Cat and Mouse

by Christianna Brand

  The woman in the white apron was not a servant. She called one “miss,” but haltingly; the word did not come to her lips with accustomed ease. And she was not used to wearing the apron, its bands kept slipping from her shoulders and she would hitch them up with a wriggle and pat them back into place with her fat, neat hands. She took Tinka’s arm and eased her into a chair in the chocolate-brown hall; but all the time her eyes were on Carlyon’s face. The shawl that had hung across the centre of the umbrella stand was no longer there. Mrs. Love said to Carlyon: “This means, sir, that the young lady will have to stay the night?”

  “Yes,” said Carlyon; he flicked a glance at each of them as though to say: What do you think of that?

  The woman stood considering. “She’d better have the room out at the back.”

  “The front room,” said Dai Jones, flatly contradicting her. “Over the dining-room.”

  “Yes,” said Carlyon. “The front room will be best.”

  “And dinner?”

  “Don’t bother about dinner,” said Katinka, hastily. “I don’t want any dinner. I don’t want to be any trouble.”

  Carlyon ignored her. “She’d better be put to bed at once and have her meal on a tray.” There was no pretence of friendliness, of kindliness or care. They spoke across her head as though she were a stray dog to which, for reasons devoid of ordinary pity, they were obliged to give shelter for the night. “I’m most awfully sorry,” said Katinka, anxiously placating them, now that the die was cast. “I don’t want to be a nuisance to you.”

  “Not a nuisance at all,” said Carlyon, turning his unsmiling face to hers. “Dai and Mrs. Love will help you upstairs. Tomorrow we can see about getting you away.” He walked off abruptly into the sitting-room as though he washed his hands of the whole affair. Of Mr. Chucky there was no sign.

  The “front room” was a big, square ugly room, adequately furnished yet oddly comfortless. The woman lowered her into a creaky cane chair and bustled about the room, passing a duster across the surface of the furniture, filling the big china jug with water, making the high, stiff-looking wooden bed. She reminds me of somebody, thought Tinka. Somewhere or other, I seem to have seen her before. But there were so many people that one saw in one’s work as a journalist, so many people especially that one had seen in those old days on the Consolidated News Service, nosing out the latest dirt. People who were famous, people who were notorious, people flung into the limelight for a single edition. … People in drawing-rooms, in theatrical dressing-rooms, in courtrooms, on their way to prison cells. … People hurt in accidents, people killed in accidents, people who had hurt other people or killed other people, not always by accident. … Murderers. Somewhere, some time, she had seen this woman before; and it had been something to do with—well, something to do with… But she could not, would not, openly face the thought that it had been something to do with—death.

  I wish to hell my ankle would look a bit swollen, she thought, and more worthy of all this fuss. The woman seemed vague as to what should be done. Dai Trouble had suggested cold compresses: would that be a good thing? “Whatever will give the least trouble,” said Tinka. “But I think that’s to reduce the swelling and there doesn’t seem to be much swelling, does there?”

  “No, miss, there doesn’t—does there?” said Mrs. Love.

  In bed at last and draped in one of Mrs. Love’s nighties, a confection as wide as it was long of cheap black georgette and imitation ecru lace, she relaxed a little against the unyielding pillow. “I’m sorry things are not more comfortable, miss,” said the woman stiffly, looking round the big, bare room. “Mr. Carlyon took the house as it stood and only brought down a few things for the rooms we use. It’s a big place—more than we need.”

  “Yes, indeed, just for the three of you,” said Katinka.

  The woman gave her a look of quick suspicion and went away. She returned with a cup of tea and Katinka, her ankle inexpertly bandaged, was left to her own devices. As soon as they’re all well and truly downstairs, she thought, I’ll nip out of bed and have a damn good look round. If anyone comes I can pretend I’m looking for the bathroom. Everything was queer and mysterious and vaguely horrible. Carlyon’s explanations were not explanations at all—he had not been ill, he had not come to Penderyn to convalesce; the protection which these two servants showed him was not the protection of “a mother and father tiger with a fragile cub,” it was the mutual protection of members of a secret society for a third whose danger was their own. Amista had been in this house. She had written those letters from this house, she had described the house, she had mentioned things that Katinka herself had seen in the house—the Siamese cat, the Sisley snow scene, these two servants, even the little woman who brought the milk. … From the window, she could see the tip of the mountain opposite, heavy and grey in the evening light, under the interminable rain. She heard Carlyon’s voice below. He was calling out to know if anyone had seen the cat, which, apparently, was missing. Both servants answered him. So they were all safely downstairs.

  She struggled out of bed. The house from the outside had seemed to be built on a simple plan: a single narrow corridor was broken at one place into an angle—it surely would not be difficult to see how many of the main rooms were occupied, to judge whether there was indeed anyone in the house besides the three she had seen. She gave herself no time to think, but climbed out of bed and, barefoot, skipped across the room.

  The door was locked.

  Back in bed, she abandoned herself to dread, sick with terror at the thought of her own temerity. This was no trivial mystery, this was not some tantalizing puzzle to be solved for the satisfaction of her own idle curiosity. She was afraid; and the trouble was, she thought, that Carlyon and Mrs. Love and Dai Trouble were also afraid of her and of what she might find out; afraid because they knew that she had forced her way back to the house on a false excuse, and suspected her, therefore, of being there for no reason but to spy upon them, of knowing much more than she did. She pulled the bound up ankle out from the bedclothes and waggled her foot about. If only the damn thing would swell up! If they could be brought to believe that she really had injured her ankle, that, surely, would allay their fears? And they would let her get peacefully through the night and tomorrow would speed her thankfully on her way. She jabbed her foot savagely at the wooden end of the bed, but it was terribly difficult to deliberately injure oneself; at the moment of impact, the flesh rebelled. She held her left foot in her hand and forced herself to jump clumsily off the high bed; the weaker right ankle doubled up under her and she fell heavily to the floor—now there was no mistake about it, and she climbed back under the bedclothes in rueful triumph.

  By the time Mrs. Love arrived at the door with some supper on a tray the ankle had swollen up under the too-tight bandages and was throbbing violently. “Mrs. Love, I’m sorry but my ankle’s absolutely awful. Do you think the bandage could be loosened a bit?”

  “There’s nothing wrong with the bandage,” said Mrs. Love, flatly. “It was properly put on.”

  Tinka pulled back the bedclothes and began untying the bandage. “Well, all right. I’ll do it myself.”

  The woman bent over and took a closer look. “It does seem a bit swollen now, doesn’t it?”

  “You don’t say so!” said Katinka.

  “I do say so, dear,” said Mrs. Love, taking no umbrage. “Let’s have a look at it.” She put her hand to the hot flesh, puffing up unnaturally over the bandage top. “You really have got a bit of a sprain there! I think we’ll give it another cold compress, dear, and then it might ease you to elevate the leg.” Her whole manner had changed: she bustled off and returned with basins and towels. Her ministrations were inexpert but not clumsy and at the end of it all the leg felt much better. She rigged up a sort of sling across the bed between two chair-backs, and made a tent of the bedclothes over it. At nine-thirty she brought a cup of hot malted milk and settled her patient down for the night, talking cheerful nothingnesses meanw
hile. Tinka, leaning on her arm, hopped down the corridor, but saw no signs of life, and subsided thankfully into bed again. The leg was settled into its hammock; Mrs. Love pitched the tent over it and with jovial allusions to wigwams and Indian braves, took the empty cup from the table and went out, softly closing the door. Tinka listened for the turning of the key in the lock, but heard nothing. The outlines of the big, stark room grew gradually more faint. She felt herself drifting off into sleep.

  Just go to sleep: that was the thing to do. There was mystery all about her, but it was nothing to do with Katinka Jones. She must go off to sleep and know nothing about anything and tomorrow she would go back to Swansea and, once there, inform the police of what little she knew. Amista had been there, and they all denied it. … Carlyon was a fake, that air of integrity and strength was a false thing, a veil thrown over a tissue of evasions and lies. … Dai Jones hid ugly secrets in his soft grey eyes, and Mrs. Love—there was something queer about Mrs. Love, something familiar, something associated with—death? There had been something queer in something she had said, some odd phrase, dimly recognised, that now was elusive. … But she could not be bothered any more. She had allayed their suspicions by proving that the injury to her ankle had been genuine and now there was nothing more to be frightened of. She must just drift into sleep. She was drifting into sleep. Drifting into sleep. … Drifting… Drifting…

  A queer, stifling, rather frightening kind of sleep.

  She jerked herself into awareness once more. I’ve been drugged! I’ve been drugged or poisoned, this isn’t a real sleep, this isn’t a natural sleep. … I mustn’t go to sleep, I shall die or be killed if I do, I shall never wake up from it, I mustn’t give way to it, I mustn’t go to sleep, I must stay awake and fight. … But her eyelids closed heavily over her heavy eyes. I am drifting off to sleep, I can’t keep awake, I must, I must give way to it, I must drift into sleep even if it means into death. … She was too dopey, too drowsy to fight any more. She made one superhuman effort, but she could not care any more, she desired only sleep. Drifting into sleep. …

  Somebody was at the door.

  She was pricked violently into wakefulness again. Very slowly, cautiously, craftily, into the nerve-shattering silence and dimness—somebody was opening the door. She was sick with terror, cold and sick with dread, stifled by the frantic thudding of her heart; staring with wide, unwinking eyes at the line of light slowly, almost imperceptibly, widening as the door inched open. A figure appeared for a moment silhouetted against the light further down the corridor, and then slipped swiftly inside the room. The door softly closed; she was shut in with it, shut in with the creeping, crawling terror of it, terror of the unknown, softly, silently; with implacable menace, creeping towards her bed. … Coming up close to the bed. …

  Fear struggled with the overwhelming drowsiness of drugged sleep. She dragged herself back from the deep waters in which she was drowning, dragged herself back to the surface of sleep and began to struggle up from the pillow. Her leg was caught for a moment in its sling beneath the bedclothes. She tried to wriggle it free, but it held fast. She jerked at it wildly, disregarding the throbbing pain in her ankle; the figure approaching the bed started back for a moment and was still. She could see the dim outline in the fight from the half-curtained window. When it came nearer, she would see the face, and she was torn with horror at the thought of it, at the knowledge that she must look, in her last moments, into the eyes of her enemy. She struggled with frantic fear to free her leg. But she could not. Something was tied to the bandage, something resisted her violent tugging, something was holding her fast to the wooden end of the bed.

  She was tied there. Deliberately tied up, a hobbled beast, helpless, threshing about like a sheep in a net, on this ghastly bed; and something, somebody was bending over her.

  Something not human. A face and not a face. Two little pig-like eyes in a vast round disc of incredible patchwork, seamed across and across like an old, mended quilt. A sort of hole of a mouth and those two little pig-like eyes. Something that was a face and not a face, something that was not animal and yet, God knew, not human. Something that drooled and dripped saliva on to her upturned face, and slowly advanced towards her a clammy white claw, the crooked fingers glistening with wet blood. Horrible, fantastic, menacing, obscene. …

  Like a drowning man going down for the third time, she sank back, helpless, into the waters of unconsciousness.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  THE SEA WAS WONDERFULLY blue and there were white breakers tumbling over one another on its surface and a great hump-backed whale surging among the breakers. But it was not the sea, it was the sky, and the breakers were white clouds and the whale was the great, grey mountain with its head in the clouds. … And there was a frame about the sky and the clouds and the mountains, squaring it into a picture; a picture seen through a window of the first floor front bedroom at Penderyn. And Miss Katinka Jones was suddenly wide awake, and feeling fine.

  It had stopped raining, and in the morning sunshine, surely everything must be decent and sane again. She was relieved to find that her ankle felt considerably better; it had probably been largely the too-tight bandage which had caused it to swell up and throb so much. She got out of bed and hopped about a little. Not too bad at all! Her handbag lay on the dressing table and she saw that the catch was not properly fastened. She hopped across and picked up the bag and examined it. Someone had been looking through it: it was not as she had left it. All right, she thought. That’s that. Now we know where we are.

  Someone was whistling very softly outside her window. In her new-found exuberance, she poked out her head to see who it could be. A shoddy little balcony ran above the front porch, under the French window of the rooms looking out across the valley; and perched on the rail, dressed in his smart brown suit and swinging a neat brown shoe, sat Mr. Chucky, very much at his ease. He slid down off the rail immediately. “Hallo. I thought if I hissed through my teeth long enough you’d be bound to wake up.”

  “What the hell are you doing,” said Katinka, “making such a din at this hour of the morning?”

  “Proper musical the Welsh are,” said Chucky, the sing-song accent very much in evidence.

  “Well, please go and be musical somewhere else. No, wait a minute,” said Tinka, changing her mind. “I think I’d like to talk to you.” She limped back to the mirror and had a look at what last night’s experiences had done to yesterday’s complexion. Pretty grim: Miss Let’s-be-Lovely would have had fifty fits, but it was good enough for that awful Chucky. She flapped a little powder on the freckled nose, wrapped Mrs. Love’s vast fancy dressing-gown about her and went back to the window. “Excuse the georgette and ecru,” she said to Mr. Chucky, balancing herself on the rail beside him. He passed her a cigarette in his fingers and held a lighter flame under it. While he bent over his own, she said: “Now, look here—what’s all this about. Because you know about Amista; you know she’s here! Don’t you?”

  “Never heard of the lady,” said Mr. Chucky. “Not till you mentioned her.”

  “You damn well had heard of her: you told me all about her when we were walking up the path to the house. I said to you…”

  “You said to me that you hoped some lady would be worth the trouble you were taking to visit her; Amista—was that the name? I don’t remember. I said that no doubt she would be glad to see you—well, anyone would; it must be lonely here for a woman. You asked me if she was pretty and I said that anyway Mr. Carlyon must think so.”

  “Yes, and why…?”

  “Well, dash it all, he appeared to have married her,” said Mr. Chucky. The white cloud flung a dappling of shadow over the mountain opposite; he looked round over the lovely valley with a quiet satisfaction, as though he had been personally responsible for its creation and, like God, found that it was good. “Nice situation they got here.”

  “Your first visit?” said Katinka, politely.

  He gave her his quick glance, half shrewd, hal
f laughing. “You and me too, Miss Jones.”

  She wriggled her foot impatiently, clasping the flimsy dressing-gown about her. “I do wish you’d make up your mind whether to be phoney American or only-too-genuine Welsh.”

  “Slip back in spite of myself, don’t I?” he said, more Welsh than ever. He gave her one of his infuriating winks.

  “What are you doing here anyway?” said Tinka.

  He looked at her, his head on one side like a bird. He was rather like a bird in some ways, with his bright brown eye. He said: “I’ll tell you in one word, my girl. I’m a policeman.”

  “A policeman?”

  “Detective Inspector Chucky, Swansea police.” He kicked his neat feet up into the air a little, and to Tinka’s great satisfaction almost tipped backward over the little balcony. He recovered his balance with an ungraceful effort and went through a performance of exaggerated horror and relief. She said: “I don’t believe you’re a policeman at all.”

  “Well, there’s women for you,” said Chucky. “You tell them the plain truth and what do you get—nothing but suspicion. That’s women!”

  “If you are—then what are you doing here?”

  “I might ask you the same question.”

  “I tell you, you fool—I came here on a purely personal visit to Amista.”

  “Who doesn’t exist.”

  “What I want to know is—why did you come here?”

  “Because you did,” said Mr. Chucky.

  Cor lummy! thought Katinka; have I made a conquest at last? But he burst into not very flattering laughter, pretending alarm and dismay. “No, no, don’t misunderstand me, Miss Jones; and me a married man with three children at home in Swansea! Like to see their pictures?” He pulled a shabby folding photograph frame from his breast pocket. “No thank you,” said Tinka, “not quite so early in the morning, if you wouldn’t mind.”