Cat and Mouse

by Christianna Brand

  She would know the various paths across the mountain? Yes. She went out a good deal, walking on the mountain. She always carried a veil, and we had it all arranged that if she should meet anyone, she would put the veil across her face. But I believe she was never-disturbed. …

  Very well, then. Pretend—only pretend—that the disfigured Angela is not Angela Erleigh at all, but Amista Somebody, background as yet unknown. Presumably it can be proved all right, that Carlyon really did marry Angela sometime about a year ago. They start off together on the motor drive over the Grande Corniche. Angela Erleigh (parents deceased) is never seen again; only a wreck of a woman who may be Angela, or may be another young woman now called Angela. Has Amista some property or money which will be Carlyon’s while she is in his power? Or is it not more likely that she replaces the true Angela—that Angela died in the accident, and this unrecognizable creature introduced to replace her—Carlyon meanwhile benefitting by an income that would cease if it were known that the true Angela is dead. Was this what Dai Trouble had meant when he had said that Carlyon would not kill the goose that laid the golden eggs?

  Your name is Marie Lloyd Love, née Marie Lloyd Briggs? That’s right: named after dear old Marie, my mother and father being in The Profession, you see, and why in the world I ever took up nursing…

  Why had Amista not confided immediately in Mrs. Love? A hospital nurse with indisputable credentials, who had come into their lives only in the past few months, as the Inaudible Nursing Association would no doubt be able to testify. Would not Mrs. Love in due course have confided in her, in Katinka—if not before, at least during this morning’s conversation. But alas! Money talks, and nursing is not the most remunerative profession in the world and Carlyon was in a position to pay out very tempting bribes for the keeping of secrets somehow made to seem innocent enough; and for the rest, Mrs. Love’s forebears had been in The Profession and no doubt handed on a legacy of their histrionic powers. As for Dai Jones Trouble—was it not he who had found this lonely place, who had warned off inquisitive enquirers, who acknowledged when slightly in his cups that there was much connected with “the accident” that had better not be talked about by servants slightly in their cups?

  Members of the jury, I think you will consider this a pretty straightforward case. …

  Dai Trouble who had spoken to her so quietly and earnestly about drugs, who had expounded his religious faith that a man was entitled to endure the suffering that God sent him, that it should be for himself to accept or reject, not for others to make the choice. … A curious subject, if he were merely trying to ingratiate himself with her, to pull the wool over her eyes. But it brought her round to drugs. By what right was Amista-Angela kept so frequently under the debasing influence of morphia? She thought of the pretexts under which Carlyon had ordered morphia given by the (unsuspecting?) Mrs. Love. Angela got into “states,” Angela “needed peace,” Angela was terribly upset after seeing her face in the mirror in the hall. Had Angela really seen herself that day? She had been standing there making strange animal noises that might have meant anything; Carlyon had said she was weeping because she had seen her face at last. He had swept her up to her room and that night there had been morphia and the next day she had been quiet and apparently resigned during Katinka’s visit. But that evening there had been a terrible “state” again, according to Carlyon, who had “sat up with her all night.” More morphia. And Carlyon is striding the hills at daybreak, and that evening Angela-Amista falls to her death from the top of Tarren Goch.

  Had Carlyon set any rabbit snares during his wanderings at dawn?

  The inquest was breaking up. Formal verdict: suicide while the balance of the mind was disturbed. A rider of commiseration for the bereaved husband and a general feeling that it was a bloody old shame, mun, happening to a lovely gentleman like Mr. Carlyon—for “Carlyon” he was obviously destined to remain. Katinka jostled out with Miss Evans the Milk twittering at her side. “What do we do now? Can we go back to your house and get away from all this?” But Miss Evans bustled off, scandalized, what with half her milk round still to do.

  Inspector Chucky passed, walking as stiff and straight as a guardsman, a slender ramrod in a posh dark blue serge suit for the occasion. Carlyon walked through the thin crowd, Dai Jones and Mrs. Love keeping a respectful distance behind: they were like two flesh and blood spaniels nervously dogging the footsteps of a ghost hound, gaunt and grim. He overtook Katinka. She said, faintly: “Good afternoon,” and he said: “Good afternoon. I hear you have been talking about me to the police.”

  “The police have been talking to me,” said Katinka. “Which is slightly different.”

  “Oh. I thought perhaps you’d been rehearsing your story for the press. Or has that been telephoned to London hours ago?”

  “You’re most bitterly unfair, Mr. Carlyon,” said Tinka. “I’ve never breathed a word of this story to anyone, let alone to the press. I don’t intend to and I never did. I’ve never mentioned your name to a soul outside your own household.”

  “Except of course the police inspector.”

  She lost her temper. “If I’d told the police inspector all that I really do know about this case, if I hadn’t kept back a piece of evidence that by rights I ought to have shouted from the housetops, there’d have been a very different conclusion to this inquest, let me tell you. I’ve taken the hell of a risk to protect your name and all you can do is to say rotten things to me!”

  Carlyon stood at the turning of the road that led down to the river. “A piece of evidence? What evidence?”

  “A rabbit snare was lying near—near her body, as though she’d fallen over it, as though it might have been set at the top of the caves and she’d fallen over it. Miss Evans saw it there. She—she saw you throw it down, after Mrs. Carlyon fell. And so did I. But I asked her not to say anything about it, so as to save you extra questioning and misery. We could both of us be prosecuted for withholding evidence like that.”

  Her heart smote her at the deathly pallor of his face; but he merely said, coldly: “You were very unwise to withhold it. You had better tell the Inspector at once. There he is, walking on ahead of us.”

  Katinka thought of Inspector Chucky’s bright eye and of how it would shine when she placed this piece of information before him, like a cat laying a dead rat at the feet of its master. She faltered: “Tell the police about it…? But what about you?”

  “What about me?” he said. “I didn’t set any rabbit snares for my wife, you know. It’s only your mind that makes up ugly things like that. I have nothing on God’s earth to fear from anything that you or Miss Evans or anyone else can say about me to the police.” And he turned on his heel and said, in a sudden blaze of black fury: “So tell and be damned!”

  She ran after him and caught him by the sleeve. “I haven’t the slightest intention of telling the police, I only mentioned it because…” But he shook her off. “I want no secrets made of this thing and I want no favours from you or Miss Evans or anyone else.” The straight back of the Inspector moved darkly ahead of them and he called out: “Inspector! Inspector Chucky! Here’s a young lady who wants a word with you.”

  Inspector Chucky turned back at once. “Oh, there you are, Mr. Carlyon—Mr. Lion, I should say, but I daresay you find yourself that the other comes more convenient by now? I was just going over to Penderyn hoping for a word with you. Miss Evans promised to take me across in her boat.” He gestured to where the milk-woman loaded her cans aboard the crazy little craft.’

  “We’d better all go over together,” said Carlyon. “That’ll be nice and cosy.”

  Katinka had no desire to go again to Penderyn, but the Inspector drew her back into their orbit, and she was obliged to walk on with them down the steep road, where the loose stones rolled beneath their feet, the soil eroded from beneath them by the draining of the water down to the valley. “Something you wanted to say to me, Miss Jones?”

  “No, there is not,” said Katinka
shortly.

  “Tell him!” said Carlyon, in a voice of thunder.

  If Carlyon was a villain, why make any effort to protect him from due retribution? Surely, she thought, I am not so infatuated that I am prepared to sit back and let him get away with murder! But that was just it: whatever Carlyon’s villainy with respect to some substitution of one girl for another, murder did not enter into it. And the clue of the rabbit snare could be concerned only with the question of murder, the question as to whether or not Carlyon had pushed the dead girl over the cliff. And she knew that he had not. Moreover, if the disfigured girl were being kept in place of dead Angela, so that through her an income might continue that should have died with Angela’s death, then there could be no reason, anything but reason, to throw her over the Tarren Goch. And therefore there could be no significance in the business of the rabbit snare and she might as well tell Mr. Chucky about it as not. “It isn’t anything, Inspector, after all. Miss Evans and I found a rabbit snare near Mrs. Carlyon’s body. …”

  The look in his eyes was only what she had known she would see there. “And you call that nothing, Miss Jones?”

  “I suppose there are rabbit snares all over the mountain?”

  “Not set on flat surfaces of rock,” said the Inspector.

  “This was down at the bottom of the cliff.”

  “In a spot where very few people go. Traps are set where they can be visited.”

  “Miss Jones doesn’t suggest that the trap was set at the bottom of the quarry,” said Carlyon.

  “Oh, of course not,” said Chucky, easily. “The suggestion would be that it was set more or less across the opening of the top cave on the ledge below the top edge of the precipice. Where Mrs. Carlyon fell from, in fact. The idea would be that anyone coming out quickly from the cave on to that ledge, would stumble over a snare stretched across the opening of the cave. Anyone knowing the caves as well as Mrs. Carlyon did might be careful, but if the snare was stretched there…”

  “And besides,” said Carlyon, “Miss Jones further suggests that she saw me pick up the snare, after I had murdered my wife through its means, and toss it down over the precipice after her. In full view of several people of course, but never mind that.”

  They had arrived at the river’s edge. “You had better come over to the house,” said Carlyon to Katinka, frozen-faced, “and finish your revelations there.” Miss Evans agreed rather doubtfully to ferry them all across. Mrs. Love and Dai Trouble scrambled in after them and they all stood huddled together in the centre of the little boat, like a bundle of asparagus, thought Katinka, tied in the middle with a piece of bass, their pale faces embarrassingly close. They touched the other side and got ashore. Miss Evans started off up the path with Dai and Mrs. Love; Carlyon, followed by Katinka and then Chucky, led an uneasy Indian file up after them.

  Carlyon looked back over his shoulder. “Well, Miss Jones?”

  Whatever Carlyon might be, he was not a murderer. God knew what other infamy he had committed so that the golden eggs might go on after the goose was dead, but he was not a murderer. And, for the love that she had borne the little boy with the spikey hair and troubled eyes, so she would resolutely testify. “I’m not going to say another word to Inspector Chucky that he can turn into a suggestion that you’re a murderer, because I happen to know you’re not. I don’t just think you’re not. I know.”

  “Oh ho!” said Mr. Chucky from behind her. “What goes on?”

  “Nothing goes on,” said Katinka. “And please don’t say ‘oh ho!’ It drives me to drink.”

  “If you’re holding back information from the police, Miss Jones, it’s very much ‘oh ho!’”

  “Which she apparently is,” said Carlyon.

  “I am not. It’s not of the slightest interest to the police unless—well, unless you deliberately sent that poor girl over the precipice. But I know you didn’t, I know it’s the last thing you would have wanted, and I’m not going to have it suggested that you did.”

  He gave her a glimmer of his old, half-tender, half-indulgent smile. “Well, that’s very nice of you. But I think you’d better say it all flat out.”

  “You don’t realize how much I know,” said Katinka.

  “Whatever you know, there’s nothing I’m afraid of your telling the Inspector. And it only embarrasses my case, if he thinks you’re holding something incriminating back.”

  Inspector Chucky walked neatly after them up the rough path. He might have been the curate, accompanying the lord and lady of the manor on a visit to poor old Betty Higden with a basin of good meat broth and a basinful of not-so-welcome advice; all the young ladies of the neighbourhood would of a surety have been in love with him. Miss Jones, however, was not at all in love with Inspector Chucky. “You can take that oh ho! smile off your face,” she said. “There’s nothing to tell. It’s not a question of hoping or guessing or working-out-clues-all-wrong. This isn’t a matter of clues, it’s a simple matter of knowing. And I know that Mr. Carlyon did not kill Amista.”

  It had slipped out. She had not meant to say that name. Carlyon stopped dead in his tracks. “That infernal rubbish again! I might have known—it’s all just another trick to get back and pick up more information. My God, Miss Jones, you certainly are a stayer!” He looked at her, white with rage, and, turning, strode on up the path as fast as his long legs would carry him.

  Tinka scurried after him. “It’s not a trick! You know damn well it’s not!” He paid no attention, tearing up the steep path, head bent, legs going like scissors. “I’m sick of this,” she cried, panting up after him. “Why should I be always accused of lying and spying, when all the time…” For after all, there was no rainbow now to cling to any more. Carlyon was not the Carlyon she had thought and—so idiotically—loved. He was a man called Charles Lion, a stranger, a creature who plotted and schemed and tricked for money, a sordid adventurer. “I’m damned if I’ll put up with it any more.” Over her shoulder she saw that Chucky was keeping up with her, was close at her heels. All right. Let him hear! Let them all hear! She jerked out her sentences in little spurts and gasps, but she got them out for Carlyon to hear and for Inspector Chucky too, if he cared to listen in. “The police think you wrote that Amista note, the assignation note. They think you wrote it to lure your wife to her death. They think, but I don’t think, I know—and I know that you didn’t kill her, I know that she was the very last person you would want to die. But I know that you did write that note. I know you wrote all the Amista notes.” She stopped in her tracks, her hand to the stitch in her side, and called after him defiantly, as he strode up ahead: “Because for the benefit of Miss Friendly-wise of Girls Together you were Amista!”

  Carlyon swung round. He came back down the path a little. “Inspector, the woman’s mad.”

  “You’ll have to explain a bit, Miss Jones,” said Chucky: but he eyed her very curiously indeed.

  “Oh, I can explain all right—don’t worry! I’ve got it all worked out. One day there might be an investigation into the whereabouts of a certain girl. And it would be very handy to recall that for at least six months since she was supposed to have disappeared, she had been conducting a lively correspondence. She couldn’t be made to conduct it with friends who might notice oddities and discrepancies—but what more safe than a perfect stranger on a woman’s magazine? Mr. Carlyon and Penderyn would be forgotten by then, Mrs. Love would be sucked back into the nursing profession, Dai Jones would have been dismissed long ago and now inaccessible, but there would be proof that, six months after she disappeared, Amista had been alive and well and very much herself, and in weekly correspondence with an absolutely unbiased witness: me!”

  “You seem to be talking absolute nonsense,” said Carlyon. He turned on his heel and started off, but more slowly, up the path.

  She followed, calling out after him angrily, with loud, vehement, gabbling words. “All right, if you’re so damn superior—here it comes! Inspector Chucky, get this! His wife, the real An
gela—she had a big income, but it could only come to them while she lived. And she died. He ran his car over a bank and she was killed. And with her went all her money. He wasn’t killed—he was very much alive, and very much alive to the consequences of what had happened. It was a lonely place where the accident happened, and in a foreign country. There was time to arrange things, to throw dust in everybody’s eyes, make up all sorts of stories to account for this and that. And he had lots of ready cash. He got her buried secretly under another name and substituted poor little, unrecognizable Amista, so that he could go on collecting the money; her hand was injured so she couldn’t even be expected to sign documents and checks. And the reason I say he isn’t a murderer,” she said to Inspector Chucky who followed close at her heels, listening intently to every gasping word, “is that while Amista lived, he could go on collecting Angela’s money—but since everybody believed that she was Angela, with her death the income would certainly die.” Exhausted she leaned back against a boulder, in the pathway. It was out now. She had delivered over Carlyon into the enemy’s hands. She stared out across the valley and thought, all of a sudden, how the little milk-woman had said that up here everything was unimportant compared with God.

  The Inspector was smiling with a sort of half-admiring, half-protesting, almost tender pity, like a father with a cute but mistaken child; Carlyon was smiling with tolerant contempt. “My dear Miss Jones, I do congratulate you—it all fits together like a honeycomb. But just one thing: do tell me—when I murder my brides in faked motor accidents (or no, that isn’t the theory, is it? You kindly absolve me of murder, which I may say is more than the gossips did at the time), when I kill my rich brides then in unfortunate motor accidents, how do I arrange for unrecognizable substitutes to be quite so conveniently at hand?”