Cat and Mouse

by Christianna Brand

  Carlyon fended off the woman’s strong, flailing arms. Tinka waited to witness no more, but flew round through the open back door, through the kitchen, across the hall to the sitting-room. As she went, something caught her eye that sent no message to the mind absorbed in other things; but there remained on her retina a memory of something gleaming gold where only silver should have been. In the sitting-room, Carlyon had succeeded in taming the bitter white hands, but the woman, head held back, was still screaming at him that he had deceived and defrauded her. He cast at Katinka one single glance of astonishment at her presence, and thankfulness that she should be there at his aid. “Find a piece of paper! Write it down for her—I’ve sent the picture to Swansea, to her hotel.” Tinka remembered Dai Trouble and the big, flat parcel. She wrote in huge printed letters: He’s sent it back to you! and moved it before the woman’s face until at last the wandering eyes came to rest on it. “Can’t she wait till my wife’s in her grave?” said Carlyon, bitterly.

  The woman had quietened down and he released her wrists, and as he did so, imperceptibly pushed her away from him, cast her distastefully from him. She turned to Katinka. “What does he say?”

  “Never mind, never mind,” said Carlyon. “What does it matter? But tell her I sent in the picture this morning by Dai; tell her she can apply to my solicitors for the rest.” He turned away and stood looking out of the window. “Now that she’s dead—let ’em all take their junk—what do I care? Tell this creature that I’ve instructed the lawyers to let her have the whole lot back, whether she’s got any right to it or not.” Katinka, interpreting freely, obediently wrote. He swung round from the window. “And now tell her to get out and never let me see that death-mask of hers again.”

  Now that her mission was accomplished, the woman no longer cared about it. In themselves the beautiful things had had no charm for her: their value was a drop in the ocean of her wealth, she had desired only to save them from avaricious Carlyon, and finding him not covetous after all, her triumph was dust and ashes in her mouth. She looked dully round the room and her glance fell upon the Dresden figure. “Tell her I’ll arrange to have it sent,” said Carlyon, impatiently. “Let her give me half a chance! It’s too precious to be jolted around in the valley buses.” But his rage and resentment got the better of him, he strode forward suddenly and picking up the figure from the mantelpiece, thrust it into her arms. She pushed it aside and, drained of all purpose, crept out slowly from the room. They heard the scratch and tap of her sticks as she limped across the linoleumed hall and out onto the gravelled space to the downward path. Miss Evans cast one scared glance round the sitting-room and went out after her, leaving Katinka alone with Carlyon.

  He stood with his back to her, hands in pockets, looking out of the window across the valley to the opposite mountain. He said at last: “Well, thank you, Miss Jones, for your timely intervention. And now—if you wouldn’t mind, I’d like to be left alone.”

  She hesitated in the doorway, irresolute, desperately searching her mind for words to speak. Exertion had brought the wild-rose flush to her cheeks, she looked up at him appealingly with bright eyes. Carlyon, however, thrust his hands deep down into his pockets and merely said: “Goodbye, Miss Jones.”

  Nothing more to be said. Mr. Chucky would tell him of Mrs. Love’s declaration as to the letter on the hall table: he would at last come to believe that she had not made up the whole story of Amista for mercenary ends of her own. But what good would that do her, if she were never to see him again? She decided to make one more venture. “Mr. Carlyon, could I speak just one word to you?”

  “I asked you not to come back,” said Carlyon.

  “Yes, I know, but…”

  “Forgive me, I don’t want to be rude. But if you wouldn’t mind…”

  Sick with despair, she turned away from him and blundered out into the hall.

  But he swung round suddenly from the window. “By the way, Miss Jones, before you go—haven’t you got some property of mine?”

  The ring! She could kill herself at the thought that she had forgotten to give him back the ring. Now he would believe… She went back into the room and scrabbled in her handbag. “Actually, this was what I came back about. With that woman being here, I’d forgotten.” She held it out to him. “I swear I didn’t know I had it. She must have slipped it into my bag that day, in the hall. …”

  He took it without a word and dropped it carelessly into his pocket; and, since everything seemed hopeless, since she had nothing at all to lose, she decided to clear up for herself one mystery at least. With her clear eyes looking into his, she said: “You know that I recognized the ring?”

  “Of course,” he said, indifferently. “But long before that, you knew who she was, didn’t you?”

  “You thought I’d come after her story because I knew all along that she was Angel Soone?”

  He shrugged. “What else?”

  “But I swear to you, I swear to you that I didn’t know. I half recognized the ring, it’s true, but I couldn’t think where I’d seen it. It wasn’t till I saw the rough place inside that it dawned on me. It’s been smoothed over now, but she showed it to me that day in her dressing-room; she told me about it and how it had rubbed a sore place on her finger and everything, and when I saw it again I knew—but not till then.”

  “She recognized you, of course,” he said. “She wanted to let you know that time when you visited her, who she was. You—of all people!”

  “Of all people because I’m a journalist?”

  He bowed ironically. “Because you’re a journalist.” He turned back to the window. “Well, what does it all matter now? She’s dead, she’s out of it all, she can’t suffer any more. And as for me, I can’t suffer any more either, because I’ve passed the zenith, I just haven’t the capacity, I’m like a vase overfilled with water, I can’t hold any more. So what does it matter if you tell the world—oh, yes, Miss Jones, my wife was Angel Soone.”

  Katinka said: “Then who was the other one—the one in the photograph?”

  He did not seem perturbed. He said: “Ah, yes, we come to that—the photograph.”

  “I took it from the attic that night. I—just wanted it. It was because of the rainbow,” said Katinka, her eyes filling with foolish tears, “but that’s just something you wouldn’t understand—not any more. The point is: this woman in your wedding photograph. That isn’t Angel Soone?”

  Robbed of its snow scene, and with the lovely Dresden figure lying carelessly on the centre table, leaving the mantelpiece bare, the room was suddenly ugly and ordinary. Only the Siamese cat was a thing of beauty, sitting up with thin dark ears pricked forward, listening to the sighing in the chimney of the mountain breeze. For a long, long time the sigh of the wind was the only sound in the room. Then Carlyon said: “I see. So you know.”

  “I don’t know,” said Katinka. “But I’m beginning to guess.” She began to talk, gathering courage and speed as she spoke. “All those clothes in the attic—they were too much out of date to have belonged to the trousseau of a rich girl who’d been married only a year ago. And the shoes were too big for me, so they must have been too big for Angela, if only I’d thought of it. And then, that woman coming to the house, asking for possessions, not staying to see her niece—coming back just a few days after her death to badger you about them again. … We said to her, did she know that her niece was dead? And she said that of course she knew, but she didn’t seem upset; I mean she seemed used to the idea. And so she was. Because her niece died a long time ago, Mr. Carlyon, didn’t she—and is buried in a place called Castletownbere in Ireland, where the aunt can go and see her grave for herself if she cares to, and the records of her death in the Parish Church.” She looked him steadily in the eye. “The truth is—you’ve been married twice.”

  “Yes,” said Carlyon. “To two rich women. And they both met their deaths in accidents.”

  Silence again in the little room. Carlyon said: “My first wife was very y
oung, she was that woman’s niece. She was an orphan and the aunt had brought her up. She had an income of her own from her father’s estate. I wasn’t hard up, but I was young too; I had a way to make in the world and even some ambition—then. Her income was certainly an advantage to me. I don’t deny it.” He shrugged. “You can see, can’t you, how people would talk—long before she got herself drowned in a boating accident, off the Irish coast. The fact that her income died with her, made no difference to their lying tongues. And then, two years later, I married Angel Soone.” He burst out in a sort of angry despair: “I was thirty. Was I to play the sorrowing widower all my days?” But he calmed down again almost immediately. “Once again, however, you see how people would talk! I kept my wedding as secret as I could and we crept off to the Continent for our honeymoon. It was convenient then, she’d cut her finger on this wretched ring, as you know, and the thing had gone septic and she couldn’t play. Actually it was that that caused the accident. I’d forgotten about it. She had her hands tucked into a little muff that she often wore, a little sable muff; they were tucked out of sight and I think that both of us forgot. I wanted to light a cigarette so I said, ‘Take the wheel for a second.’ We’d done it so often before, I was used to, I relied on, an instant response. I took my hands off the wheel and she put out her right hand to steady it. But we’d both forgotten how weak and useless it was, and all bandaged up. Before I’d realized what had happened, the car had mounted the little bank at the edge of the road. It tipped to the near side, the door flew open, I suppose, and I was flung out on the grass. But she…” His knuckles glowed ivory-white against the brown skin of his tight-clenched hand. He said once again: “You can imagine how people would talk!”

  “As if you would have wanted to kill the goose that… Well, I mean, that’s what Dai said, and of course how true it was. …”

  But he had not even heard her. “And now the precipice. Not to mention the rabbit snare. The police are toying with the charming idea that I set the snare and then forged the assignation note to lure her there—and when the snare had done its work, chucked it down after her.”

  “You don’t mean to say that they’ve actually accused you?”

  “Not outright,” he said. “But Detective Inspector Chucky is a very astute young man.”

  “Even Chucky admits that in moments of stress people do unaccountable things, like throwing down the snare when it had nothing at all to do with what had happened.”

  “But what was it doing set there in the first place?”

  “It may not have been set there, Mr. Carlyon. It may have just been left there—some careless kids, perhaps, playing up there round the caves. She may not have actually tripped over it.”

  “Of course she didn’t trip over it,” said Carlyon. He looked at her, heavy with a sort of resigned despair. “Can’t you see that I’ve told you all this to explain to you why I can’t explain to the police, that it was deliberate suicide? To admit that would be to rake up all the old scandal about the—the other one. And if it looks bad for me now, how would it look then?” He rubbed his forehead wearily against his hand. “I just can’t face any more of it. Let them suspect me of murder. They can’t prove anything so what do I care?”

  Suicide. No truth at all in the notion of the trap set at the edge of the precipice, no truth in the murderous intent of the “assignation note.” Angela Carlyon had committed suicide. “But why?” whispered Katinka. “Why? I mean, why just then? Why that day?”

  He looked at her savagely. “You forget, my dear Miss Jones—or perhaps you don’t realize yet—what, once again through your instrumentality, my wife had just seen!

  “Had just seen…?”

  “What she had seen when your handbag fell open, my dear.”

  A photograph of Carlyon, her husband, her love; standings radiant and happy and proud, with another woman in bridal dress by his side.

  “You remember she was—just a trifle upset,” said Carlyon. “No doubt you flattered yourself it was on your account. But no. We had quite a scene when you were gone. You see, she didn’t know that I’d been married before. She was—well, she was young and sentimental and—so happy; I couldn’t bring myself to tell her before we were married, and I kept on putting it off and putting it off. And then, after the accident when it was all I could do to convince her that I still—still loved her, well, that wasn’t quite the time either. So when, through you, she found out for herself, she certainly was just a little distressed. Life was not exactly heaven for her and this was just about the last straw, I suppose. I left her in her room and went to get her a sedative, and she must have bolted out immediately and got down the stairs and the next thing I knew, she was scrambling far away up the mountainside. The rest you know.”

  Across the valley, iridescently glowing against the grey-green of Bryntarian, a rainbow was being born. Carlyon, following the sudden light in her eyes, glanced over his shoulder, hesitated, then faced back into the room. “So now Miss Jones, you see why, for the very last time, I say—goodbye.”

  She went to the door; but there she paused. “Let me just say this, and then I won’t speak one more word. I know that I shall never see you again, I know you don’t care, I know you won’t want to see me. But I can’t bear that you shall think only horrible things about me. It’s true, I suppose, it was through me in the first place that she saw the photograph; it was through me in the first place that she saw herself in the mirror and was made so—so extra unhappy that the sight of the photograph would be the last straw. I admit all that. It was through me, but it was not exactly my fault. I never intended her the slightest harm, I never would have done her the slightest harm. And as to Amista, Mrs. Love says, and Chucky will confirm that Mrs. Love says…” She gabbled on and on. Mrs. Love’s testimony as to the impossibility of her having introduced the first Amista-letter to the house… “I only wanted to tell you, Mr. Carlyon, and, now that you’re freed of all these ghastly doubts and mysteries in my mind, to ask you at least to free me of suspicion in yours.”

  Carlyon waited till she had finished, until she had trailed off miserably in the face of his stony silence. “Is that all?”

  “I don’t see what more I can say to you. I don’t see what more I can do.”

  “All you can do is to leave my personal affairs alone for the future, spread this story of my poor wife’s identity no further than you already have…”

  “I haven’t spread it at all. We haven’t said a word about it to anyone. Mrs. Love’s gone, but Miss Evans and I haven’t said one word about it to anyone. Mr. Chucky asked us not to and we won’t.”

  “Very well,” he said coldly. “Thank you.”

  “Carlyon, don’t you believe… I mean, Mrs. Love says…”

  “Mrs. Love!” he said. “A servant I’ve just dismissed: and, incidentally, once again all because of you. Some cock-and-bull story you’ve hatched up between you.”

  Katinka put her hands to her face and stood for a moment, utterly defeated. “You hate me, don’t you?”

  He looked at her wearily. “Do I? I suppose I do. Anyway, it doesn’t matter because I hope with all my heart that when I’ve finally persuaded you to go away and leave me in peace, I shall never have to set eyes on you again. You’ve messed up my whole life, you’ve virtually killed my wife, you’ve hung me about with suspicion that I suppose will dog me all my days. And now on top of it all you want to thrust this myth about Amista!”

  “She isn’t a myth,” she said drearily. “She’s true.”

  “The day you bring me incontestable proof of that,” said Carlyon, “I will believe you. Till then…” He did not raise his voice, but the look in his blue eyes was as cold to her as death. “Till then, once and for all and for ever and ever, please leave my house and for God’s sake don’t come back.”

  She turned and stumbled without another moment’s delay, out of the room and into the little hall.

  At the front door she paused and looked back through a starry
mist of tears, at the scene of so much bitter happiness, so much unalloyed pain. The hall, with the gay shawl no longer draped about the hideous hatstand, the narrow stair with the landing above, over which no heads bobbed in eager interest at the unexpected visitor; the door of the sitting-room, where her love was bowed in a desperate friendlessness which she, with all her longing to be of service, could do nothing to assuage; the kitchen beyond, through whose open door she could see the two tinny milk cans placed neatly in the centre of the scrubbed white wooden table. Two tinny milk cans, shining silver in a shaft of pale sunshine, flowing through the open back door; and against the silver…

  She ran back through the hall and into the kitchen and caught up the can. Against the silvery surface was something gold, a thin gold chain, caught in the curved handle of the can, snapped off and hanging in two broken ends.

  And attached to the thin gold chain—a seal.

  The seal of Amista.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  A LITTLE OLD SILVER gilt seal, the handle ornately wrought, the name Amista carved across the face of its inset amethyst; and around the base of the seal, in tiny letters, was the name Amista Lark and a date. Amista Lark—whose miniature hung in the parlour up at the little white house above the village, to which, long ago, Miss Evans’s English mother had come as a bride. “Oh, Mr. Carlyon!”

  He came out into the hall. She held the seal out to him, dumbly, and he moved to the front door and held it to the light, looking down at it. “I saw it by the milk cans, Mr. Carlyon. It must have got caught in the handle and the chain snapped and she didn’t notice it. If you doubt me look, here’s the name written round the edge, Amista Lark, Miss Evans’s grandmother. You can see the date and everything!”