Cat and Mouse

by Christianna Brand

  The listening ear pressed close. “What act is this young woman supposed to have played?”

  “You had a rich wife,” said Katinka. “But she—she wouldn’t part with her money, I suppose, and you couldn’t get the control of it that you wanted. So… So…” She began again. “This man’s daughter, Dai Trouble’s illegitimate daughter, she’s injured in an accident. She’s unrecognizable. ‘Right you,’ says Dai. ‘Pass off my daughter as your wife. She’s a good enough little actress and for the rest, her right hand is injured, she won’t be expected to sign documents. We’ll promise her plastic surgery for her injuries—she could never afford it for herself and she’ll do anything we tell her to.’”

  “And the accommodating wife, meantime?”

  (Even to a mad wife in the attic, à la Jane Eyre…) “Shut away down here in this lonely place, kept under drugs. …”

  “And writing nonsense to some woman’s magazine, signed ‘Amista’?”

  “No,” said Katinka. And she looked again into the raddled face and said: “I thought—I thought Mrs. Love couldn’t be Amista because she hadn’t been with you long enough to know all the things Amista mentioned in her letters. But if that wasn’t true… I think she was with you, long before that poor girl got out of hospital and came down here. I think she was with you looking after the other one, looking after your drugged wife locked away in whatever room it is up there at Penderyn.”

  “And the letters?”

  Katinka had a sudden vision of the red hands folded over the unaccustomed crisp white parlour-maid’s apron. “She wrote first for a lotion to whiten her hands. Then she wrote and said that…”

  Carlyon bowed sardonically in the direction of Mrs. Love. “She said, if I remember your story correctly, that she was in love with a man ten years older than herself. With all due deference to Mrs. Love…”

  “Yes, but… The actual phrase was… Yes, now I remember it! The actual phrase was, ‘the man I love is over thirty.’ But her handwriting was terribly illegible and when these girls write to us about ‘disparity in age’ as we call it officially at the office, they’re always bobbysoxers in love with people older than themselves. So we assumed… But suppose that what she really wrote was that the man she loved was only thirty, was ten years younger than herself. …” She turned upon Mrs. Love. “I don’t believe there’s any Harry at all! I believe you’ve been hand-in-glove with Mr. Carlyon all this time—because you’re in love with him.”

  Mrs. Love seemed incapable of speech. “And the murder note?” said Carlyon, coolly civil. “Amista’s note luring poor Angela—but no, she was Dai’s daughter, really, wasn’t she? Some unknown Bronwen or Mifanwy—to the precipice?”

  Katinka’s voice began to falter with the first faltering of her confidence. “She—the girl might have begun to find out, she might have suspected that everything wasn’t being done to restore her face (because that wouldn’t have suited you at all, would it?). She wanted to look in a mirror and then—then she wanted to give me the ring as some sort of sign. That day she tried to give it to me in the hall, it was wrapped up in a paper; perhaps there was a message written on the paper. And as for the ring…” She broke off. “Mrs. Love said that she always wore the ring ‘when she played.’ Well, playing is the technical term for acting. I could easily have traced an actress who wore a sphinx ring on the stage; it would be used in publicity if I know anything about actresses, and it would have been easy enough to trace.” She stood at bay, gazing back at them, into their staring faces, the turkey-red face of outraged Mrs. Love, the intent and angry face of Dai Jones Trouble, the coolly sneering face of Carlyon. The white blur was melting away from the window, was fading away like the smile of the Cheshire cat, and she was left alone with them again, with these three infinitely more menacing than they had been before, because now they were not only angry, they were afraid. But the smile reappeared, thank God, fading in again at the doorway, the friendly, smiling, Cheshire-cat smiling face of Detective Inspector Chucky, all too hail-fellow-well-met for words.

  “Well, there you are then, Miss Jones! Company all the time! I met Miss Evans down by the chapel and she told me that you were alone. Right you, I says, up and have a friendly word with Miss Jones. And what do I find—company with you all the time.” He flapped his wet hat out into the linoleumed hall. “There’s wet! Raining-pouring outside it is, proper old Pentre Trist weather. Pentre Trist, that means the Village of Grief, you know, in the Welsh; and crying all the time the old skies are, with the grief! Duw, duw!” He never had sounded so execrably Welsh, never had been more exquisitely welcome.

  Mrs. Love disregarded him entirely. She had recovered the use of speech and now employed it to the full. Such a fandango of wicked lies Mrs. Love had never heard tell in all her born days. Her in love with Mr. Carlyon, indeed! Katinka’s accusations of murder and mayhem passed, apparently, clean over her peroxided head; but that she should be accused of harbouring a guilty passion for Mr. Carlyon, and unrequited passion at that…! And with her Harry patiently waiting for her up in good old London! Well, he wouldn’t have to wait much longer. Of that she gave them all her word.

  “And Amista?” suggested Mr. Chucky, lovingly pouring a little oil on the flames.

  “Amista! I jest see meself writing a whole lot of rubbidge to a rubbidgy girls’ magazine! Amista! She’s Amista herself, if you ask me, and always has been. Nosed out poor Mrs. Carlyon and made up the whole story so as to get into the house, like Mr. Carlyon’s always said. And wrote a few bits of letters herself to keep the thing going.”

  “Including the last note?” said Chucky. “Luring Mrs. Carlyon to her death?”

  Katinka had not scrupled to accuse Mrs. Love, but Mrs. Love looked a little shamefaced and said that she wouldn’t like to think that of Miss Jones.

  Carlyon spoke. He said: “Was there ever really any note at all? This woman here—she says she found the note. She and Miss Evans, of course, but Miss Evans doesn’t count, she’d do what she was told. They were first at the body; who knows what they may have hatched up before the rest of us arrived. If Angela wasn’t quite dead… They could have scribbled this note and put it into her hand.”

  “But she was dead,” said Katinka. “Of course she was dead.” And she thought of the twice-broken body and said: “God forbid that she shouldn’t have died the moment she hit the ground.”

  Carlyon stood with bent head. “Well, amen to that.”

  “Anyway, why should I want to keep up the story? Why should I want to steal the ring?”

  He lifted his head at once. “Your story was dying on you, I suppose, literally dying on you. You’d scooped the world, you’d literally got in at the death, but after that there was nothing much to say, the inquest was a bit tame. You’d thought of that no doubt, well ahead. So now, when the thing begins to fizzle out, there’s still the ring to make a snappy paragraph of, bolstered with photographs. …”

  The wallpaper was a scarlatina of red roses, with Carlyon’s face as white as the background to the roses, his white lips spitting venom. She confronted him. “Now look here—once and for all. Just tell me this—has there been one line in any newspaper, one single line that any local reporter couldn’t have contributed, one solitary word that must have been sent in by me? Have I contributed one word to any paper about Mrs. Carlyon’s life or Mrs. Carlyon’s death?”

  “Not yet,” said Carlyon. “You work for a weekly periodical, don’t you? ‘The full story…’ What day does your rag come out?”

  Katinka admitted defeat. “All right, I give in. There never was any Amista; I made it all up, I built it up for months beforehand in order to get into a house where a news story existed that I couldn’t possibly have known anything about. I kept it going so as to make more chatty paragraphs that I never sent in, and finally I lured a girl to her death and horribly murdered her, to make just one more news item that I haven’t used.” She said wearily to Inspector Chucky: “What’s the use? There was no earthly point i
n my making up any ‘Amista,’ but just because I’m the only person who knows anything about her, they all believe, you believe yourself, that she never existed.”

  Mr. Chucky thrust out a thoughtful underlip, looked at her over the tops of imaginary spectacles. “Well, indeed now, Miss Jones, you underestimate the poor Swansea police! I know quite as much about Amista as you do—probably more.”

  “You know who Amista is?”

  “We local boys get around a bit,” he answered airily. “We’ve had the letters down from your office, of course, and had a go at the fingerprints—nothing posh, mind, just a few amateurs messing about with a bit of old powder. And then there’s the seal. There must have been a seal, mustn’t there? And that red-gold sealing-wax. So naturally we’ve had a bit of a look round for the sealing-wax and the seal.”

  “Why the hell couldn’t you have told me that, when you wanted to search my house?” said Carlyon. “I’d have been a bit more co-operative.”

  After the way he had looked at her and spoken to her, quite obviously Katinka Jones could never care for Carlyon again. And yet… If only it could be proved to him that Amista had been no part of any plot of hers! “Detective Inspector—for heaven’s sake tell me then—have you found the seal?”

  “Not to say found it,” said Chucky, easily. “But I know where it is—or I can have a pretty good guess.” He did not even glance in Mrs. Love’s direction, but he said: “You weren’t very far out, Miss Jones, in your calculations.” He beamed. “A bit of psychology—there’s a splendid thing!”

  “Well, don’t look at me,” said Mrs. Love. “You and your psychology!”

  “Do you mean to say, Inspector,” said Carlyon, “that Mrs. Love…? That she really…?”

  Mrs. Love had had a very bad evening. She was wet and weary and cold and angry and she had been mortally wounded in all her finer feelings. “You shut your face!” she said. “Lay off of me! You don’t employ me no more, and I’m fed up with you and your secrets!”

  “Mrs. Love!” said Carlyon, sharply.

  “Don’t you ‘Mrs. Love’ me! I’m fed up with this, suspected and accused and badgered, mixed up with the police and all. I’m not standing for it, I’m not going to get mixed up in your business no more, you and your Angel S. …”

  There was a sharp sound as the ring clattered to the table, rolling over to lie against Katinka’s mirror which remained, with the contents of her upturned handbag, on the table. Mrs. Love, checked in mid-word, remained open-mouthed, belligerent but alarmed; and into the cool silence, Mr. Chucky hummed a little tune.

  But Katinka was staring down at the two jade rings, the sphinx face tumbled down on the little mirror, the sphinx face reflected back from the mirror, the little roughness inside the upswept white jade wings reflected in a mirror as once she had seen it before.

  “Oh, what a minx—the sphinx was…” crooned Inspector Chucky; and Katinka Jones was a journalist again, not Miss Friendly-wise of Girls Together, but go-getting girl reporter for Consolidated News, who had gone but not gotten any news at all from her interview with Miss Angel Soone. She sat again in the flower-gay dressing-room, she heard again the tinkling of the piano and the high, sweet, tinkling little voice singing a naughty little song; the tumultuous applause, the fading into the new signature tune. …

  The white jade ring winked up at her, reflected in the brightly lit theatrical dressing-table mirror.

  And she had come running into the dressing room. Angel, with her outstretched narrow white hands, saying: “So sorry to keep you waiting, Miss—Er. I’m awful about encores, I simply love them and I overstayed my time. The management will be furious!”

  Miss Angela Erleigh. Miss Angel Soone.

  That had been the very last concert she had given; not that Katinka had known that at the time, and the failure to discover it had cost her dear. She had sat like a drivelling idiot, playing with the ring on the dressing-table, asking the wrong questions, being delicately led up the garden path. “How do you think the new song went, Miss Soone? What about your old signature tune, Miss Soone? Is it true that your new husband wrote this one for you…?”

  “My husband!” Angel had protested, laughing. “I can just see him!” (Carlyon composing a silly, vulgar pretentious little bit of nonsense like that!)

  But Tinka had not then heard the name of Carlyon, had never even heard of Mr. Charles Lion. “Oh, now I’ve given away that I really am married, haven’t I? But look, Miss—Er, don’t give us away, will you? We do so want to keep it a private affair. Just say that yes, I’m married—but I think you’ll find that really everybody knows—and that we’re going off soon on a belated honeymoon. And ask the public to be nice and kind and not worry me, and when I come back I promise there’ll be lots of news and photographs and plans and lots and lots of lovely new tunes.” And she had taken the ring out of Katinka’s hand and looked at it lovingly. “Do you like it? We found it in an old antique shop and it’s simply ages old. I always wear it when I play now, I’m going to turn it into a sort of mascot and have the signature tune to go with it and all that. Only I’ve had to leave it off for the last few days because it’s chipped and making a sore place on my finger. …”

  So that was where she had seen the ring before; that was how she knew that inside one of the wings was that little unevenness. Angel! Angel Soone, with her halo of fluffy gold hair, talking away so gaily and charmingly and sincerely, sending one away so blissfully unaware that one had been given not an iota of “hard” news. Angel, whose brilliant rendering of the showier musical classics brought down to earth by an occasional chirping little, improper little song, had brought her a fortune in concert and music-hall appearances; whose life had been spent in one long blare of publicity, whose tragic disfigurement would have provided such fare as half the reporters in England would have been despatched to secure. But Angel had quietly faded out. Nothing had been heard of her and it was assumed that she was still travelling incognito on a protracted honeymoon. The accident had evidently somehow been hushed up; and Carlyon had been wise indeed to bring his famous wife to this mountain fortress—might indeed be forgiven for supposing every unidentified visitor a news-hound on the scent.

  A finger-nail delicately drawing its message inside the palm of a hand. An A, and an N. And, yes, Katinka remembered now that at first she had recognized a G. ANG… Angel Soone, who had nodded violently when Carlyon addressed her outright as Angel, but one had supposed it to be merely an endearment; who had tried to force upon Katinka’s attention the jade sphinx ring, had tried, gruesomely struggling, to recall that long-ago interview, to tell her visitor that here, beneath this mask of gristle and skin-graft, lay the famous, the fabulous Angel Soone; rich wife of Carlyon, the Goose that had laid the Golden Eggs!

  Carlyon was looking at her across the table, looking intently at her as she came slowly out of her day-dream, and, lit with a new hope, a new fire, a new heaven of confidence in him, she looked him in the eyes. He said: “Yes. My wife was Angel Soone,” and turned on his heel and went out into the hall. They heard the wet swish of his mackintosh as he jerked it down from its hook and swung it about his shoulders; the faint evening light was blotted out for a moment from the window, as he strode past it through the teeming rain.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  BREAKFAST NEXT MORNING WAS positively gay. Mrs. Love was off to London by the eleven-something from Neath, and full of jolly badinage at the prospect of her reunion with Harry and the form it was likely to take, and her differences with Katinka seemed all forgotten. By common consent, last night’s revelation remained undiscussed. Inspector Chucky had exhorted them all to keep mum and not make a lot more trouble for Mr. Carlyon who, after all, had had a perfect right to keep his own counsel all this time. As for Amista, only one more word had been spoken. “A course, I knew it couldn’t be you really, dear,” said Mrs. Love in the sanctity of Miss Evans’s little spare bedroom, reluctantly shared with her by Katinka. “You couldn’t have put that first
letter in the hall, the one on the hall stand, you know, the day you came to Penderyn.”

  “Carlyon would say I could have slipped it on when I went over to the table.”

  “Oh, no, you couldn’t,” said Mrs. Love. “I was watching you, hanging over the banisters wondering who you could be. I saw you as plain as plain. I could see the letter with the little red seal like you said, and you bent over and looked at it, but you never put your hand out, that I do know, and’ll swear to it in any court of law.”

  Katinka wished that she might have sworn to it under the innumerable other situations that had meanwhile offered themselves. It would have saved a considerable amount of heart-ache and trouble. But she contented herself with extracting a promise from Mrs. Love that she would pass on this information to Inspector Chucky before she left South Wales, and they composed themselves to rest, Mrs. Love making a great parade of threatened insomnia, prior to snoring heavily through every remaining hour of the night.

  And now her bus was almost due. Her heavier luggage was to be brought over from Penderyn by Dai, and she set forth to meet him, encumbered only by a bulging over-night bag, a caved-in hatbox, assorted brown paper parcels and a large, cretonne knitting bag holding everything in the world except needles and wool. How she had negotiated them all across the river the night before, Katinka could not pause to discover; she was set only upon seeing that Mrs. Love confided to Mr. Chucky, before she left, the confirmatory story of the letter on the hall stand. Miss Evans had gone ahead to procure his attendance at the bus stop.