Cat and Mouse

by Christianna Brand

  It was hot toiling up the hill. The autumn sun was at its height above the mountainhead, her grey suit, suitable garb for an inquest, was too warm for hill climbing on this lovely day. There were little beads of perspiration round her hairline, the veins stood out faintly pink on her hands. But suddenly she was cold from her sick stomach outwards, a dank, deathly cold that held her rigid in her tracks, staring unbelievingly out across the river. In her ears, not the soft running of the river but the sound of muffled, animal bleatings from behind a carelessly opened door; in her mind’s eye, the little chubby-faced man, standing at the end of a long corridor, wiping blood and lather from rubber-gloved hands. …

  Angela, who really was Amista; kept from all mirrors, fed with soft lies as to the wonders that plastic surgery was doing for her; Angela, who really was Amista, slowly, deliberately, through the long months of torture and dread, rendered further and further unrecognizable. Amista, who had taken the place of dead Angela, but all in vain: for now both Angela and Amista were dead.

  They came up to the gravelled space before the house and she blundered into the silly little fretwork porch and into the chocolate-brown hall.

  A woman was standing in the hall; a woman in a smart black coat and a smart black hat with a nodding rose.

  Curling blonde hair tucked away under the silly little hat. Round, foolish face, big, round, foolish eyes… Shorn of the starched white nurse’s apron, the starched white nurse’s cap, the anonymity of a nurse’s uniform—not young any more, not pretty any more, but once very pretty; once a pretty, rather vapid face framed in a halo of soft gold curls, peering now through the mask of an old, a raddled, an experienced face…

  Amista was not dead. All the elaborate story of the substitution was a fantastic mistake. For Amista was not dead; her face peered forth from the raddled mask of the face of Mrs. Marie Lloyd Love.

  Mrs. Love was Amista.

  CHAPTER TEN

  HALFWAY DOWN THE HILL, Mr. Chucky paused to light a cigarette. He held out one to Katinka. Miss Evans ambled on ahead of them, swinging her cans. Katinka lit the cigarette and threw away the match with the flick of her wrist much admired in the journalistic world. Mr. Chucky, however, only tch tch’d and made a great fuss about stamping it out with the toe of his irritatingly neat brown shoe. “You’ll be setting the bloody old mountain afire; nothing but an old town girl you are, not knowing how to behave and you a good Welshwoman!”

  “As it’s certain to rain again within half an hour or so,” said Katinka, crossly, “there isn’t the slightest danger. And I wish you wouldn’t find it necessary to talk to me with an accent like a Swansea errand boy. You talk normally enough when you like; why should you find it necessary to visit me with all these by-there’s and my-girl’s and indeed-to-goodnesses generally?”

  “It makes you so mad,” he confessed, laughing. “You want to see me a proper little Anglo-Welshman, mincing around with a phoney English accent.”

  “I don’t want to see you at all,” said Tinka. “And after this horrible affair is over, I trust that I never shall.”

  “Well, come to that,” said Chucky amiably, “you’re free to go tomorrow if you want to.”

  “Free to go?”

  “Sorry to lose you, Miss Jones, naturally,” he said with a little mocking bow. “But what’s keeping you? Not the police.”

  Her heart leaped, then subsided. Tomorrow I could go home, back to London where everything’s normal and ordinary and none of this horror and miserableness.

  Tomorrow I could go back to London, and never see Carlyon again!

  “I daresay you’ll be glad enough to get away,” said Chucky, eyeing her evident hesitation with his too-discerning smile. She would not admit defeat. She said with a great pretence of thankfulness that she would go back to London the following day.

  Miss Evans was distressed to learn that her guest proposed to leave Pentre Trist so soon, and confounded at the sudden recollection of a long-standing engagement with Mrs. Lloyd Funeral Parlour, which would oblige her to leave Miss Jones all alone on her very last evening in their midst. Katinka finally overcame her civil scruples by promising to sit up until she returned from the funeral parlour festivities and spend the fag-end of the evening, at least, in formal farewell chat. Having seen her hostess off in her black Sunday dress, she settled herself down for an hour or two of much-needed solitude.

  But to be alone was to think, and to think any more was to go out of her mind. She got up and searched among Miss Evans’s heterogeneous selection of books—the neat rows of well-worn classics, modern novelettes, mysteries, romances, tattered copies of long-out-of-date magazines; nothing, alas, that could take one’s mind for a single moment from one’s own romance, from one’s own mystery, one’s own fantastic penny novelette, from that glimpse of a face beneath a face, the young pretty, foolish face of Amista beneath the raddled macula of Mrs. Marie Lloyd Love.

  The fire burned up brightly in the black grate, but outside the rain had begun again, ceaselessly, drearily tapping at the window-panes, dripping from the tips of the washed green leaves, from the choking, gargling gutters of the little house. The rain was an evil thing, a threat, it was like some danger known but not recognized that hung chokingly about the house, tapping at the doors and the windows of her little cell of safety. … Tapping very softly, then more loudly, thudding, banging, hammering at the door of the house.

  Sick at heart, she crept into the tiny hall and dragged open the door. And there was the face again, the two faces, the young and foolish face grown old and experienced, the pretty face behind the painted mask.

  “Well, there you are at last,” said Mrs. Love. “I thought you’d never come, and me out here in the rain and soaked to the skin.” Her straw hat flopped woefully about her neck and the fur collar of her coat was like a drowned thing. She marched into the hall, shaking a flurry of raindrops from her soaking gloves. “Where’s Miss Evans?”

  “She’s out,” said Tinka: and immediately regretted having said it.

  For Mrs. Love tonight was not her usual friendly self. She looked about her roughly and angrily as she flapped her sodden hat, so that the little raindrops flew all over the shining linoleum. Her coat hung limply on the rack like a hanged man with a dead fox at his throat, and she kicked off her squelching shoes and advanced into the cosy sitting-room on stained, wet-stockinged feet. “Aht?” she said, slapping her handbag down dankly on the chenille tablecloth. “Aht, is she? Well, never mind; it’s you I come to see.” All her small pretence at refinement had left her, all her jollity and friendliness were gone. “Nah then, my girl,” she said. “What about that ring?”

  The room seemed suddenly very small and Mrs. Love seemed very large and close. Katinka, retreating to the other side of the round table, said weakly: “Ring? What ring?”

  Mrs. Love lifted the bag and slapped it down again like a wet fish on a fishmonger’s slab. “What ring? You know damn well what ring. Her ring—the sphinx ring or whatever it was.”

  “Well, don’t ask me,” said Katinka. “I don’t know where it is.”

  Mrs. Love rubbed savagely at the ends of her dripping hair with a scarf which still hung limply round her neck. “Oh, don’t you?”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” said Katinka. “How should I know anything about her ring? The last time I saw it she was wearing it, in her room.”

  “What about her trying to give it to you that time in the hall, just before she was killed?”

  “She didn’t… Oh, yes, she did try to give me something, wrapped up in a bit of paper, but I don’t know what it was and anyway I didn’t take it.”

  “Well, I’ll tell you what it was,” said Mrs. Love. “It was the jade ring. He saw it hisself. Jade indeed! Jade’s green, or was when I was at school.” She added that no doubt it had had time enough to turn white since then, and appeared somewhat mollified by this rueful joke. Something of her small veneer of gentility returned to her, but after a moment all f
riendliness was gone again. “So now, miss, you can hand it over here and now. Or else!” She thumped down the bunched scarf on the table beside her handbag so that all the bobbles fringing the tablecloth danced in silent agitation. “Come along!”

  “I tell you, I haven’t got it,” said Tinka. “What on earth would I want it for? Besides which, as it happens I’m not a thief.”

  “If she tried to give it to you, I daresay you’d think that was different.”

  “If she tried she didn’t succeed, that’s all.”

  “Well, then, where is it?” said Mrs. Love.

  “How the hell should I know? I was shoved out of the house as if I were a criminal, and that’s the last I saw of it—if what was in the little package was the ring, which may not be true.”

  “Well, I haven’t got it,” said Mrs. Love.

  “Nobody says you have. I simply say…”

  “Oh, don’t they? Well, he does, for one.” She lost her air of accusation and became more confidential. “No sooner you’ve turned and run off this afternoon, looking as if you’d seen a ghost—though it was nothing but me just waiting in the hall—than he sets about looking through the bits and pieces they’ve sent back from the inquest, what she had on when she fell. She always was a bit of a one for joolery, pore thing, decking herself out as if she’d been… Well, horrible, it was, but there you are. And almost at once he says, ‘Where’s the ring? The jade ring,’ he says, ‘the sphinx.’ Well, I didn’t know, I couldn’t remember having seen it—she hadn’t worn it, not since you come to see her the day before. ‘She was trying to give something to that journalist woman,’ he says.”

  “Ah,” said Katinka. “‘Something.’ So even he isn’t sure that what she was trying to give me was the ring.”

  “Of course it was the ring,” said Mrs. Love, losing her confidential air at once. “Where else is it, if not? It’s not among her stuff. And if it’s not you that’s accused, it’s me. As if I’d take a bit of old rubbidge like that! ‘Now, look ’ere, Mr. Carlyon,’ I says to him, straight out, ‘I’m not going to stand for this, and so I tell yer, flat. Jade indeed!’ I says, ‘more like a bit of dirty old soap, and some nasty Egyptian trollop no better than she should be with her chest all bare. Indecent, I call it,’ I says, ‘going round with a thing like that on yer finger. And you didn’t think so much of it yerself,’ I says, giving it to him straight while I was about it, ‘you was always telling me not to let her wear it, it’s not till it’s lost that you suddenly set such a store by it.’ Though, mind you, Miss Jones, that was more because it reminded her, I must say; she always wore it when she played…” She broke off abruptly and glanced craftily into Katinka’s face.

  “Played? Played what?”

  “Well, not hockey,” said Mrs. Love. She abandoned the subject immediately. “Never mind that. The thing is, it’s missing and I’ve been thrown out on me ear on account of it.”

  “Thrown out?”

  “Thrown out—and on a night like this! I’m not taking any accusations from you, Mr. Carlyon,’ I says, ‘and I’m not staying here one minute more to be insulted, so if it’s all the same to you, I’ll pack me bags and go, and never mind me money,’ I says, getting it in before he can say it himself, ‘you can keep it in loo.’ ‘Oh, get out of my sight,’ he says, ‘I’m weary to death of the whole pack of you!’ Well! So I packs up me traps and tells Dai Trouble to bring them over tomorrow to the Neath bus, and I collects a few bits and pieces and out I marches; and here I am—sacked! Thrown out of the house—and on a trumped up charge.”

  It looked very much as though Mrs. Love had thrown herself out of the house, and on a trumped up charge. Her conscience, though preventing her from leaving Carlyon flat, evidently did not cavil at taking advantage of his momentary anger to set herself free to return to the loving arms of Harry. “But how did you get across the river, Mrs. Love?”

  “Took off me shoes and stockings and waded,” said Mrs. Love. “And that reminds me, I’ve left all me parcels in the porch. But never mind, they’re as wet now as they’ll ever be.” She was preoccupied with her wrongs. “Me! Pinch a dirty old ring!”

  “Yet you don’t mind accusing me,” said Katinka.

  “Nobody says you stole it. She give it to you, there in the hall.”

  “But I tell you she didn’t,” said Katinka. “If you don’t believe me, you can look through my things.” She seized the handbag which, on her precipitate return from Penderyn this afternoon, she had cast down upon a chair. “Here you are, you can begin on this.” But on second thoughts, if Mrs. Love handled the bag, she would see the photograph of Carlyon on his wedding day, tucked into a side pocket. She opened the bag instead and, turning it upside down, emptied its contents onto the table, one finger holding the photograph in place. “Lipstick, money, handkie, comb, flap-jack…” A coin rolled off the table and she stopped to retrieve it. “Note case, another handkie (filthy!), powderpuff, ten-bob note, mirror, key-ring…” Her fingers flew, sorting out the things like a dog burrowing in a dust-bin for a likely bone. “There you are, that’s the lot!” To demonstrate it, she picked up the bag and, holding its mouth wide open, shook it vigorously over the table.

  Pale whitish-green, against the dark green of the cloth, the sphinx ring rolled out onto the table and lay there, softly gleaming up at her. There was a stifled exclamation behind her. She swirled round. Carlyon stood at the door.

  He was terribly white. His mackintosh hung dripping about his shoulders, his pale hair was plastered across his head by the rain, and only one strand detached itself and stuck out over his forehead, giving his worn face that too-well-remembered, too-well-beloved air of a forlorn little boy. He took one pace forward and picked up the ring. At his shoulder, Dai Trouble appeared and quietly unhitched the wet mackintosh and took it out into the hall. Carlyon seemed not to know that he was there.

  Katinka backed away from the table. “I had no idea… She must have put it there when I dropped my bag in the hall. …”

  “Well!” said Mrs. Love, scandalized.

  “Mr. Carlyon, surely you don’t think… Surely you can’t think…? Damn it all,” cried Katinka, “I’m not a common thief, am I?”

  “I don’t know,” said Carlyon. “Aren’t you? It looks very much like it.”

  “I tell you I had no idea it was in my bag. She must have slipped it in that day in the hall. She picked up several of my things and dropped them back into the bag, after I upset it. And it got stuck in a crevice, I suppose, and I never noticed it. It wasn’t till I gave it a good shake just now, that it was dislodged and fell out. I swear to you I didn’t know it was there, I had no idea it was there. …” And she swooped suddenly on Mrs. Love and cried triumphantly: “It wasn’t there at all! You put it there!”

  “Me?” bellowed Mrs. Love, outraged.

  “Just now when I stooped to pick up the money! I bent down, Mr. Carlyon, she could easily have slipped the ring into my bag then. I don’t believe it was there at all before that, I promise you I didn’t…” She broke off, faltering uncertainly.

  She was facing them across the little table, the three of them, softly, speechlessly, remorselessly watching her. Three of them against one; three cats against one poor, petrified little mouse. The room was small and bright and warm about her, but it was a bright, warm prison, closing her in with the three of them, boxing her in with fear. Cold as ice-splinters came memories of the past few horrible days among these three. The dripping face, hanging over her in the night, of a girl reduced to a ghastly monstrosity by the hand of Carlyon—the careless, or the deliberate hand of Carlyon. Inhuman squealings under the surgeon’s knife; a bunched hand pushing through a broken pane of glass, feeling like a blinded snake about the blank wall. The deaf woman, stumbling on ivory-handled sticks like a black bird of doom against the grey-green countryside. The terrible chokings and gurglings and pleadings of the poor creature left behind in the little hall to the mercy of these three, abandoned to Carlyon and Dai Jones Troubl
e and Mrs. Love. Where was she now, poor Angela Carlyon, whom she had on that day abandoned to these three? Lying on a cold slab in a mortuary, lying dead, lying murdered by the hands of Carlyon and Dai Trouble and Mrs. Love. And here she stood, Katinka, boxed in, alone with them.

  They came on. Suddenly, behind them, something swam, blue-white, at the single, uncurtained window-pane, a face was pressed suddenly close to the window, a face drowned in rain, pressed close and distorted. An enemy? But all her enemies were here. A friend then, passing the window, attracted by the strangeness of the silent scene within. Help was at hand, she was no longer alone. I must say it now, she thought, I must shout it out loud and then whoever it is will hear, they’ll know—if I’m killed, at least somebody will know the truth. … The white blur withdrew from the window and she cried out suddenly and sharply so that it abruptly returned and was pressed close again, greedily listening, greedily peering in. “I know who you all are, I know what you are, I know that Amista did exist, I know that she did murder poor Angela!” And, pressed against the wall, bracing herself with the palms of her hands away from the wall she cried out into Mrs. Love’s swimmily advancing face: “I know that you were Amista!”

  Behind them, unseen by them, the white face stared in at the window, flesh distorted, pressed close. “Who knows that any of you are what you say you are? Who knows that you met only a year or so ago, or that Mrs. Love came to poor Angela only a few months ago? She says her mother was an actress—well, so she may have been, because I say that she’s an actress too, she’s been playing a part all this time. …”

  They broke silence at last. Carlyon said in a voice of high disdain: “A part? What part?”

  “The part of a hospital nurse,” cried Katinka, loud and clear for the benefit of the closely listening ear against the pane. “You asked me the other day where you were supposed to have found a substitute so conveniently at hand when your wife was killed. Well, I’ll tell you.” She threw out a hand towards Dai Trouble. “He has a young daughter, an illegitimate daughter; perhaps more than one. Two women left this village twenty years ago on his account. And all Welsh people can act, it’s in the blood, they’re dramatic by nature. …”