Jess
Tuesday, nine in the morning, and the coroner's officer has a cold.
She parks a grey Astra behind my taxi at the gate, with a lanyard hanging off the mirror, and comes up the path with a clipboard under one arm and a packet of tissues in her other hand. She knocks. I open the door. She sneezes. I sneeze. We stand there.
"Bless you," she says.
"Don't," I say.
My face is better than last night. I can see out of both eyes. I slept four hours in the car with the windows up and the cat on the wall outside, and when I came in at half eight for the toilet he was on the kitchen table, waiting, like he'd paid for it.
The officer sits down at the table. She puts her clipboard down in a patch of black hair and doesn't notice. She's from the police but she isn't the police, she says. She works for the coroner. She needs to go through a few things with the family, and the family is me.
"You're the great-niece," she says.
"With a few greats missing," says the cat, from the other end of the table.
"Great-great," I say.
"Did you know the deceased well?"
"No."
"Had you seen her recently?"
"No. Never."
The officer writes on her form. She looks up at the cat.
"He's a big boy, isn't he," she says. "Hello, Puss."
To her it's a cat having opinions. The cat turns its whole head and looks at her.
"I am not Puss," the cat says. "Answer to a thing once and it's yours for life. I answered to Puss in 1803 and I've never got it off. I was stuck up a chimney in the vicarage at the time, and the curate was holding a herring. It was not my finest hour, madam, and I would thank you not to drag it into a public office."
"He's chatty," says the officer.
"He is," I say.
She sneezes. I sneeze. She gives me a tissue and takes one herself. The cat watches us both like it's at the tennis.
"Have you got a cat at home?" she says.
"No."
"Me neither. I think it's going round. My husband's got it and he's never touched one."
"I am not going round," says the cat. "I have been here since 1725."
She goes through it. Agatha Crowle, aged seventy-one according to her records. Found at the bottom of her own garden steps on Monday morning by her neighbour, Mrs Tebbutt. Head injury consistent with a fall. Out every night, the neighbour says, walking the sea bank. Went down the steps in the dark, as she did every night. No light on the steps.
"Ask her who else was in the garden," says the cat.
"I'm getting to that," I say.
"Sorry?" says the officer.
"Nothing."
"Ask her," says the cat. "Go on. Ask her. Somebody did this, and she is going to write it down as weather."
It doesn't stop. Every question she asks me, it talks over the answer. Where I live. Peterborough. Somebody did this. My occupation. Taxi driver. Ask her about the gate. Whether I'm aware of any concerns. No. Ask her, madam, ask her. A headache comes in behind my eyes, from the swelling and from the cat.
So I ask, to shut it up.
"Could somebody have pushed her?"
The officer looks at me. She puts her pen down.
"Why do you ask that?"
"I don't know. I'm asking."
She looks at her clipboard. She wipes her nose.
"The back gate at the bottom of the garden was bolted on the inside," she says. "We checked that Monday. She never got as far as the gate. The front gate is in full sight of the neighbour's front window. Mrs Tebbutt says she was in all evening. Nobody came up that path." She taps the form. "There was nobody else in that garden on Sunday night but Mrs Crowle and her cat. She went down those steps in the dark, as she did every night of her life, and she fell."
"Thank you," I say.
"Black hairs in her fist," says the officer. "She'll have grabbed at him going over."
The cat doesn't say anything. It sits very still at the end of the table.
"Post-mortem's Thursday," says the officer. "It'll say likely accident. The coroner will open the inquest and adjourn it. You'll get the body back after that, but the undertaker says he'll not get a hearse down this drove till after the big tide, so you're looking at a funeral after that. Is there anything else you want to ask me?"
"No," I say.
The cat says nothing.
She packs up. At the door she gives me a leaflet about bereavement, and she sneezes, and I sneeze, and she goes back down the path to her Astra and does a nine-point turn in the gateway and goes off up the drove.
My phone goes while I'm still on the step. It's the estate agent from Wisbech who was coming at eleven to look at the place. I put him on speaker because my hands are full of leaflet.
"Miss Crowle? Bad news, I'm afraid. I've just heard about the high street. I'm not going to be able to get out to you today, or this week by the look of it, there's police tape across the high street. Can we say a week Thursday?"
"Fine," I say.
"Just so I've got it for the details," he says. "Does the cat stay with the property?"
"No," I say.
"Yes," says the cat, behind me.
"Only some buyers like a cat," says the estate agent.
"Not this one," I say, and hang up.
I go back in and sit down at the table. The cat's still there. I look at it, and it looks at me.
"Did you push her?" I say.
"No."
"Where were you?"
"Asleep," says the cat. "I woke on Mo's cushion."
There's another question. I know what it is.
I get up and fill the kettle. I put it on the range, which is out. The cat watches me.
"There's a gas ring in the scullery," it says.
"I know," I say. I don't.
In the afternoon I go and look at the steps, because I'm going to have to sell them.
They go down from the back door to the bottom of the garden. Brick, wet, green at the edges, with no rail. Eleven. I count them going down and I count them coming up, and it's eleven both times. At the bottom there's a gate in a fence, with a rusty bolt, and on the other side of the gate there's a dyke, full, and a path along the top of it going off toward a long green bank about a mile off, with sheep on it. The sea's on the other side of the bank. I can hear it. It sounds like a car on a wet road, a long way off, all the time.
I don't look at the bottom step for long.
I sit down on the third one from the top, because it's dry. It's warm. I put my hand flat on it to check. It's warm like a car bonnet after a short run.
The cat comes out of the back door and stands on the step above me.
"That is my step," it says.
I move down one. It sits where I was. It tucks its feet in.
"Last night," I say. "In the kitchen."
"Yes."
"What happens if it gets you?"
"I go home," says the cat. "And I do not come back."
"Home where?"
It looks down the garden at the dyke. It doesn't answer that one. I don't ask twice.
"How do I stop it," I say. Then, "I'm not saying I'm going to. I'm asking."
The cat doesn't look at me. It talks to the garden, and it says it all in one go, plain, no big words, like somebody reading out a bus timetable.
"When a witch dies, her familiar has thirteen nights to be taken by somebody else. If he isn't, he goes home at the turn of the tide on the thirteenth night. She went down those steps on Sunday night. The thirteenth night is Saturday week, and it is the big tide. Blood first."
"Blood first?"
"You. Until the last night, only you may try. On the last night, anybody may."
"Try what?"
"Three witch's acts, done on purpose, knowing what they are. Then you hold me on the sea bank, and you say my whole name. And while this runs, only the blood can mend a bottle."
"What bottle?"
"Jugs," says the cat. "Stoneware. With a face on the neck. She filled them with bent nails, hair, salt and her own water, and buried thirteen round the edges of the town, and while there is a witch they keep the fen out. There is no witch. One a night. You can count, can't you? You drive a meter."
"Last night was one."
"Under the war memorial. You drove through it."
I look at the dyke at the bottom of the garden. It's higher than it was this morning. Not much.
"Why don't you mend them?"
"I am not the blood," says the cat. "And I cannot dig. I have paws, madam. What goes in the jug is written in her book, and her book is locked in her bureau, and the key was in her coat pocket, and her coat went to the undertaker's with the rest of her."
"So get the key."
"The undertaker's is in Wisbech. I am a cat."
I sit there. The sheep on the bank are walking along it in a line, all one way.
"Three acts," I say. "On a bank. And a name."
"Yes."
"And then I've got you."
"And then you have me. For as long as you live."
"Nope," I say.
The cat doesn't say anything.
"I'm not a witch," I say. "I'm a Skoda. I've got a shift tonight. I've got a house to sell. I've got fourteen thousand two hundred pounds to pay back to people who ring me every morning at eight. I'm sorry about your," and I don't know what to call her. "About her. I'm sorry about the floor. Not my problem."
The cat gets up and goes back in the house. It doesn't say anything else. It goes in very slowly, with its tail down.
At six I go to leave.
I've got the bag in the boot and the keys in, and I'm going to go back to Peterborough and do the late shift on the station rank and sort the sale from there, on the phone. It's getting dark. The drove's a long grey line going off to the town, with the dyke on either side, very full, very still.
The cat's on the wall. It's sitting up. Then it flinches. I see it. Its ears go flat and its mouth opens like something's gone through its teeth.
The dyke on the left comes over the road.
It doesn't rush. It just comes up, over the edge, quite quietly, and then it's on the road, a thin sheet of it, shining in my headlights, and the dyke on the right does the same, and the two of them meet in the middle, and then the drove isn't a drove any more. It's a long flat ditch going off into the dark with reeds sticking out of it on both sides to show where the road was.
I try it anyway. I put it in first and go, slow, down the middle where the middle was. The water comes up round the wheels. Twenty yards. Forty. The steering goes light, like the car's thinking about something else. At fifty yards the water's at the sills and I can hear it in the wheel arches and the exhaust starts to bubble, and the little light on the dash for the engine comes on and stays on.
I stop. I put it in reverse and go back the fifty yards looking over my shoulder, all the way, with the reeds scraping the paint on both sides, and I get it up onto the hard standing by the gate, and I turn it off, and the light goes out.
I get out of the car. The water's at the tops of my trainers by the gate. Further up, it's deeper. I can't see the ruts. The car's got water dripping out of the bottom of both doors.
I count it. A Tuesday late shift is a hundred and ten, if the station's busy. A hundred and ten I'm not getting. Fourteen thousand two hundred, and a hundred and ten I'm not getting.
"That was the second one," says the cat.
I sleep in the car anyway, at the gate, on the bit of hard standing that's still above the water. The water's all round. I can hear it ticking against the tyres.
At three in the morning I wake up and I want milk. I go in through the gate in my socks and my trainers, through an inch of water on the path, and let myself in, and I don't turn the light on, because I don't want the cat. I go to the fridge in the dark. I open it quietly, with my fingers on the seal.
He's at my ankles before the little light's even come on.
"I heard the seal go," he says.
I pour the milk. He watches me pour it. I put a bit in a saucer for him, because he's watching, and he drinks it like I owe him.
Then I turn round to put the bottle on the side, by the sink, and there's an eel in the sink.
It's long and grey and it's moving, slowly, round and round in the bowl, and it's come up the plughole from somewhere, and it's got its head up out of the water.
It's looking at me.