Come Home and Be Killed

by Jennie Melville

  ‘What do you mean?’ asked Kathy, quickly seizing his arm. ‘You must tell me.’ Then, as he hesitated, ‘I can take it.’

  ‘Yes, I know you can take it, Kathy … Well, it’s like this … they’ve found what they think is Janet’s case, her travelling case.’

  ‘Where?’

  Robert looked white. ‘In the river at the bottom of Deerham Hills.’

  ‘Yes, and I’ll tell you something else they think, Kathy. They think it was there yesterday. Work that one out.’

  ‘But Janet …’ Kathy hesitated. ‘I’m pretty sure she had her case with her, almost sure, anyway.’

  Robert was getting into his tweed coat and putting on his hat. ‘It may not be her case. I’ll be back, Kathy.’

  She heard his car drive away.

  And Kathy was once again alone in the house.

  She set herself to work by clearing up the mess Robert had left in the kitchen. He had only made a cup of coffee and spread some butter on bread but there were crumbs all over the table and on the floor, three knives were resting in the sink together with two saucepans (one burnt) and an empty milk jug.

  She put on her rubber gloves and her frilly apron and soon had everything neat again. It was Janet’s apron really, a fact she had momentarily forgotten and which indeed she did not remember until she put her hand into the pocket to feel for a handkerchief and found Janet’s there. It was a little square of blue cotton with Janet embroidered on it and carrying a sweet light scent … Janet, anyway, had good taste in scent.

  For a moment a picture of her little sister was vividly before her.

  Five feet two, curly hair and bright blue eyes with a smile. You had to admit that Janet’s face was always smiling … even when she was as mad as hell it looked smiling.

  What had Janet been doing while Mumsy carried on with Mr Charles Fox? No good pretending that Mumsy would have, or could have, kept it all from Janet. It was one of their teases: how Mumsy had more boy friends than Janet. Long, quiet, faintly giggly discussions were always going on in their bedroom, in the bathroom while Mumsy set Janet’s hair, and over their frequent cups of tea and coffee. No, Janet knew what there was to know about Charlie Fox. She might not know that Charlie Fox had stood a good chance of going to prison but she certainly knew that he stood a good chance of going to bed with Mumsy. At her age, too, thought Kathy.

  The other sure thing was that Janet had a little secret or two of her own to cover up. Must have. Consider her life: she had a job which allowed her immense scope for meeting people on the quiet. Janet was a freelance secretary and since she was highly skilled and a good linguist, she had her choice of good and interesting jobs. She never stayed in one for more than a month or two. Didn’t want to: she admitted that she liked to be on the move. Mostly she took jobs based on home but on quite a few occasions she had taken jobs which meant travelling. Once she went to New York, once even to the West Indies. And in between jobs she stayed at home and giggled with Mumsy. When she was tired she took a holiday, when she needed the money she worked. No doubt it was a practical way of life but to Kathy’s eyes it was irregular. And above all how was it going to help her adapt to marriage … especially marriage to Robert?

  Kathy allowed herself to think for a moment lovingly about Robert. He was kind, he was a good business man, he behaved with dignity and good sense and could be trusted, but above all he was the man who would expect his wife to stay home married to him. Kathy agreed with this all the way.

  She put her hand again into the pocket of Janet’s gay little apron and felt a little piece of paper. It felt like sweet paper, the sort that comes wrapped round a toffee. But it wasn’t as Kathy saw when she had it in her hand. It was one of Janet‘ s little notes. Janet was always scribbling messages to herself on scraps of paper; she claimed she had a terrible memory. This looked as if it had been folded on a penny. ‘Lunch,’ it said, ‘Lunch with C. F.’

  So Janet had known, had even met, Charlie Fox. Quiet, discreet little Janet!

  Across the garden she heard the familiar sound of Emily’s kitchen door banging followed by the sound of footsteps and she knew Emily had started on her way across.

  ‘Now what?’ thought Kathy cautiously, and she watched Emily progress down her own garden, up to Kathy’s to the back door. She seemed to be carrying something which looked like a dead baby, but this was only Emily’s professional expertise, and it was a parcel of woollen goods for Kathy: they had a standing arrangement that Emily should collect the post when they were all out. The implications of that one didn’t immediately strike Kathy, but of course if the parcel had come by the morning post it indicated clearly how long her house had been empty.

  ‘Here,’ said Emily, thrusting over the bundle, ‘this came. Two and six excess postage.’

  ‘Thanks.’ Kathy rummaged in her purse … the sender, Mrs Checkworth, never did weigh her parcels, she seemed to rely on intuition.

  ‘Oh hell,’ said Emily. ‘Why pretend? I came over here, sneaked really, because I’m worried about you.’ She pulled a cigarette from her pocket and lit it. ‘I don’t like it you over here on your own. Unreasonable maybe, but that’s how I feel.’

  ‘I’m not alone, I’ve had Robert here.’

  ‘Oh Robert.’ Emily’s expression changed infinitesimally. ‘Tell me, is it true he’s leaving Pie Assurance?’

  Kathy shook her head. ‘I don’t talk business with Robert.’

  ‘I should have thought it was the only thing you could talk with Robert.’ She looked round. ‘Where is he?’

  ‘Out for a moment,’ said Kathy, not wanting to say more, and then because you were forced into a reluctant honesty before Emily (it was, one had to admit, her nicest and yet most maddening attribute, it must have made her a wonderful nurse) ‘Oh, he’s gone down to the police station about Janet and Mumsy … they think they may have found something … Janet’s bag.’

  Emily gripped her hand hard. She didn’t say anything. ‘Where’d they find it?’ she said casually after a pause.

  ‘In the river at the bottom of Deerham Hills.’

  ‘Funny place,’ said Emily. ‘Well, isn’t it Kathy? It isn’t a place you’d think to hide anything and yet hardly a place a case would fall in by accident.’

  The river which curved round the bottom of Deerham Hills and which gave the place its character and was dearly prized by the inhabitants, was a small stream and shallow; later in its career when fed by other waters, it broadened and became important, but at Deerham Hills it was very insignificant. As Kathy said, you’d hardly reckon to hide anything in it. At the same time it was protected by a belt of trees and a little embankment so that you’d hardly fall in by mistake.

  ‘Someone in the dark,’ began Kathy, hardly knowing what she said.

  ‘It’s you that’s in the dark,’ said Emily, putting out her cigarette. ‘Kathy for goodness sake open your eyes and watch out for yourself …’ Then she noted Kathy’s hand. ‘What’s that?’ she asked sharply. ‘Here, let me see.’ She was expertly unrolling the bandage and flexing the finger. Kathy winced. ‘Not broken, just badly bruised.

  How’d it happen?’ Her eyes traced the trail of bruises up Kathy’s arm.

  ‘Something fell on me,’ said Kathy, rolling down her sleeve.

  ‘It fell hard.’

  ‘I don’t know what you think is going on,’ said Kathy, answering what Emily had not said rather than what she had, ‘but I wish you’d lay off hinting.’

  ‘I have this horrible feeling,’ said Emily staring at Kathy, ‘that there’s a threat of violence to you. Don’t laugh at me, get cross if you like, but don’t laugh. I had this feeling once before: when a patient went mad.’

  ‘I wish you’d go away, Emily,’ said Kathy, badgered beyond endurance.

  But like all Cassandras nothing stopped Emily when her conscience was pushing her on and she marched off still muttering gloom. A high cross wail from an open window in her own house suggested she had troubles at home to kee
p her quiet.

  But her work had been done. Angrily Kathy went back to the sitting-room and waited for Robert to reappear. Whatever the news, she wanted to get it over with. She was committed now.

  But the minutes ticked by and to Kathy it began to seem that Robert was a long while gone. Even the telephone was dead and quiet.

  She found it uncomfortable in the chair and started to move restlessly round the room. To cheer and calm her thoughts she started to do an inventory of the things of the house, proportioning out what was hers, what was Mumsy’s and what was Janet’s. There was nothing mercenary in this activity, simply that she was beginning to feel quite sure that Mumsy and Janet had recently been in some need of money and if things had to be sold off to pay their debts then she wanted it to be their things that were sold. Janet and Mumsy had never shown her more than a facade and now she was learning what was hidden behind it. Mr Charlie Fox was one of the things hidden, although not so well hidden, behind the screen.

  She went over to her own neat desk with clean envelopes and writing paper set ready, a file of accounts paid and bills to be paid, waiting. It was getting near the end of the quarter and the post had recently brought a reminder that her insurance premium would soon fall due, a reminder that Kathy would not fail to heed. A reminder she had never failed to heed ever since her father died and she had taken over the sole responsibility for running herself. There was a photograph of her father on the desk. He had been a good deal older than her mother even on his wedding day, and an old man when he died, but a cheerful, jovial, hard-headed old man, with Mumsy his one weakness. And if anyone was cut out to be an old man’s darling, Mumsy, it had to be admitted, was. But of course all the property had come to Kathy when he died, that was fair. She was a daughter, and Kathy and her father tacitly agreed that blood was all. But at the same time, wives, even widows, had their rights, and Kathy’s father had recognised this right as Mumsy couldn’t fail to admit. He had left her what cash he had saved, a few hundreds, and asked Kathy to be good to her. And Kathy as far as she could had been good to Mumsy.

  The statement from the insurance company, Robert’s company, usually so pleasant in its reminder that she was the man of the house now, gave her a little jar. It was primarily an endowment policy, to mature in twenty-five years as a little bit of tax-free saving. In addition, it carried the property of being a life insurance; naturally this was not an aspect that had worried the childless, unmarried, kinless Kathy, but she had had to devise this inheritance somewhere and she had devised it and all else she owned to Mumsy and Janet. Well, to Mumsy really, but there was no doubt that what was Mumsy’s was Janet’s. This had been in the halcyon honeymoon days, just after the old man died, when Kathy had still felt like the friendly gesture of calling them kin.

  Kathy was worth nothing to Mumsy and Janet alive, but dead she was worth two thousand pounds. Seddon had killed for three hundred, Palmer and Haigh for a quick petty return.

  What did Robert know of the secret life of Mumsy and Janet? Kathy was quite sure he knew precious little of Janet’s but she was sharp enough to see that Janet might have a private life that even Mumsy didn’t know about. Robert seemed so blind and trusting where Janet was concerned. He had the reputation in the district of being a first-class business man; thrusting, go ahead, up to anything. Among the younger men his was a name to respect. At the parties, dances and gatherings of Deerham Hills people were glad to speak to Robert and to show that they knew him. He had a tiny flat, maisonette rather, in the big block of new flats built with the best view on the Hill, and although Kathy didn’t regard it as eligible as her own house and would never consider living there it was a good address for a bachelor. Robert was a good, sound, sensible business proposition: if he’d been a credit risk you’d have given him a very high rating. In addition he was a gentle, considerate person. He was popular in the district. Bachelors were not common in Deerham Hills for Deerham Hills was a community of young married people of comfortable means. All the houses had good, well-tended gardens, there was a first-class nursery school, a theatre, a club, and no supermarket; it had been a fight to keep one out but they had done so. Deerham Hills had such an open happy life: it was hard to think of anything festering behind it.

  Inside Kathy a little ferment was starting up. At first, she thought it was entirely mental and heaven knew she had cause enough, but after a while it was clear it was physical too.

  Physical sickness was almost unknown to Kathy. Even as a child she had hardly had anything. There had been a time when her mother took her to a doctor on account of her attacking all the other little girls in the district with a spade, but as he pointed out any child might do that. Kathy often reflected that it was just as well her mother had died young: they would not have seen eye to eye.

  So this strange feeling of churning nausea was something Kathy had never met. For a time she dismissed it as indigestion but as she sat there rigid with discomfort she gave a little moan. Silently she staggered up to the bathroom. She sank down on the edge of the bath and started up again at the faint mark where she had wiped off the smear of blood, and where she had then begun to feel the first puzzled question marks about Janet and Mumsy stir in her mind.

  She was clever. But suppose they were cleverer? What if, in the end, they were to prove too much for her? She began to feel a poor, doomed, hunted creature.

  She began to shiver.

  The sight of a light in Emily’s bathroom brought her back to her senses. ‘ Make yourself sick,’ she seemed to hear Emily’s clear, decided voice recommending. ‘ If you think you’ve been poisoned make yourself sick.’ Kathy poured a generous dose of salts and water into a glass.

  Mumsy and Janet were not here; it was literally and physically impossible for them to have poisoned her. But supposing they had appointed Robert as their planned and predestined agent? Supposing the plan was rolling on with nothing now to stop it.

  Robert telephoned the police, she assured herself. You spoke yourself. He got the number, said the cautious guard that lived inside Kathy. He could have been tricking you. You don’t really know that it was the police. Or that they found a case, or that the police know anything at all about Janet and Mumsy.

  Chapter Five

  Robert entered the house quietly, letting himself in with his borrowed key, borrowed from Janet. Like all people in a hurry he fumbled and was clumsy: he was also nervous: he was on borrowed time, and he knew it; he was frightened of Kathy and knew that too. Kathy would have been disconcerted if she had realised what Robert felt about her: he was attracted, she had not been mistaken there, but he thought her tough and alarming too. Kathy ran her own life and ran it pretty successfully and to some men there will always be something a little alarming in a woman who can do this. Moreover Kathy, although she didn’t see this herself, could be fierce. But it wasn’t this that frightened him about Kathy at the moment, it was that there was a sort of relentless logic about Kathy; she carried through to the end what she started; when all about them were losing their head Kathy, you felt, would not be losing hers, and it was this quality that was on his mind now. He had good reason for it to be. Also he did not know whether Kathy was a physically brave woman or not (come to think of it he didn’t know if he was physically brave either) and this too was worrying him: Robert was tender, he didn’t like to think of a woman being hurt. But sometimes they had to be.

  ‘Hello Kathy,’ he called out, waiting for her to answer.

  She didn’t answer.

  ‘Hi Kathy. News. I’m back.’

  She appeared at the door looking dishevelled and sick.

  ‘I don’t know whether it’s good news or bad news, but at least it’s news,’ he went on. ‘That case didn’t belong to Janet.’

  ‘So it wasn’t Janet’s?’

  ‘That’s right,’ he was looking at her puzzled. ‘ Kathy, you all right?’

  ‘No, I’m very far from all right. So it’s not Janet’s case?’

  He shook his head. />
  ‘Well, I’m not surprised. I don’t know that I ever believed in that case. I don’t believe in Janet. I don’t believe in you.’

  Robert didn’t answer, but chose a chair carefully and sat down in it and looked at Kathy.

  ‘Did you really go to the police? Were they even policemen?’

  ‘Yes, Kathy. I went to the police. And they were policemen. But it wasn’t Janet’s case.’

  ‘So wherever Janet is she still has her case with her?’

  ‘I’d like to think that,’ said Robert, in a low voice. ‘I thought you’d be glad about the case. At least it gives a chance that Janet’s still alive, doesn’t it?’

  ‘I’m still alive,’ said Kathy angrily. ‘That’s what matters to me. I’ve been hit with a booby trap, and I’ve been poisoned but I’m still alive. Are you going to let me stay that way.’

  Robert moved his head back quickly, as if ducking a blow. Kathy waited anxiously to see him look surprised at the news that she’d been poisoned, as some indication of all this being news to him, but it wasn’t so. He looked more and more as if he knew.

  ‘I don’t think you’ve been poisoned Kathy,’ said Robert, still speaking in that low voice. ‘You’d be dead if you were.’

  There seemed to be a threat there.

  ‘What was that about a booby trap?’ he asked.

  ‘Before you came. Roll of tarpaulin fell off the garage roof on to me,’ said Kathy sullenly. ‘Can’t you see I’m bruised?’

  ‘You had workmen in last week looking at the roof hadn’t you? Ten to one they left it there. I’ll go and look.’

  ‘Don’t bother,’ said Kathy. ‘You seem satisfied. I don’t know if I am.’

  ‘I think you’re just full of nerves and imagination. You’re frightened, Kathy.’ And then after a pause. ‘I don’t blame you.’

  Did this reinforce the threat?

  They had reached a deadlock. The little sitting-room seemed stuffy and hot.

  ‘I didn’t tell you everything about that case.’ Robert got up and opened a window and a cool lick of wind blew into the room. ‘I said it isn’t Janet’s. That was true. I didn’t say it wasn’t a case I knew. I did know it. I chose it as a birthday present myself last year. I think it is Mumsy’s. The only thing is that it is neatly packed with her things, that’s why I think they may be both alive still. I feel that if anything had gone wrong it would be ransacked and empty.’