Cat and Mouse

by Christianna Brand

  He was waiting for them there, chatting idly with that same group of men who had lounged there against the wall, a thousand aeons ago, when first Katinka had come to Pentre Trist, the Village of Grief. Dai stood at the roadside with an assortment of suitcases and carrying a large, flat parcel under one arm. Mrs. Love deposited the rest of her impedimenta with him.

  “Well, don’t make me miss my bus,” he said. “I got to go down to Swansea with this old parcel, for ’im.” He jerked his head back towards Penderyn, presumably to indicate Mr. Carlyon, and at the same time flapped like a bird’s wing the elbow that pressed the flat parcel to his side.

  Mr. Chucky advanced upon them full of early morning good cheer, and Mrs. Love, badgered and prompted by Tinka, finally got out the story of the incident in the hall. Mr. Chucky gravely undertook to convey this information to Mr. Carlyon. A red bus chugged up the hill, gathered in Dai Trouble and his parcel like a vacuum cleaner, and chugged on, leaving Mrs. Love’s luggage dumped by the side of the road. A blue bus crossed with it on the brow of the hill and started the steep ascent. Mr. Chucky had an inspiration. “This old bus’ll get you in hours before your train, Mrs. Love. I’m going to Neath myself, this morning, in a police car. I’ll take you in with me.”

  Mrs. Love was enchanted to think that she would have a male escort to the station, and further enraptured to think that she would not have to struggle into the bus with all her luggage. It stopped, sucked in its passengers and rolled on down the hill. One traveller, however, had dismounted. Exquisitely elegant among the stout Welshwomen in their printed cotton overalls over outworn Sunday black, oddly artificial, superlatively sophisticate, Milgrim-Molyneux-Rue de la Paix came limping towards them down the shabby village street. It was the woman who, three days ago, had called to see Carlyon; who had crossed the Atlantic Ocean, sought out this remote Welsh village, toiled painfully across the river and up the rough mountain-path—and then had argued about a painting and some pottery and gone away again, not staying to see the girl that she had loved, who now lay stricken and monstrous a few yards away.

  Fair play, thought Katinka in the Welsh idiom, fair play, you couldn’t catch old Chucky on the hop! Quick as thought, he had stepped forward and intercepted the woman, presented his credentials, entered into one-sided conversation. Miss Evans debouched from a side street, leading her stubby pony by the bridle. She left it to its own uninspired devices and came forward to speak to Katinka. “It’s the lady I took across to Penderyn in my boat.”

  This seemed an excellent pretext for cutting in upon Mr. Chucky’s most unfair monopoly. Katinka swept Miss Evans forward, all nervous blushings and bobbings. The woman acknowledged the slight acquaintance with almost weepy gratitude. She had been hoping to find Miss Evans and persuade her to take her across once more to Penderyn. She dived into her slim handbag and produced an envelope.

  Mr. Chucky stood quietly to one side, watching with sardonic amusement the efforts of Miss Jones to ingratiate herself with the lady. The woman accepted the intrusive stranger without enquiry. She wished to be rowed across the river and she cared not how many outlandish Welshwomen chaffered among themselves about the job. It appeared, however, from the gesturings of this one, the little rather round one, that there would be some delay. The other one, the little thin one with the blue eyes, must apparently arrange for someone to continue with the stubby pony on his round. It would be necessary to wait a little while until this was arranged, and there was much pointing towards a little white house, above the level of the main road. More delay! More terrible, unendurably fatiguing effort to be somehow undertaken! But her fingers closed over the ivory handles of her sticks; almost perceptibly she thanked her gods that though her legs might be weak and helpless, she still had two strong arms to drag their faltering steps along.

  “Hoi! What about me?” cried Mrs. Love, left with her parcels at the side of the road.

  Mr. Chucky whistled up a henchman with instructions to pile Mrs. Love into a police car with her possessions and call for him in twenty minutes time at Miss Evans the Milk’s. He caught up with the party toiling up the little hill. “Do you suppose your new friend knows,” he said, conversationally, to Katinka, “that her niece is dead?”

  Tinka stopped, horrified. “My God! Do you think she doesn’t?”

  “She wasn’t at the inquest: she’d left the hotel she was staying at in Swansea. We thought she’d gone back to London, but we couldn’t locate her there.”

  “Good lord! I wonder… Well, you’ll have to break it to her before she goes up to the house.”

  “I thought as you were so palsy-walsy,” said Chucky, “you might undertake the job yourself.”

  “What me? Not likely! Do your own dirty work. And look here, by the way—I wanted to talk to you.”

  “That makes a change,” said Mr. Chucky, grinning.

  “This new development about Angela being Angel Soone…”

  “New to you, perhaps,” said Chucky complacently. “Not to me.”

  “You knew all along?”

  “I’ve known for a good long time.”

  “I don’t believe a word of it: you haven’t!”

  “Didn’t I hum her signature tune to help you to recognize the ring? You were always saying that you’d seen it somewhere before. You’d been a reporter—it wasn’t so difficult to cheek with Consolidated any people you might have interviewed who’d worn a sphinx ring as a publicity stunt. And then it all fitted in so neatly: the description ‘artist’ on the marriage certificate, all those masses and masses of clothes in the attic. Painters don’t call themselves artists, they call themselves painters, and it would be her profession for her to put it on her passport and all that, but it’s not a great many women painters that make a whole-time profession of it. …”

  “All right, all right,” said Tinka. “Don’t labour it. I’m convinced. You knew. But what I wonder is—did you see the significance of what you knew?”

  “Well, yes,” said Chucky, considering. “I daresay I’d see it as clearly as most.”

  “That’s why I want to go to Penderyn just once again,” said Tinka. “I’ve said I’ll take the deaf woman up there, and I can return the ring to him—he forgot to take it last night.”

  “I thought you was going back home today?” said Chucky. “Miss Evans can take the lady to the house all right, and I’ll take charge of the ring and give it back to him.” He gave her his teasing glance.

  “Oh, don’t be so damn silly—you know I want an excuse. The truth is I’d like to be the one to tell him, now that he’s cleared of suspicion. …”

  Ahead of them, Miss Evans pushed open the little front door and ushered the lame woman in. Inspector Chucky said: “Suspicion of what?”

  “Suspicion of what? Suspicion of murder, you fool!”

  “’Ere, ’ere, ’ere,” said Inspector Chucky. “More respect for the police force, hif you please!” And he looked at her kindly and rather sadly and said: “Love is dimming your wits, my dear Miss Jones. If ever a motive for murder had been established—here it is. Which was not so clear before.”

  “Oh, crikey!” said Katinka, impatiently. She brushed aside his kindly glance and marched forward into the tiny hall and through to the sitting-room where already the visitor was installed in the best fireside chair, while Miss Evans hung out of the window and called shrilly to the woman next door for permission to ask her small girl to lead the pony on its familiar round. Over her shoulder, Katinka said to Chucky as she marched: “Your only idea is that Mr. Carlyon should have slain his wife for sordid gain. Why should he have tried to do so when she was capable of earning simply thousands of pounds a year?”

  The deaf woman looked up at them blankly as they came in and resumed her patient waiting. Mr. Chucky said: “But was she capable of earning thousands of pounds a year?”

  “Capable? Of course she was capable. What do you mean?”

  “Only that her face was—well, no longer beautiful. And her hands not in
the best of trim for piano playing.”

  Katinka beat with her fists on the green table-cloth. “I’m talking about the first accident, of course. And what I say is—it was an accident.”

  “And what I say is,” said Chucky, “that it may have been. But—that having happened—there was plenty of motive for the second one to be murder.”

  The deaf woman sat tapping softly on her elegant handbag with her elegantly gloved hand. Katinka stammered out at last that there had been the assignation note. Once more—who and what and where was Amista? If Mr. Chucky really knew…

  Mr. Chucky shrugged away Amista. “Whoever, whatever, wherever she is, anybody could have written that note, anybody could have scribbled those few words, left-handed, and signed them ‘Amista.’ And since it was in answer to the note that Angela Carlyon had gone to a prearranged death, by tripping over the rabbit snare, it was reasonable to suppose that the person who had written that note had been her murderer.”

  “But for Pete’s sake, now you’re saying all over again that Mr. Carlyon murdered his wife.”

  “All I’m saying is that he still had a motive for doing so; and that he may easily have written the note.”

  There was a clatter of school boots as the small girl from next door ran down the garden path to take over the milk float. “I don’t say,” went on Inspector Chucky mildly, “that he did. I only say that if the girl was murdered, she was murdered with the help of the note drawing her to the rocks at Tarren Goch. And what is the evidence? She was left alone in the hall with Mr. Carlyon, after you had gone. There was a scene, the servants were sent back to the kitchen, told that he could ‘manage.’ Well, he didn’t manage very well; for next thing, she’s haring across the mountains, and Mr. Carlyon who could otherwise easily have caught up with her, whatever start she had of him, develops an unfortunate limp at the critical moment. She dives into the corridor of rocks as instructed, or more or less instructed, by the note. And she comes out, inevitably, at the top opening where a rabbit snare is stretched, or let’s say has quite possibly been stretched, so that anyone running quickly out of the cave will trip over it. Mr. Carlyon subsequently uproots the snare, or at any rate is seen to get rid of it by picking it up and throwing it over the cliff. She’s found at the bottom with the note clutched in her hand. If the note was innocent why doesn’t the writer come forward and say so?”

  “If you know who the real Amista is,” said Katinka, “as you say you do, why don’t you ask her?”

  “The ‘real Amista’ may not have written the note.”

  “Even so, why should you think that Mr. Carlyon did?”

  “I think it because of the rest of the facts,” he said.

  She sat with her head in her hands, her elbows propped on the green table-cloth on the little round central table. Mr. Chucky left her to her battered thoughts and moved over to sit beside the deaf woman. When Katinka roused herself to listen, she saw that he was gently paving the way to revelation. He was saying, “You know about the accident?” His pen scratched as he transferred the question to paper.

  “Yes, yes, I know that of course,” said the woman.

  “She means the first accident,” said Tinka, butting in. “Obviously she knows about that.”

  Mr. Chucky wrote again. He spoke the words slowly as he wrote them down. “You do realize, madam, that your niece is dead?”

  “Yes,” said the woman resentfully. “I know that. I know she’s dead.” She produced the envelope from her handbag. “And now that she’s dead, I want my property back. He’s got a painting there that’s worth a lot of money: thousands of pounds; and other things, not only here but in London—he says they’re in store, but how am I to know that? There’s a list of them. You can see for yourself it says here positively, ‘on loan.’ It’s the list I sent her from America. ‘Of course you can have them, darling,’ you can see it written here, ‘on loan till we come back and settle in England again.’ And then there’s the list: the Sisley painting, the Chippendale mirror, but that’s not down here, or the little Renoir or all this furniture. The Dresden figures are here, though, and some of the Persian rugs.” She insisted: “On loan. It says so here, he can’t get round that. But if he’s sold them…”

  “Angel Soone couldn’t earn more money,” said Chucky to Katinka over the woman’s unsuspecting head. “But she seems to have left quite a little bit of property that could be disposed of—legitimately or otherwise. Murder’s been done for very much less than all this stuff would come to.”

  “But he’s rich in his own right. You heard him say so, you heard him remind her that he proved to the solicitors when he married the niece that he was at least as well off as she was. Why should you think that he murdered her? Why should you think that she was murdered at all?”

  “Because of the assignation note,” said Chucky patiently.

  The deaf woman had struggled to her feet. “When can we go? I want to get up to that house.” She limped forward, the two sticks gathered in one hand and, clinging to the table, thumped with them on the floor. “I can’t wait all day. I shall have to arrange with someone else.” A faint breath of perfume stirred with her stirrings. What were these barbarians that she should be kept waiting while they settled their trivial affairs? She supposed it was a matter of money as usual. She opened her handbag.

  Katinka half amused, Miss Evans outraged, they protested. But the woman could not hear the sincerity of their refusals, she thought that these tiresome yokels were merely genteel. She followed them insistently as they backed away from her, thrusting upon each a ten-shilling note, and at last, seeing Katinka’s handbag on the table, snatched it up and opened it and thrust the two notes inside.

  The photograph of the wedding group, Carlyon’s picture that all this time had stayed so secretly there, tucked into its side-pocket, slid out a little and was exposed to full view. And something that had niggled all night at Katinka’s consciousness, suddenly broke into splinters of blinding light. The woman said, bending over the photograph: “But that’s not my niece!” and Katinka burst out simultaneously: “That’s not Angel Soone!”

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  THERE WAS A DISCREET hoot outside the front door followed by a violent honking. In a neat black police car, an embarrassed constable cringed over the driving wheel while Mrs. Love leaned across from the back seat and pressed heavily upon the horn with a cotton-gloved hand. “I must go,” said Inspector Chucky. He whipped up the photograph, bowed to the three ladies with infuriatingly olde-worlde grace, and hurried out to the waiting car. Mrs. Love’s voice floated back to them urgently through the muffling curtains. What her Harry would do to Mr. Chucky if she missed that train! They drove off in style, the Inspector and the constable erect and prim in front, Mrs. Love bumping blowsily among her heterogeneous packages in the rear. A plump hand in its openwork cotton glove waved vaguely back in the direction of the house.

  The deaf woman would answer no questions. Faced with bewildered and bewildering enquiries, she reiterated only that she wanted to go to “that house,” and this time without recourse to her purse. Miss Evans, blue eyes blazing at the memory of the recent insult to her friendly disinterestedness, marched out into the hall for her mackintosh and hood. Tinka had never seen her so decisive before. The hood was too awful. She looked like a middle-aged pixie, like a dwarf in coloured plaster from a suburban garden; and yet rather pretty, thought Katinka, pitifully smiling, with her pointed brown face and her blue eyes on fire, disdainfully escorting the ill-mannered stranger down the hill. The day was clearing, the fine drizzle of rain had ceased, and there was even a glimpse of blue in the tear-drenched sky. They walked down in silence to the river’s edge.

  The lame woman manoeuvred herself painfully aboard. Her hands were firm and strong on the ivory crooks; beneath the thin sleeves moved muscles developed and hardened by the long necessity of extra strain. She perched herself gingerly on the folded newspaper laid reverently by Miss Evans across the wet wooden seat. The riv
er had risen again after the night of rain. They bumped against the muddy bank and she painfully scrambled ashore and started the slithery climb up the mountain-path.

  Dai Trouble had gone to Swansea; Mrs. Love driven off with Mr. Chucky to the station in Neath, twelve miles the other way. Up at Penderyn, Carlyon was nowhere to be seen. Tinka, stunned and bemused, sat down on the sodden wooden bench outside the window of the sitting-room and tried to decide why she was here and whether she should try to see Carlyon or not, and what on earth she should say to him if he deigned to speak to her. She heard Miss Evans clank tinnily round to the back door; the front door bell pealed as the deaf woman stood with her finger pressed to it. No answer. The shrill ringing drove Tinka frantic. She jumped to her feet again and started round the house to the front. The movement brought her eyes on a level with the window of the sitting-room; she moved, as three days ago Mr. Chucky had moved close, and peered inside. Immobile, uncaring, impervious to the sound of the shrilling bell, Carlyon sat in the leather armchair, the silver cat stretched out at his feet before the grate where the dead fire lay untended, his silvery head in his hands. At that moment the door of the sitting-room was pushed violently open and the woman in black stood looking in on him.

  Carlyon raised his head at last. He said without surprise or interest: “What do you want?”

  After the long jolting ride up the valley, the long wait at Miss Evans’s house, the long toil across the river and up the mountain-path, the woman was drained of all strength, her nerves were raw. She thrust forward the envelope and in her black-gloved hand it looked more blankly white than her white face with the faded eyes. Hysteria seized her. She cried out, high and jerkily: “There’s the letter! There’s proof! On loan, it says, on loan! The things are mine. I’ll see about the others, my lawyers will see about them. But the picture’s mine and I’m going to take it now!” She dragged her eyes from his face and lifted them to the place on the wall where the Sisley snow scene had hung. Except for the hideous pattern of the wallpaper, there was nothing there but a blank. She gave way completely. “You’ve hidden it! You’ve sold it! You’re not going to give it back…!” Miss Evans’s pointed face appeared in the doorway, wide-eyed with shocked alarm.