Cat and Mouse

by Christianna Brand

  “It’s a very odd one, to say the least of it,” said Chucky. “And it’s inconsistent. This Amista is writing a note—obviously a secret note—to Mrs. Carlyon. She’s going to hand it to her, or ask somebody to hand it to her, or put it in some prearranged place where she will find it. Why address it ‘To Angela’ on the inside part of the note, mark you, not on the outer fold where a note is usually addressed? And why write ‘To Angela’ at all? In all three cases Angela will know well enough that it’s intended for her: to write it only makes discovery more sure if the note should be intercepted.”

  “Some people are extra careful and fussy about things like that,” suggested Katinka, but doubtfully.

  He bowed his head gravely. “Splendid. Now we see how this extra-careful and fussy person makes an assignation. ‘Meet me tonight.’ Just ‘tonight.’ Any time between, say, six or seven o’clock and dawn. And then, ‘at the caves.’ Does that mean at the top of the caves or at the bottom, or inside them or outside them? You could play hide-and-seek for a week in those caves and all round them, especially after it got dark.”

  “If they were in the habit of meeting one another at a certain time and place?” suggested Miss Evans, timidly.

  “Then why not—this very careful and fussy person—avoid risk of discovery by merely saying, ‘At the usual time and place’?” He acknowledged: “It’s slight. But somehow it doesn’t ring true. I don’t believe that this was an assignation note at all.”

  Katinka fought for comprehension, for understanding of what all this might mean to Carlyon. “Assignation note or not—why should Mr. Carlyon throw it down?”

  Mr. Chucky shrugged. “Just to get rid of it?”

  “To get rid of it, he pitches it neatly beside the body?”

  “You yourself suggested,” said Chucky, “that that would have been an extraordinary chance.”

  “A very extraordinary chance indeed that it should blow right into her hand and nestle there.”

  “If it was right in her hand,” said Chucky.

  “But Miss Evans says…”

  “Miss Evans says it was held fast in her dead hand,” said Chucky. “And all I’m saying to Miss Evans is, are you sure?”

  Katinka pounded on the table with her fists, an impotent tattoo of impatience and irritation. “Why should he care two hoots about the note? Why should Mr. Carlyon want to get rid of a letter written by Amista?”

  “My idea was,” said Mr. Chucky blandly, “that the letter might not have been written by Amista.”

  Miss Evans gave a startled sideways jump like a cat playing with a toy which it has decided to treat as an enemy. Tinka said slowly: “Then who in the world do you think did write the note?”

  “I thought it just possible that Mr. Carlyon might have written it himself,” said Inspector Chucky.

  As soon as she was released, she flew down the mountain road to the ford. Miss Evans had set off doggedly on her milk-round, but if necessary she would pick up her skirts and wade; after two fine days the river depth must surely have dropped. And she must see Carlyon, she must warn Carlyon. That Carlyon had murdered his wife she did not for one single moment believe. She had seen the outflung hand that caught at the backward-streaming scarf, she knew that it had not touched, let alone pushed that teetering figure at the cliff’s edge. If he had thrown down the rabbit snare, that was an action explicable in half a dozen ways—the automatic reaction of the dazed mind to the horror of contact with the means of dreadful death. But if already the police were suspicious, the knowledge that he had thrown down the snare would set the seal on their mistrust of him. She must see him, she must warn him that by way of this nonsense about the note they were working in their dunderheaded way towards a theory that he had lured his wife to her death, that mention of the rabbit snare would be fatal. She must tell him that she and Miss Evans would keep silent about the snare.

  At the bottom of the hill a small crowd deflected her attention. She knew what must be happening. The police were at the ford, they had brought a boat of their own up the river and now were clumsily transferring a covered stretcher aboard. The men uncovered, the women stood silent and respectful as the stretcher was borne up the hill and placed in a police van. Carlyon, utterly expressionless, passed close by without seeing her and went off in a second car with the police.

  Dai Trouble wasted not one moment after the car had turned the precipitous corner, but shot into the dark back-doorway of the local pub and came out again very shortly, wiping his mouth on a red handkerchief. Mrs. Love had joined Katinka and he stopped in his hurried passage down to the waterside. “Well, there you are, then, Miss Jones! How are you doing, my girl? Missed you we have at Penderyn, Mrs. Love and me. …” That drink wasn’t your first today, old boy, thought Katinka.

  “Got to hurry back now—orders!” said Dai, waving a rather wild hand towards the opposite mountain. “‘Don’t you let none of these bloody journalists up to the house, Dai,’ he says, ‘and if that Miss Jones comes pokin’ her nose in,’ he says… Well, well, don’t you fret, Miss Jones, bach…”

  “Dai, I simply must speak to Mr. Carlyon as soon as I can. The police have been getting at me (that Chucky—a policeman all the time!), and they’re asking me all sorts of most peculiar questions. They’ve got it into their asinine heads that Mr. Carlyon—well, that he may have wanted her to die.”

  “You mean that he pushed her over, miss?” said Dai, coolly. “Don’t you take no notice of that. That’s what they always say—it’s a bloody lie.”

  “How do you mean, ‘always say’? She didn’t make a habit of falling over cliffs?”

  “There was the other accident,” said Dai. “When he turned the car over.”

  Her heart stopped. “For God’s sake…”

  “Only talk, you know. Natural enough—she was a rich girl, there you are.”

  “Yes, but… I mean, what good would it do him to wreck his wife’s beauty?” But her whirling brain had to accept the truth. “You mean that they suggested that he’d intended to kill her? That he’d faked the accident?”

  “There had to be a bit of an enquiry, Miss Jones, fair play. Lot of old Frenchies coming around, peaked caps with a bit of braid round them—there’s funny! ‘You’re welcome,’ he says to them. ‘Anything you want to know.’”

  “Didn’t anybody see the accident happen?”

  “A motor cyclist come up a bit afterwards. He was just trying to lift her, carry her back to the road. Dazed he was, the man says, and white as death. ‘If only she had been killed!’ he says, over and over; and the man thinks it’s a bit funny and tells the police. Natural enough it seems to me, him seeing the state she was in and thinking she would die soon anyway, and better she had been killed outright and save the sufferin’. But it caused talk of course. And him with not a scratch on him. Not surprisin’ they had a bit to say.”

  Beneath their feet, the crumbly road sloped down sharply to the river. Over them loomed the mountain, the Tarren Goch a raw wound in its side; but Katinka was on another hillside, under the violent post-cardy blue Riviera skies, when an upturned car lay smoking in its ruins and a dazed, white-faced man said over and over and over: “If only she had been killed!”

  “How vile people are, Dai Trouble, how vile they are!”

  “Oh, dammo, what’s a lot of Frogs?” said Dai. “I says to them, a man can’t arrange to be killed himself, just because he turns his motor-car over. And she so pretty, I says, and a bit of hot stuff what’s more; and he like an old Tom cat around her, flowers and presents and rubbish every day of their life. And she’s rich, I says, and nobody wants to kill the goose that…” He broke off. “Oh, duw, duw—there I go, opening my big mouth again, as usual.” A waft of beer came over to her as he tugged at his cap and rolled off, a little unsteadily, down the crumbly road. “Goose—what goose?” she said to Mrs. Love.

  Mrs. Love put a heavy arm about her shoulders. “Goose yourself to take any notice of him; tight as a coot and on a day like
this. Not but what…” She glanced across at the pub, with a gleam in her eye.

  Five minutes later they were ensconced in a dark corner by a slightly scandalized Mrs. Richards the Tap, and provided with glasses of thick red port. Katinka sipped hers, shuddering; but Mrs. Love called cheerfully for fizzy lemonade, emptied her glass into it and drank heartily without apparent ill effect. She produced a bag of sweets. “Have one, dearie. Cheer you up!”

  “No thank you, Mrs. Love, honestly.”

  Mrs. Love delved thumb and three bunched fingers into the bag. “Well, I dunno—we all need something and that’s a fact! And if I wasn’t a soppy date, I could be in a train for London this time Tuesday, after the inquest. But no, no! ‘Mrs. Love,’ he says, as cool as a cucumber, ‘you’ll stay on and see me through the next few weeks till I decide what to do?’ and yessir, I says, of courssir, I says, as if there was nothing in the world I wanted more than this one-horse village and this goddam mountain and the thought of that pore thing going screaming over the edge. And what my Harry will say! But there you are! That’s Love for you: always the softhearted fool.”

  “Oh, yes, Mrs. Love, do stay with him, don’t let him down! A man’s so sort of—helpless. Don’t leave him.”

  Mrs. Love looked at her curiously. “Bit of a soppy date yourself, aren’t you?”

  “Soppy’s the word,” said Katinka ruefully.

  Mrs. Love took a swig of her port and lemon and scrabbled in the bag again. “What is it, dear? The genuine article or just an attack of good old sex?”

  “God knows,” said Tinka. “I don’t see how one ever can know. But I’ve had lots of ‘attacks of sex’ before, and never anything remotely like this.” She said, miserably: “It hurts so much!”

  “Me and Harry was just the same,” said Mrs. Love. “Bellyful of butterflies, I used to say, and hurt! Why the hours I’ve spent sitting by that telephone in the old days, you wouldn’t credit it. I’ve told you about how Harry and me met, dear, haven’t I? Because that was romantic, if you like.”

  “Yes, you have indeed,” said Katinka hastily. “And it certainly was extraordinarily romantic. But Mrs. Love, I wanted to ask you about what happened yesterday—up at the house, I mean, before she fell.”

  Mrs. Love swung her stout legs, swirling her dreadful drink round and round, faintly fizzing, in her glass. “After you left, you mean? Well, goodness knows! Dai Trouble and I, we skipped out of the way, him not wanting to hear any more about letting you and that Chucky up in the attic, and me hoping Mr. Carlyon would see her ladyship up to her room and not leave it all to me. She was creating something awful, howling and carrying on. I heard her from the kitchen, and him trying to reason with her and after a bit I stuck my head out thinking I’d better do me duty, and arst if there’s anything I can do. He was looking worn out, pore man, but he gives a jerk of his head sending me back to the kitchen, and says in a low voice that he’ll manage her himself. Sooner you than me, I thinks, and morphia again tonight, I thinks, and I went back into the scullery. After a bit there’s peace and I’m singing away to meself and I happens to glance out of the window, and what do I see? Her hobbling and sliding up towards the top of the mountain, him running after her, giving a hop and a skip every now and again as if he’s hurt his leg, and sure enough it seems he did give it a twist and it slowed him down dreadful, pore man—otherwise, of course, he’d have caught up with her.”

  “So you went after them?”

  “Yes, I pipes up for Dai, and he comes running downstairs putting a shirt over his head as he comes, and out of the front door and up the mountain too. Out I goes, but a couple of yards up that ’illside and I’m done. Not for you, my girl, I thinks, you’re a darn sight too fat to be skipping up mountains like a ruddy goat. You run straight across, I says to meself, and that’s what I done. And just in time to see her fall.” She stopped her thrilling narrative and two tears came into her eyes and peeled off runnels through the thick powder on her cheeks.

  “You actually saw her fall?”

  “I didn’t see her at the top, dear. More sort of hurtle past; and then on the rocks.” She burrowed into her paper bag again, but automatically. Her mind was with the sprawled body at the foot of Tarren Goch.

  Nothing about the rabbit snare. Tinka breathed a sigh of relief. “I had some beautiful pipe dream, Mrs. Love, that all the time it was Angela, Mrs. Carlyon, who had been writing to me as ‘Amista.’ But of course the fact that this assignation note was written to Angela, means that it can’t have been. She’d hardly be writing letters asking herself to meet herself.”

  “She’d hardly be writing letters for beauty hints, anyway, dear, now would she?”

  “Well, but she wrote in first for a lotion to whiten her hands because they were all sunburned; and that one poor hand was all she had left to keep beautiful.”

  “Yes, but it wouldn’t get very sunburned laying in a nursing-home.”

  “Oh, how idiotic of me!” said Tinka.

  “And besides she can only—could only,” corrected Mrs. Love sadly, “she could only write with her left hand, not proper writing at all.”

  “Amista wrote with her left hand to disguise her writing; that’s what made it all the more a possible theory. But anyway, that’s exploded. And now that ass, Chucky, has developed the really wonderful idea that Mr. Carlyon wrote the assignation note himself—in fact wrote all the letters, I suppose.”

  Mrs. Love was enchanted with the notion of Carlyon writing soppy letters about himself to an unknown correspondent on a women’s magazine. She delved into the bag and fairly crammed her mouth with toffees. During the resultant enforced silence, Tinka developed the bewildering theme of Amista’s identity. “After all, somebody wrote those letters, Mrs. Love. You swear that you’ve never had the slightest knowledge of anybody in the house who could possibly be Amista,” (Mrs. Love nodded violently, trying frantically to unstick her jaws and add voice to gesture) “and there certainly is nobody else but Mr. Carlyon. You can hardly imagine Dai Trouble indulging in such a freak, and as for yourself, you simply never had the necessary knowledge. I mean you’d never even been to the place till you brought Mrs. Carlyon down here—had you?”

  Mrs. Love shook her head as emphatically as she had nodded it, and was understood to say that Miss Jones could ask the seckertarry at the (inaudible) Nursing Association if it were not honestly so.

  And anyway, fat, jolly, gay Mrs. Love with her fat, jolly, vulgar lover and no frustration or regrets in all the world, driven to so odd, so unbalanced, so pointless a practical joke, even if she had had the time and the requisite knowledge to carry it out. And there was nobody else. She turned over and over in her mind the Inspector’s hints about Carlyon, as though they had been a long-dead bird found rotting on a woodland walk. All right, face facts. Think it all out courageously. …

  All that afternoon and all that night and all through the following morning, thinking, thinking, thinking, worrying, worrying, worrying. And on through the inquest the following morning. Carlyon standing in the witness box with a face like a dull clay mask. Name? Charles Lion. I called myself Carlyon when I first came here because I wanted to avoid publicity for my wife when eventually I was able to bring her home. It was a little sort of—pet name—that she had for me.

  Charles Lion, do you identify the body of deceased as that of your wife? Yes. Angela Mary Lion, née Angela Erleigh, parents deceased.

  Your wife was unfortunately disfigured in a motoring accident? Yes. The accident was my fault. I took my hand off the wheel for a moment, the car went over the edge. It was my fault that she was disfigured.

  There is no need, Mr. Lion, to subject yourself to distress. Thank you: I prefer to face the facts.

  And owing to this disfigurement you brought your wife down here to this lonely place…?

  Katinka sat frozen in the hot, stuffy courtroom and her nails made scalloped indents in the palms of her hands. A mask of a woman, an unrecognizable mask of a woman, shut away in this lo
nely house from the knowledge of men; prevented by half a hundred delicate devices from communication with such men of the outside world as might penetrate its ivory fastnesses. She recalled Carlyon’s grudging permission for her single interview with Angela, the shaded light, the absence of pencil and paper, of all the material for communication between them; the promise of “impersonality” so easily extracted from herself, the unobtrusive policing of the interview. But the darkness had not been acceptable to the sick girl; she had put out her terrible broken hand as Katinka began to move away and had switched on the light. Had she, also, consented to promises, delicately extracted? Pretend, only pretend for one moment, that Carlyon is not the Carlyon I—love; that something is dreadfully wrong here, that Angela is not Angela. She felt again the pointed nail, the dry, slow scratching in the palm of her hand. A—M… Carlyon had explained glibly that what Angela had wanted had been a mirror, that her message traced out through the broken window had been the first two letters of the words: a mirror. But by the time they had met in the bedroom, Angela had seen herself in a mirror; why should she be demanding one again? Had she really ever asked for a mirror? Had not the message on the outer wall been also the slow spelling out of her real name: Amista? A girl who jerked impatiently when addressed as “Angela,” whom Carlyon was careful not to address as “Angela,” resorting to pet names, sweetheart, darling, angel… Not Angela Mary Erleigh at all, but Amista, trying to tell the world with what slight means of communication were left to her that this was Amista, lying unrecognizable here.

  Now, Mr. Lion, you had been anxious as to the possibility of your wife’s attempting her own life? We were all anxious. She was very unhappy and we had to keep her to some extent under drugs. That in itself was weakening to her moral stamina.

  So that when you saw her running across the mountain to the rocks…? My first thought was that she was making for the precipice. It had always had a sort of fascination for her. She’d had a bad shock recently: she’d seen herself in a mirror and realized that the plastic surgeons were making less progress than she’d hoped. And a—a friend had visited her and she was distressed at her leaving. She came down to the hall to say goodbye. I got her upstairs at last and to her room, but the moment my back was turned she must have come down again. The next thing I knew was when I glanced out of the window and saw her making her way up the path at the back of the house.