") called Nigger – and Binky Rain thought that was all right! Not named after a black man ("bleck men"), she said dismissively when his jaw dropped, but after Captain Scott's cat on the Discovery. (Did she really go around the quiet streets of Newnham shouting out "Nigger!"? Dear God, please not.) Her brother-in-law had been a stalwart of the Scott Polar Research Institute on Lensfield Road and had spent a winter camped on the ice of the Ross Shelf, making Binky an expert on antarctic exploration, apparently. Scott was "a fool," Shackleton "a womanizer," and Peary "an American," which seemed to be enough of a condemnation in itself. The way Binky talked about polar expeditions ("Horses! Only an idiot would take horses!") belied the fact that the most challenging journey she had undertaken was the voyage from Cape Town to Southampton in first class on the Dunnottar Castle in 1938.

Jackson 's best friend, Howell, was black, and when Jackson told him about Binky having a cat called Nigger, he roared with laughter. Howell dated from Jackson 's army days – they had started out as squaddies together. "Bleck men," Howell laughed, doing a disturbing impression of an old white lady, disturbing given that Howell was six-foot-six and the blackest black man Jackson had ever met. After his discharge, Howell had returned to his native Birmingham and was currently working as a doorman for a large hotel, a job that required him to wear a ridiculous pantomime costume – a royal blue frock coat covered in gold braid and, even more ridiculously, a top hat. Howell had such an imposing presence that rather than losing dignity in this flunky's outfit he actually made it seem strangely distinguished.

Howell must be at a dangerous age as well. What was he doing about it? It must be more than six months since they had spoken. That was how you lost people, a little carelessness and they just slipped through your fingers. Jackson missed Howell. Somewhere along the line Jackson had managed to lose not only his wife and child but all his friends as well. (Although had he had any friends other than Howell?) Maybe this was why people filled their house with stinking cats, so they didn't notice that they were alone, so they wouldn't die without a living soul noticing. Jackson hoped that wouldn't happen to him. Anyway, he was going to die in France, in a chair, in the garden, after a good meal. Perhaps Mar-lee would be there on a visit, and she would have her children with her so that Jackson could see that part of him carried on into the future, that death wasn't the end of everything.

Jackson let his voice mail pick up Binky's message and then listened back to her imperial tones commanding him to visit her as soon as possible on "a matter of some urgency" to do with "Frisky."