Cat and Mouse

by Christianna Brand

  Angela Carlyon appeared suddenly from the cave-mouth at the top of the corridor, two feet from the precipice’s edge.

  For one eternal moment of horror, the tiny figure stood teetering there. The grey-green veil floated out from her upflung head, her arms flailed the air in a frenzied effort to regain lost balance. Close behind, close and yet not close enough to do more than clutch despairingly at the ends of the trailing scarf, Carlyon followed. For one half-second they seemed immobile there, a still from a movie-camera; and then, with one choking cry of mortal anguish, Angela Carlyon pitched head-foremost over the edge of the precipice and hurtled past in a swirl of twisted limbs and flying skirts, to lie, grotesquely broken, on the rocks below.

  Little Miss Evans came running to meet Katinka. “Don’t look! Don’t look! There’s terrible it is; don’t look!”

  But she brushed the little woman aside and went resolutely forward. “She may not be dead. …”

  But she was dead, and at peace at last in the stony lap of the Tarren Goch, limbs askew, neck twisted, the dreadful face staring up at the bonny blue sky. One hand, fast closed in death, held a scrap of paper, white against white, blue-white against the ivory-white of the dead hand. The good hand, the pretty hand; all that was left of the long-ago beauty of Angela Carlyon, grasping a scrap of paper with half a dozen words written across it in an unformed, illegible scrawl. “Angela. Meet me at the caves tonight.” It was signed “Amista.”

  Not Amista at all, but Angela—Angela Carlyon, who was not Amista after all, but by Amista had been lured to this fatal assignation at the precipice of blood.

  Gently, gently, softly billowing on the sunny breeze, the grey-green chiffon scarf floated down after her.

  CHAPTER NINE

  IS IT ONLY THREE days, thought Katinka, since first I came to this house, since first Mr. Chucky and I poked our noses in at the little front door and asked Miss Evans the Milk to take us across to Penderyn in her boat? (Miss Friendly-wise, so chirpy and self-secure, in her smart grey suit and her gay blue mackintosh, trotting up the steep hill to this little house, on her too-high tan heels…!) She looked again round the closed-in little room, at the age-old dresser, its dark oak aglimmer with the gold of lustre jugs, the deep brass fire-screen hanging from the mantel over the range, the onions hanging in their orderly clusters from the rafters, silvery-brown. Miss Evans’s little house, the home to which long ago her father had brought his “English Lark.” What had she thought about it all, that caged bird transported from her native woods, an exquisite prize even in this land of song birds? What had her parents thought of it, whose stiff miniatures flanked the funny old daguerreotype of the Song Bird, music in hand, against the whitewashed wall—Mama and Papa Lark, left at home in Shropshire—what had they thought of this hasty wooing by a wild Welshman, who talked like an angel of his mountains at home and spent most of his time beneath their surface, throwing up cones of black upon their green bosoms, like any burrowing mole?

  Miss Evans placed badly fried bacon and eggs before her and a cup of lukewarm tea. “Eat you, now, Miss Jones, bach; going to need it you are before the day is out.” She eyed her guest appraisingly and said for the hundredth time: “Sure I am that you never slept one old wink!”

  “I did, honestly I did. And I was very comfortable.”

  “Well, well,” said Miss Evans. “Nothing posh it is, but better than your nasty old Swansea hotel.” She had reverted to the complete Welsh idiom, her blue eyes were drowned with weeping and she rattled the cups in their saucers with the shaking of her hands. Halfway through the meal, she burst into outright tears. “There’s terrible, Miss Jones—no use pretending. Lying there at the foot of the Tarren! And then—the rabbit snare!” She laid her forehead down upon her arm and wept anew.

  “Miss Evans, we’ve promised, we’ve promised ourselves to say nothing about the rabbit snare.”

  “But why should he throw it down, Miss Jones, bach? Why should he throw it down?”

  “We can’t be certain that he did,” said Tinka desperately. “It was all so quick.”

  “I saw him and you saw him. You know you did, Miss Jones. Just the little minute after she fell—he stooped down and picked it up and threw it after her. And there it was when I got to her, lying at her feet.”

  “Oh, Miss Evans,” said Tinka, wearily, “we’ve been over and over it. People do these things when they’re stupid with shock—unreasonable things, inexplicable things. I suppose—I suppose he glanced down and saw it there, realized that she’d tripped over it, and stooped and picked it up, hardly knowing what he was doing.”

  “But why throw it down?”

  “Anybody would have thrown it down,” said Katinka. “What else could he do? It was the thing that had killed her. He would—he would cast it away from him in absolute horror—not meaning it to go over the edge at all, perhaps, just flinging it away from him. …” (She would see it for ever, it was impressed upon her retina for ever and ever, that vision of Carlyon standing peering over the edge of the precipice with something held in his hands; opening his hands and letting that something fall, tumbling over and over as a moment ago the body of his wife had tumbled over and over to the rocks below. It had all happened in so brief a moment, even the vision of the falling snare was not clear in her mind—only the memory of his leaning forward, opening his hands and letting go. …) “Don’t say anything to anybody about the rabbit snare, Miss Evans, please don’t Everything’s hell enough already without adding this silly little complication for the police to make a Thing of.”

  “There’s terrible, Miss Jones, bach, to keep a secret from the police. Certain sure they are to find out.”

  “How can they find out what nobody knows except you and me?”

  “Mr. Chucky was there, Miss Jones, and Dai Trouble and Mrs. Love. Supposing one of them saw him throw down the rabbit snare?”

  Katinka’s heart turned over at the bare thought of it—of the questioning and harrying and suspicion and unbelief, the probing about among the already unendurable wounds of his sorrow. She said, however: “Even if they did, there’s nothing to prove that we did. We’ve only to keep our mouths shut as we’ve done so far.”

  So far. All the afternoon, all the long evening—questions, questions, questions, the Pentre Trist constable, the Pentre Trist sergeant, the sergeant from Ystalyfera up the valley, called in to help. But now they were promoted, this morning they were to be questioned by a real, live Detective Inspector from Swansea, doubtless with a sycophant sergeant all of his own: There was a bustle at the door. Miss Evans said: “That’s them, now!” and went out, but came back goggle-eyed. Slim and austere, thin, pale face, dark eyes, upright carriage, just the least bit prim—Mr. Chucky walked into the room behind her, bowed to Miss Jones and sat down and made himself at home. Behind him the constable also took a chair, notebook in hand.

  Katinka stared at him, absolutely dumbfounded. “What on earth…? What are you doing here?”

  “Investigating the unfortunate death of Mrs. Angela Carlyon,” said Chucky, consulting a notebook as though he were not quite sure.

  “You—investigating her death? But you’re a…”

  “I’m a police officer, Miss Jones, as I always told you.”

  “But you said you were a journalist.”

  “It was you who said I was a journalist.”

  “You aren’t one? You aren’t on a Swansea paper? But then—what were you doing at Penderyn?”

  “Just what I told you,” said Chucky, patiently. “Protecting Mr. Carlyon.”

  “Protecting him from what, for goodness sake?”

  “Protecting him from you,” said Detective Inspector Chucky.

  The gentian-blue eyes of Miss Evans peered at her across the table. The constable sat sturdily, pencil poised. “I think we might begin?” said Chucky, sweetly.

  Her mind swam with a thousand queries, a thousand doubts. “Now, wait a minute! You were—you say you were suspicious of me, you made up an excuse t
hen to come with me across to the house? And you stayed that night, I remember; yes, and then—then he sent you away the next day. He didn’t want you there any longer. You were to return to Swansea. …”

  He plunged two fingers into his breast pocket and pulled out a folded paper and handed it to her. It was the letter she had written, quite openly, and given him to take to the Swansea police. “So I came back,” he said.

  She flushed, looking down at the note in her hand. “I suppose you were highly contemptuous! I suppose you thought I was very silly!”

  “I thought you were very brave,” he said simply.

  “And you came back just in time. …”

  “I dropped down to Neath and made my report there, to go on over to Swansea. Then I thought I’d stroll back over the mountain way. I like a bit of exercise,” said Mr. Chucky, looking down with modesty at his rather too-pointed brown shoes, “and I thought I might perhaps catch someone napping if I turned up that way, unexpected like. I watched you from the ridge of the mountain playing hide and seek with Dai, and dropped down to the ledge at the top of the rock-caves, in case you should happen to come bolting out that way.”

  “Which I did: so in fact you saved my life,” said Katinka.

  He held up a deprecatory hand. “No thanks! Just my good luck to be there.”

  “You were not so fortunate with Mrs. Carlyon,” said Katinka, revolted by this arrant complacency.

  His pale face went quite pink for a moment, and he looked down, this time with more real humility, at his shoes. But he said: “At least even then I contrived to be on the spot when it happened.”

  “Just your luck as you say,” said Katinka. She hated him. The world was spinning round in a mist of blood and stark, staring terror—and who must appear to tear their hearts out with pitchforks and rake their trembling souls with riddling irons, but this jackanapes in office, Inspector Chucky, forsooth. What a name! If he had only sounded a little self-conscious about it, a little apologetic, the faintly deprecating, jolly laugh as he announced himself! But, no: whatever else about him had been false, his name it seemed was really and actually Chucky, and as ever he appeared perfectly satisfied with the condition of his affairs.

  He got down to cases. “I want you to tell me, carefully, exactly what you saw, what you heard, what you thought and felt and imagined, and above all what you did, yesterday afternoon on the Tarren Goch.”

  “You was there,” protested Miss Evans. “You saw.”

  “I know what I saw. What I want is—what did you see?”

  Miss Evans shrugged dubiously, folding her little hands, like the brown paws of a mole, before her on the green chenille tablecloth. “Mrs. Carlyon, poor soul, running across the mountain, with the green veil flowing out behind her like a snake. And Mr. Carlyon coming after and then Dai and then fat old Mrs. Love, heaving herself across the lower slopes, not troubling to climb the ridge; and sensible too, fair play, because Mrs. Carlyon came down again off the high ridge, to the mouth of the caves. And all of them after her. Then you and I up, Mr. Chucky; and Miss Jones following. And into the caves.”

  “And then what?”

  “Running about in the caves, hunting and crying.”

  “And then?”

  Katinka sat with clenched hands in an agony of doubt as the danger-point drew near. Miss Evans’s blue eyes wavered, she looked very young and helpless all of a sudden, sitting there with her honest blue eyes clouded, playing with a bobble of the chenille table cloth. “And then I caught a glimpse of her high above me at the top of the caves. ‘She’s going to fall,’ I thinks to myself; and one idea only, to run to the bottom of the Tarren and be there when she fell. Plenty of people in the caves to stop her; nobody at the foot of the old Tarren to receive her poor body when she fell.” Two tears rolled down her weather-beaten cheeks.

  “What was the use?” said Chucky, ignoring them. “You knew she would be dead. She was dead, wasn’t she?”

  Yes, she had been dead. Katinka was back with her, back for a moment in the sweet sunshine on the mountainside, kneeling with Miss Evans beside the shattered body, beside the twice-broken body, dead at last and at peace. “Yes, she was dead. She must have died the moment she hit the ground.”

  “Very well,” said Chucky. “And then?”

  Miss Evans’s hand shook on the chenille bobble, she clasped the hand to its fellow as though they two might cling together and so still each others’ trembling. “I saw her at the top of the precipice, on the little ledge. I saw him come out of the caves behind her, stretching out his hand to save her. …”

  “Did he touch her?” said Chucky.

  “No,” said Katinka sharply.

  He eyed her alertly. “But I was asking Miss Evans.”

  “Miss Evans and I both agree that he never got near enough to touch her, to catch hold of her.”

  “Right, right,” agreed Miss Evans, only too glad to have someone else do the talking for her.

  “I was watching from a break in the rocks, almost down at the bottom of the caves. I saw it all happen. He flung out his hands to save her, but he couldn’t clutch her, he may just have touched the ends of her scarf, that’s all. He—he turned and plunged back into the caves. I didn’t see any more, I was running down, myself, out of the corridor with all the rest of them following me.”

  “You joined Miss Evans beside the body?”

  It was over: the danger-point was passed, they were beyond the moment where the rabbit snare had been thrown down, and if only she were a little clever, she could keep him from ever going back to it. She began to gabble a little in her nervous eagerness. “Miss Evans was kneeling there beside her. She got up and ran forward to meet me. She said, ‘Don’t look!’” She put her head for a moment in her hands, and gave way to sick dizziness at the memory of it. “But I went and looked down at her.”

  Inspector Chucky said gently: “She was a distressing sight, I’m afraid.”

  “She had been a distressing sight for a long time,” said Katinka. (If I am to have softness, let it not be from this unspeakable little cad!)

  Inspector Chucky flicked over another page of his notebook. “Now, ladies, about this paper she was carrying…”

  “She had it in her hand—the good hand. You could just see it sticking out.”

  “Neither of you interfered with it?”

  “I didn’t, and you didn’t, Miss Evans, before I got there?”

  “I wouldn’t have had time,” said Miss Evans, simply, “even if I’d wanted to. But why should I touch it?”

  He spread it out before them, holding it nipped between two fingertips. You could almost hear the clicking of the tumblers as he read it over to himself and fed it to his brain. “‘Angela. Meet me at the top of the caves tonight. Amista.’” Katinka said: “It’s Amista’s writing.”

  He looked up sharply. “You recognize it?”

  She looked at it more closely. “Well, it’s just like it. But then I’ve always thought Amista’s letters were written with the left hand, as a sort of disguise. I suppose most left-hand writing would be much the same.”

  “And this was clutched in her hand?”

  “The dead hold fast,” said Miss Evans. “They can take so little with them; if they have anything in their grasp when they die, they never let it go.” Always, thought Katinka, you would find in the Welsh these odd glimpses of drama and poetry, however humble the surface personality. She recognized them within herself, but they were so deeply hidden beneath layers and layers of sophistication and “towniness” that she had almost lost sight of them.

  Mr. Chucky was at present concerned only with hard fact. “You’re certain this was held tight in her hand?”

  “For Pete’s sake,” said Katinka. “What the hell does it matter whether she was clutching it or not?”

  “It matters very much,” said Chucky. “Because if Miss Evans is sure that she was holding it, then it couldn’t have been thrown down after she fell.”

  Angela’s
body had lain on the tumbled rocks at the foot of the Tarren Goch, and two or three feet from the body had been the tangled rabbit snare. (She had kicked it aside. With some swift foreboding of danger, she had moved it farther away from the body, with the thought hot in her mind of Carlyon standing on the ledge two hundred feet above them, opening his hands and letting something drop down, down, down, after the tumbling body. …) But suppose that the presence of the snare had been fortuitous; suppose it had been the note that Carlyon had thrown down. She stammered: “What on earth would Mr. Carlyon have thrown it down for?”

  “I didn’t say Mr. Carlyon,” said Chucky.

  “Nobody else threw… Nobody else was in a position to throw anything down.”

  Miss Evans came flying out of the tangled undergrowth of her thoughts, dabbed down a contribution to the discussion, and fled back. “How can you throw an old paper down? Float, it would, float in the air like a feather.”

  “It could be wrapped round a stone.”

  “And the wrapping duly came undone and by an extraordinarily convenient chance fell neatly just to her hand. Besides,” insisted Katinka, “why? Why should he throw it down? Here is this assignation note, written by Amista, whoever she turns out to be. …”

  “Well—perhaps,” said Chucky.

  “What do you mean—perhaps?”

  “I mean perhaps it was an assignation note and perhaps it was sent by Amista-whoever-she-turns-out-to-be.”

  “Why in the world should you doubt that it was an assignation?”