Come Home and Be Killed

by Jennie Melville

  ‘That’s what everyone says.’ Charmian still frowned.

  ‘Mind you, there’s two sides to it. Kathy has quite a sense of her own property.’

  Charmian smiled. She too had noticed this about Kathy.

  ‘I remember the wedding. My, that was a circus. Not that I was invited but it was in the days when I was trying to be a girl reporter for the Deerham Hills District Two Minutes Silence.’ – In her short working life Grizel had been reporter, nursemaid, and daily house-worker. ‘I went to all wedding receptions held at that Deerham Arms whether invited or not. I remember that one. Bridegroom’s daughter crying, Bride’s daughter quarrelling. Bridegroom on the drunk side and Bride trying to cheer them all up. Know who was best man? Rob Mitchell.’

  ‘Was he?’ said Charmian alertly.

  ‘Always wondered if Rob fixed that marriage. That’s slander, mind. But quite in his interest if he wanted a well-off widow, and being in the business he might have known old Birley had a bad heart.’

  ‘Thought he was the daughter’s property,’ said Charmian drawing little patterns on her blotter.

  ‘Rumour has it that he was mother’s friend first. After all, he’s not so young, he’s older than Janet. Older than Kathy, if it comes to that.’

  ‘That’s some slander,’ said Charmian.

  ‘Could be true,’ persisted Grizel. She was preparing to depart.

  Charmian looked half irritably at her cards. ‘Really?’ she said.

  ‘Yes, really. It’s a real world I’m talking about.’ Sometimes Grizel did wonder if Charmian wasn’t spinning an imaginary world out of her own entrails like a cocoon. It had got to be her way or it didn’t exist.

  She looked at her curiously.

  Chapter Eleven

  ‘If they are alive,’ thought Kathy, ‘ then’ where am I?’ There was danger for her around and she knew it. Every sense was alert. But all the same she couldn’t stop herself looking pathetically for help towards Rob. He might be her biggest traitor, but she wanted to trust him, she needed to trust him.

  The thought of Mumsy and Janet fascinated her. How could Rob know if they were alive or not? How indeed? thought Kathy, and yet she feared to ask him. She had a sense of being in a deep scheme, of being in a play, of being moreover one of the principle actors, and yet not knowing what it was all about. There was a peculiar irony in this which she did not appreciate because Kathy could admit to herself now that she had had schemes, and thought herself very clever.

  She stared at Rob over the other side of the table. He was looking down, his face thin and drawn and tired. It looked a kind face, but Kathy fancied she knew better. Was he acting as Mumsy and Janet’s agent? Or was he acting on his own? Was he even acting?

  She was momentarily distracted by the sound of the milkman banging the bottles down on the step. Morning had come. She must have slept longer, much longer than she had realised. A panic swept over her as she thought of all that could have been happening unknown to her while she slept. Mumsy and Janet coming back from the dead, the police doing and thinking God knows what, Rob sitting there looking like the doom of God. He hadn’t slept anyway.

  A little tear trickled down her cheek as she realised that it would never be safe for her to sleep again. She’d have to stay awake for ever. ‘I’d need to be Cerberus,’ she said to herself, tears sloughing down her face, ‘and have a thousand eyes.‘

  The noise had roused Rob from his thoughts too. ‘ Kathy, Kathy,’ he said, ‘ we’ve got to take stock.’

  ‘Is that a threat?’ said Kathy, ‘because, do you know, to me, it sounds like it.’

  She had at last admitted that she had to do battle.

  ‘You know whether it’s a threat or not.’

  ‘Then it is.’ She stood up, muscles flexed, eyes wide. ‘If you touch me, I’ll scream.’

  Robert’s lips moved, but it was hardly a smile, it was the shadow, the memory of what once might have been a joke that moved it.

  ‘I won’t kill you,’ he said.

  Kathy frowned at the emphasis, she was on the alert now for every stress, every little implication; she felt like a blind woman in the world of the sighted. If he meant that she might kill herself then there was no possibility of that either. Frightened, bewildered she might be, but she was a fighter and would struggle passionately for herself and her rights. She had, she thought, given adequate proof of that.

  The sounds of life and movement in the road outside reminded her that ordinary life was taking up and going on. Just outside this nightmare in which she was living was the real world to which she might get back. ‘Hang on,’ she told herself, ‘hang on, Kathy, and you’ll get back.’ On the kitchen mantelpiece was a little bit of china that belonged to Mumsy: the three wise monkeys. See nothing, Hear nothing, Say nothing. It was characteristic of Mumsy to own such a thing. ‘ I’ll be like that,‘ said Kathy. ‘I know nothing, see nothing, and say nothing.’ There ought to be a fourth, she thought: ‘Do nothing.’

  Rob looked at her, almost as if he could read her thoughts and perceive the neat little sandbagged shelter she was trying to hide herself in.

  ‘You’d better go and tidy yourself up, Kathy,’ was what he surprisingly said. ‘ You look quite a mess.’ He was putting on his own jacket as he did so. ‘We have to expect the police back again, you know.’

  Upstairs in her own room Kathy locked the door. She dressed herself quickly and yet neatly, it was next to impossible for Kathy to be unhandy, and then opened her little medicine box in which she kept aspirin, sleeping tablets and old medicine. Kathy was not a hypochondriac and rarely took a dose, but even she felt the need of a little aspirin now.

  She was calmer. In some ways the mention of the police had reassured her. It would hardly be possible for Robert (and Mumsy and Janet, if in some obscure and dreadful way they were concerned) to kill her with the police all over the place. It was a rum sort of safety but undoubtedly it represented safety of a sort.

  She marched downstairs again to find Rob waiting at the bottom of the stairs.

  ‘Look out of the window,’ he said, holding the curtain back for her to do so.

  She peered out.

  It was early morning, but already a man was standing watching the house, and a woman exercising her dog.

  ‘The news is out,’ said Rob. ‘Radio, I expect.’

  ‘They don’t know it’s us.’

  ‘They will.’

  Deerham Hills was alert now, eyes and ears ready. There had never, so far, been a serious crime in the district. Down at the bottom of the hill where the car had been found photographers and reporters were already gathering. Half proud, half ashamed, Deerham Hills prepared to assume its fame.

  Kathy saw the curtain twitch in the Carters’ house and knew that Emily was watching too. She repressed her customary irritation at Emily’s omniscience: she was going to need Emily’s affection and loyalty. She was going to need all her friends.

  She turned to face Robert.

  ‘This is a day, like any other. I’m going to make the beds and tidy the house.’

  Robert looked at her with a sort of respect. Not Rob, not Kathy took notice of one strange aspect of their

  behaviour: it was their great silence.

  Neither of them had touched again on Rob’s comment that

  Mumsy and Janet might not be dead. They had not even noticed

  it as a thing to be said.

  It was the strangest and most monstrous thing of all.

  Emily Carter was the possessor of one of those oversize consciences which are a trial to the owner and everyone round them. It was more than straight curiosity that accounted for the nosiness which Kathy complained of. She minded about people. It was why she had become a nurse.

  The friendship between her and Kathy dated back to the day Emily moved into her house as a bride. She was very much a bride, her wedding having taken place only that morning. She and Jim had worked out whether they could afford a washing machine or a honeymoon a
nd Emily had decided in favour of the washing machine. Jim, who had a more romantic nature, would have taken the honeymoon. Somehow Kathy, who wasn’t devoid of a certain quiet curiosity of her own, had discovered that Emily was on a honeymoon at home, and she had baked a celebration dinner and cake and sent it across that first evening, so that Emily did have a celebration of a sort. The fact that Emily’s mother, lamenting and clucking her tongue over no honeymoon and no wedding dress, had also sent over a cake and a dinner so that they had two of everything, hadn’t altered how Emily felt about this spontaneous kindness.

  She brooded about Kathy now as she washed the breakfast things and tidied the kitchen. It was still pretty early, too early for visiting, but in a little while she planned to go across and speak to Kathy. It might be that Kathy needed comfort and solace. It was almost certain that she needed advice, but that was something Kathy never took from Emily except on matters of health. This had been the bone of contention between Emily and Mumsy: it was the real reason why she had come to war with Mumsy. She had observed Mumsy’s sporadic outbursts of demoniacal energy and her eager and popping eye, and had taken her aside one day to ask her anxiously if she had hot flushes, moist palms and was losing weight, because she feared she had hyper-thyroid tendencies. Mumsy, who thought the suggestion obscene, indignantly denied any such symptoms. Emily disregarded this with an Olympian professionalism that would have irritated a calmer mind than Mumsy’s ever was, and advised her to watch her weight. Mumsy, who was on a rigid diet, without losing a pound, was naturally maddened. What she said then made Emily even more sure of her diagnosis which of course made Mumsy even crosser.

  But she had much more ominous reasons for fearing Mumsy than that. She had seen so many more things than she had told Kathy. She knew that Mumsy had a gun. And she knew that Rob had given it to her. Anybody could have a gun, although it was not usual to find them in the hands of plump high-tempered ladies of fifty. She knew too that Mumsy both hated and feared Kathy. ‘She’ll have us out of this house,’ she had heard Mumsy say.

  Why would a woman who had a gun (and was emotionally equipped to use it too) kill herself? She was much more likely to kill Kathy.

  The telephone rang, and Emily, after wiping her hands on the back of her blue cotton smock and stuffing a hard rusk in her son’s ever-open hand, padded out to answer it.

  ‘Em?’ said an eager feminine voice. ‘ Charlotte Weight here. You won’t know this, because I had it confidentially from the egg man, but I just wanted to tell you that …’

  ‘You’re only the third,’ said Emily philosophically, ‘not counting old Mrs Mossman who actually had the receiver but her daughter-in-law shouted in it first, before she could get it out. I know.’

  ‘Em! Are you joking? What I’m telling you is serious,’ said Charlotte indignantly. Emily was notorious for her sense of humour.

  ‘Two women dead in a car,’ began Charlotte.

  ‘Old Mrs Birley,’ said Emily.

  ‘I didn’t know about it being Mrs Birley,’ said Charlotte regretfully.

  ‘The police haven’t said.’ Then she realised what Emily had said. ‘Mrs Birley,’ she began to cluck.

  ‘And I don’t know either,’ said Emily, ‘if it comes to that.’ She put the receiver down hastily on Charlotte.

  But these two women had to come from somewhere, poor things. And if they weren’t the Birleys, who were they?

  Emily went back to the kitchen. In her absence her son, rarely idle, if never actually helpful, had crumbled up his rusk and scattered it over the kitchen floor where it was being chewed by Emily’s elderly tabby cat. The cat was an inheritance from an aunt (who had not died, but had sensibly removed herself to a warmer climate) and between him and Emily there was an old, enjoyable and sometimes bloody war.

  ‘It’d be a pity, Tab, to really be helpful, wouldn’t it?’ said Emily. ‘You’re losing your grip.’ The cat had been called Fluffy by Emily’s aunt but Emily and her husband called him Tab, or Tabby, or even occasionally ‘HIM.’ Emily had hoped he would leave home in disgust when her son was born, but no, he seemed to like the baby, and she suspected found him an ally. Tab lashed his tail and departed. Like all good generals he hardly ever actually fought a battle but gained his ends by looking fierce and frightening the enemy.

  Emily sat down at the table and wondered what Kathy could be doing in that closed-up house.

  She had not told Kathy about the gun. Even Emily found it difficult to say: Your stepmother has a gun, is she planning to use it on you? But she had hinted and worked round the subject until Kathy questioned her in exasperation. Kathy seemed angrier with her than Mumsy and perhaps it was an awkward revelation. ‘You shouldn’t get mixed up with family quarrels,’ her husband sagely told her.

  It had all led up to that last queer day, of which she had been the observer. The day before last. The day of constant comings and goings on the part of Mumsy, the day on which she was almost sure she had seen Janet at an upstairs window although everyone knew Janet was supposed to be on holiday. If it was Janet, because this girl had waved and Janet never waved, never even saw Emily much, she was so short-sighted. Come to think of it, there was something funny about the wave. Why wave to Emily?

  But who else could it be but Janet? She seemed continually to be revolving around personalities and doubtful ones at that.

  The day before yesterday had been a bright, clear, sunny day on which Emily had felt particularly happy. Because of this she had got on briskly with her housework, and then baked two cakes. The lighter and more regular-looking of the two she wrapped up and took over to Kathy, with a glow in her heart at being a good neighbour. Kathy was away: the cake would await her on her return. Also Kathy could probably do with the extra pound of weight which she, Emily, could well spare. It was amazing about food, how a feather weight of cream and cake, which couldn’t weigh more than an ounce or two, could be so quickly turned by the eager body into a couple of pounds. The phenomenon always amazed Emily.

  But the door of the house was closed against her, the back door was bolted and the front door locked. Even Emily only rang a bell twice. She might give herself the benefit of the doubt and ring a second time just in case they hadn’t heard, but after this she went away. This was on the day before yesterday.

  Emily sat there thinking, while her son banged on the table in front of him in an effort to get her attention.

  Supposing Mrs Birley was clearing off for some reason of her own. Taking Janet with her of course. She might very well have reasons for wanting to go. And there might also be reasons why she didn’t want Kathy to know until the last minute. That would explain the odd flittings to and fro, the packing up.

  The boy banged harder. He already felt that life was a tough, competitive business and being a keen boy he was anxious to get into it. Emily still took no notice.

  And supposing she not only didn’t want Kathy to know but didn’t want anyone particularly to know about her whereabouts? Supposing she was going to sort of camp out? – At the thought of Mumsy camping out anywhere a faint smile appeared on Emily’s face.

  Emily got up and stared out of the kitchen window. Her son started to roar angrily, seeing that mere shouting wasn’t getting him anywhere.

  Suppose all this was a front part of some complicated plot? Something, her mind shot forward, to do with inheritance, and insurance. Robert knew all about insurance. She had always felt there were explosive qualities in that household of women.

  Suppose the end and purpose of the whole parade was death for Kathy?

  Suppose, suppose, suppose.

  You always came back to the two women in the car. They had to be explained. But there was something phoney and perplexing and not quite right. Emily knew and she felt the police knew it. Nothing was quite what it seemed.

  She started vigorously to clean out the kitchen. Her son still roared. Tab the cat, who was well tuned-in to Emily’s moods, was sitting bang in the middle of the lawn with his ears back.


  Upstairs her husband, shaving, paused uneasily and listened. The whole house was vibrating to the noise of Emily angrily stamping about. He shook his head. Pregnancy wasn’t quietening her down any. There was a particularly loud bang. Despairingly he wondered if they’d have to have ten children before his Emily stopped thinking she could ride the tempest and rule the waves.

  Kathy’s house-cleaning wasn’t the thorough job she usually did. The enthusiasm was lacking. She had somehow lost her old firm sense of what was important and what was not. She kept a watchful eye on the window because she expected the police to return. The telephone had been strangely silent.

  And Robert too. He was sitting slumped in the hall, rather like a watch-dog.

  From the upstairs window she saw Emily bang her kitchen door and start across the garden. There was a gap in the hedge through which Emily could make her way if in a hurry. She usually was in a hurry and Kathy saw she was this time. She caught Robert’s eye and guessed that he too had observed Emily. He was frowning. For that matter she could do without a visit from eagle-eyed Emily. ‘We don’t want her in, do we?’ said Robert. He went through and turned the lock in the kitchen door. Kathy watched him. There was a moment when she could have stopped him maybe, but only one, and it soon passed.

  Emily tried the back door and since it was closed and firm she walked round to the front and rang the bell. No one answered. No one.

  ‘That’s odd,’ thought Emily. ‘I mean they are there.’ She could hear her son shouting in the distance and she fancied she could hear her husband’s voice above even that. She rang again, giving two short spurts on the bell. The house remained dead. ‘I don’t like this,’ said Emily. She looked briefly at an upstairs window, but circumstances prevented her from doing any climbing just then and she saw that in any case climbing in would not do.

  A little alarmed but still not frightened, she went round to the back again and peered through the glass panels. She could see nothing. Someone had drawn the curtains. Emily stood in thought for a moment and then slowly walked back round the house, covering every side. The windows were all closed, the doors were shut, and, thoroughly frightened, she turned and ran back through the gardens.