Eating Mammals by John Barlow

Author:John Barlow [Barlow, John]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-00-744254-6
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Published: 2004-02-15T00:00:00+00:00

V

Sergeant Harold Devitt of the Dewsbury Constabulary looks so anxious that anyone might think him a novice. Fifteen years’ service as a police officer to his name, fifteen years of ham sandwiches and sweet tea that have lent him an almost buxom rotundity. But now he doesn’t know where to put his pudgy hands, and his stomach has curled itself up so tight that he can hardly stand up straight. His jowls quiver, and points of sweat glisten on his forehead and on the ridge of his nose; he is, suddenly, all humidity and leakage, and under his uniform he bristles and chafes with a sour, nervy dampness as he tries to explain about the cat. In front of him sits a police officer of a higher rank than any he has previously encountered.

There have been two complaints, both lodged according to the correct procedures. Joseph Markham, who moved more urgently on the matter, turning up at his solicitor’s the very day after the incident at the fairground to prepare his legal challenge, has accused Longstaff of the theft of a winged cat from the workhouse. No concrete explanation of how the cat had then found its way to the fairground is given, but there is a whole section in his submission which describes Mr John Longstaff as a notoriously unconventional businessman, and which includes a signed statement from an ex-stable hand claiming that Longstaff beat a horse to death with a wooden club; other statements allege that he kept only improvised financial accounts, and that he regularly overcharged clients and became abusive when they refused to pay. There is even a description, lengthy and showing the hallmarks of Markham’s own prolixical style (though it is unsigned and therefore inadmissible), of the ramshackle hen house that Longstaff built and maintained, and insinuates that more than one of his customers found him to be of dubious and unsteady character, indeed just the kind of man to whom it would occur to steal a winged cat for the purposes of making money. John Longstaff, it is suggested, made a deal with Petronella to share the proceeds from the fairground attraction.

This theory is contradicted by Longstaff’s own documents, which arrive several days later. In them he claims that it was not Petronella but two young gypsy men who stole the cat from New Court, where the animal had been living of its own free will, having arrived there unexpectedly the very day that Longstaff and his family moved in. One of these two gypsies is described in great detail. However, no names are given, since by the time Longstaff set out to find them again, the fair was gone, and all that was left where the tent had stood (and fallen) on the great open field in Dewsbury was a pile of boxwood splinters and a black-and-gold sign announcing the Cat-Icarus. Longstaff, being not wise in such matters, punched and ripped and kicked the sign to bits until it was worthless as evidence.

‘Well,

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