Cat and Mouse

by Christianna Brand

  “Oddly enough,” said Carlyon, “you look to me just like a tasty little mouse!” And he turned on her a smile of indescribable evil and shot out one brown hand and grasped hold of her wrist.

  She began to struggle, blindly, half terrified, half in doubt. “Carlyon, you’re playing, you’re having some joke! But don’t, please don’t! It’s horrid, you’re frightening me!” She looked up into the glaring eyes again and gave one shrill, short, broken-off little shriek. “Scream away!” he said. “There’s nobody to hear you. Your boyfriend the Inspector has gone off into Neath with Mrs. Love, Dai Trouble’s in Swansea by now, and you yourself have just seen Miss Evans’s boat safely across the river. I was waiting for that. We’re alone on the mountain now, all alone.” And he shook her till the teeth seemed to rattle in her mouth, and said: “You goddamned bitch! Spoiling my plans, mucking up everything, endangering the whole affair! My God, women!” he said. “Preserve me from women—except rich ones, of course! Drooling over me, slavering over me with your sickening infatuations—I bury myself fathoms deep in mountains and mist and no less than two of you have to seek me out and dog my footsteps night and day, not to mention that poor half-wit monster drooling after me. As if murder wasn’t a tricky enough business without my having to keep half a dozen doting women at bay!”

  “Carlyon, for God’s sake…”

  But he gathered her two wrists in one hand and with his free hand closed his thin fingers round her throat, forcing her head back, staring down into her starting eyes, like a hypnotist. “Oh, yes, I’ve played cat and mouse with you, my dear! Played it for my life’s sake—keeping you always at arm’s length, luring you back with pretended fits of anger, dotted in between little half-hints of passion to keep you going, all full of phony symbolism. …” He imitated his own half-brusque, half-tender voice. “‘It’s like the rainbow—too perfect, too soon!’ What woman could resist hanging on to see what happened at the rainbow’s end?” He released her suddenly and, unbelievably free, she fought with all her strength to dart away from him, to scramble up off the little ledge to where, from the precipice edge, the broad mountain rolled back. He let her go; then in three strides caught her again, caught at her skirt and dragged her back by the wrist and flung her to the ground.

  “A Siamese cat, am I? Well, here’s one Siamese cat that does like to torture its prey.” He stood over her and, when she struggled to rise, put the arch of one shoe across her narrow wrist. “Stay there, you infernal bitch, and listen to me! And drink your fill, Miss Jones, look your last upon dear Carlyon—for you will not see my like again, nor the like of any man.”

  He bowed over her, the instep of his shoe crunching horribly over the delicate bones. “You see before you, my dear, a professional charmer, a man endowed with the dangerous gift of being able to look sad. You don’t know what a fatal fascination that has for women, any women, all women. And to be able to look at the same time very sad, and very young…” He shrugged. “Irresistible! A kitchen-maid at my public school taught me that. A delicious slut she was, too!” He seemed to fall into a pleasant reverie, contemplating the half-forgotten charms of seducer or seduced of long ago.

  Katinka wrenched frantically at the captive wrist, fighting to get up to her feet before sick horror overwhelmed her, robbing her of strength to make the final effort. “Let me up, you fiend, you devil, let me get up…!”

  He raised her to her feet immediately, with an air of solicitude. “Always the gentleman, you see. Always the charmer.” And he laughed and quoted, once again horribly mimicking his own words: “But beware of charm, Miss Jones! Charm takes all sorts of guises, it isn’t just being gushing or brilliant or gay, or looking nice. The dangerous part about it is that, whatever form it takes, it always seems sincere. In some mysterious way your professional charmer always is sincere—even when he least means it.” He gave her his mirthless, glittering smile. “I’ve said that to you before, my dear—haven’t I?”

  “Yes,” whispered Tinka, hypnotized by the glare in the pale blue eyes.

  “Yes. I’ve got it by heart, you see. I’ve said it to so many women, and laughed to see them goggle-eyed at me!”

  She began to fight again, wrenching frantically at her captive wrists. “Let me go, let me go!”

  “Oh, I’ll let you go soon enough,” he said. “And then you’ll be ready to give your immortal soul for a handclasp, even mine. But too late—because you’ll be falling through space like that other idiot girl with her ghastly face, and like the lady whose photograph you so inconveniently discovered, and another young woman still, that you’ve never even heard of—neither you nor the police. Poor young husband! Wasn’t he heart-broken? Every time!”

  “Let me go!” screamed Katinka, blind with terror, wrenching at his wrists.

  “In a minute, in a minute. You must let the cat have his fun first with the mouse. And pay you out for all the nuisance you’ve been to me—not to say danger. Letting on to the police about Angel! They’ve never been really satisfied about that so-called motor-smash in the South of France. In fact, I’ve a shrewd suspicion that Chucky was sent down here in the first place to keep an eye on me. Much good may it do him!”

  Red mist rose before her eyeballs, she swayed and struggled and nothing was real but the iron ring of his fingers round her wrists, and the ghastly cold voice going on and on and on. “Talk about cats! I thought the damn girl had nine lives; I couldn’t get her to die. Acres and acres of rocks, and she has to fall on grass! I lugged her up, unconscious, and heaved her further over the edge to where the car had gone; but does she fall into the flames—not she! Catches her dress on a rock. I took up her head and bashed it against the rock and bashed and bashed and bashed…” He went off into peals of incredible laughter. “And had to fork out two thousand of her hard-earned pounds afterwards, to repair the results of my handiwork! Some damned French nosey-parker has to come motor-biking along before she’s dead. I was a bit dazed by then—things had gone so wrong; it seems I kept saying I wished she was dead, but mercifully they took it the right way, and only poked their damn French noses in a bit and went away shaking their heads and saying how sad it was. But they murmured a gentle word to the police over here, just the same. No false sentimentality about the French. But I could see I would have to be careful, so I hawked her around and lashed out a lot of money on her, and finally brought her down here. I kept her under drugs as much as I could, only that bloody old woman was so keen on her duty. I nearly managed it once when she’d gone off for a day or two, but it didn’t come off and I had to go more carefully than ever. I was playing up the idea of suicide as much as I could. But not she—she clung to life, with her dear, loving Carlyon.” He broke off. “It’s fun to be telling you all this. Murder’s a lonely business: there’s never anyone to talk to.”

  She hung, cold and sick, across his arm, gathering strength for one last struggle to get away.

  “And then, fool that I was, hoping that you’d be filled with a beautiful pity and keep your dirty little journalistic trap shut, I let you in to see her. And she sees you.”

  Cool movement of the pointed finger-nail, whispering in her palm; dry rustle of scarred skin, forcing the jade ring over the broken knuckles…

  “She recognized you, of course, and the moment you’d gone she gets the whole story out, thrilled to pieces—wants me to explain to you where you met before, arrange another meeting. I had to refuse, and there seemed no very reasonable excuse. Perhaps she began to smell the faintest possible niff of a rat about then, but anyway she always wanted her own way; she was an obstinate, spoilt little bitch. She was determined to see you again—if not in the house, then somewhere else; so she writes the note asking you to meet her in the caves, and tries to give it to you before you leave. …”

  Katinka covered her face with her hands, to shut out the horror of his face, gloating down into hers: blue eyes, brown skin, silver hair—the once-beloved face compared with which poor Angel’s monstrous ruin would now have s
eemed beauty beyond compare. “She wrote that note? But it said…”

  “Oh, I topped and tailed it,” he said airily. “She’d had the ring wrapped up in it, trying to give you the ring and the message before you left the house. It must have come unstuck when you were fussing about with the handbag. Anyway, when you’d gone I picked it up off the floor. By then, of course, she’d seen the photograph, and I decided that this would have to be the end. The note came in very useful. I gave it back to her with a gentle word or two and—well, perhaps I looked at her too much like a cat with its prey.

  “Anyway, she runs off shrieking out of the house, and obligingly makes for the chosen spot. I suppose she’d have chucked herself over anyway, if I’d only left well alone, but after what had happened in the hall, I couldn’t risk her not killing herself for sure. So I took the snare out of my pocket as I ran, and just chucked it neatly at her feet when she came up out of the cave. It was never set at all and as it happened it wasn’t needed, because over she went. I was a damn fool to just chuck it down like that, but I lost my head, I suppose, a thing I’m a little too much inclined to do, like saying after the car smash that I wished she’d been killed. Anyway, it would have been risky to have been found with it in my pocket. I often carried one; they come in unexpectedly useful sometimes. I did the first girl in with a snare—round her throat, you know.”

  But Katinka was no longer listening, she was not taking in a word. She looked down over the sickening height of the precipice. “Carlyon, for God’s sake, I don’t know anything, I’ve never seen anything, I never for one moment really suspected you! Carlyon, for God’s sake let me go! Let me go, and I won’t…”

  If I’m dead, she thought, what good will that do? He’ll go on murdering other women just the same—if I’m dead or if I keep silence, it’ll all be the same.

  “Carlyon, if you’ll spare me, I’ll swear, I’ll swear by everything I hold sacred, I’ll swear never to tell this to anyone!” But his eyes were blank blue stones. “Then, Carlyon, kill me some other way! But not this—don’t send me hurtling over the edge of this ghastly precipice into space.”

  Poor mutilated Angela, legs ludicrously uppermost, tumbling through the empty air to fall, smashed and horrible, on the rocks below. “Carlyon, for God’s sake—I saw her fall; for God’s sake, don’t throw me down!”

  But she knew it was in vain. Her head was muffled in veils of horror and fear, her mind was blank, there was a dank red mist before her eyes, but through it pierced one thought—nothing would help her, to beg for mercy was in vain. In a moment, I am going to die. A minute, perhaps two minutes, five minutes, but when he has finished talking at me, when he’s tired of it, I am going to die. When he’s tired of showing off to me! She knew that they were alone upon the mountain, by no sort of calculation could Dai be back from Swansea or Miss Evans across the river again and up the steep mountainside, or Chucky returned from Neath. She was alone. Nothing, nothing was to be gained by argument or pleading but a further moment or two of life. Yet even that was dear.

  “Why, Carlyon! Why, why should you want to kill me? It’s dangerous for you, another ‘accident,’ and after all, I didn’t know anything that other people didn’t know, there was nothing I could tell!”

  “Oh, but yes,” he said. “You did know something. There was something you could tell—though I don’t think you’d recognized it yet. As long as Angel played the piano it was so obviously to my interest to keep her alive that nobody could suspect me seriously of wanting her to die. So first accident must surely be—just an accident after all. I wouldn’t have wanted to kill the goose that was laying the golden—and such golden—eggs. But the ring! She had to go and tell you about the ring.”

  “The ring?”

  “Sooner or later you were going to tumble to it, and when you did, you would be the only person in the world who knew about that ring.” He dropped her wrist for a moment, and secretly, hopelessly, she began to try and gather strength to dart away. “The rotten bad luck of it all! Just a few weeks married, set up for life, nothing to do but bask in her glory and watch the shekels rolling in—and she scratches her hand on the filthy old ring and the poison takes hold, eating into her hand, drawing up the muscles, nothing to be done about it, nothing. … Hundreds of pounds, thousands of pounds to be squandered in search of some cure for a hand that I knew damn well would never be really right again, never stretch an octave again, and that was all that mattered—never bring in a shilling again. Sing? She could no more sing than a corncrake, a little piping chirrup that they put up with because of her piano playing—just something to do in the intervals of the serious stuff. Ten quid a week on the halls her singing would have brought us in—and that only for a few years, on the strength of her old reputation. No, no, that wasn’t what I’d married Angel for. I’d kept the wedding pictures out of the papers—where the relatives of the other dear departeds might have seen them; and meanwhile I carted her over to the Continent where she wouldn’t be so easily recognized, and showed her hand to two or three surgeons there. But they only confirmed what I knew already. Angel Soone was no longer of the slightest use to me. And before anyone realized that, she would have to go. I persuaded her that it would be bad publicity to say anything about her injured hand; I made her wear a muff to conceal the bandages. But (only I didn’t realize it till this afternoon), she’d already told one person. She had to go and babble it all out to a tuppenny journalist who would one day put two and two together and make it—a noose.”

  “Tell me? She told me nothing! She merely said that she’d scratched her finger on the broken bit inside the ring. I had no idea that it was infected; she was playing that night, it still wasn’t serious.”

  “You said she’d told you about the ring making a sore place on her finger ‘and everything’; she knew—she was playing but she was playing badly that night, and we’d arranged to take some time off because of it. She knew that her finger was infected.”

  “I swear to you, I swear that she didn’t tell me. I didn’t know.”

  “Well, you know now,” he said. “So I’m afraid that in any case it has to be goodbye—and as you so truly said this afternoon, this time it really is going to be goodbye.” She made one frantic dart for the bank, but he caught her again as easily as before, and her last, pathetic little hope was gone. “Say your prayers, my dear: it’s all over with you. And nice Mr. Carlyon, homme fatal, has yet another mysterious death at his door that nobody can ever quite bring home to him.”

  Pale eyes, terrible pale eyes of a cat with its prey, glaring down into hers. Terrible claws holding her close, terrible mouth with the drawn-back lips over the gleaming teeth… Terrible, helpless, hopeless, squealing of the doomed mouse. Carlyon dragged her to the edge. “So, over you go! One—two—three…”

  A clap of thunder sounded in her ears, reverberating in the bowl of the precipice two hundred feet below. She rocked and swayed and was violently jerked backwards; and his face, enormous and distorted with screaming was close to hers—was a thousand thousand, misty miles away. … But he came at her again, and the ghastly cat mouth was open, pale lips stretched across the white teeth, pale lips slowly dribbling a thread of scarlet blood. Blood, spurted up with the violence of his choking, spattered her upturned, screaming face. He fought with her, dragged her up with him, swayed with her to the chasm’s edge.

  He screamed: “If you shoot again, you’ll shoot her! She’ll go over with me!” A terrible silence fell. She could feel his weight swaying against her, she could feel the strength ebbing out of him; only his fingers were tight upon her wrists. Blood welled up out of his mouth and ran down his chin. He whispered: “I’m dying. … I’m dying. …”

  “Carlyon, for Christ’s sake, let me go!”

  But he only whispered: “I’m dying. I’m going to fall.”

  Inspector Chucky stood above the grassy ledge, his face sheet-white, the revolver in his hand; and something darted out of the caves behind them and with one arm thr
ust Katinka aside to lie sprawling on the grass at Inspector Chucky’s feet; and closed with Carlyon.

  The revolver hung useless in Chucky’s hand. “Push him away from you! I can’t shoot, I’m afraid of hitting you! But he’s weak, he’s helpless, push him away from you, push him over the edge. …” He leapt down to the platform and tried frantically to catch hold of the writhing bodies, of a flailing arm, he flung himself on the ground and grabbed wildly at the threshing legs. “Let go! I Let go of him! He’s weak, shove him off you, he’ll pull you over the edge…!”

  But little Miss Evans had longed for a lover and now that his arms were about her, she could not let him go. His pale mouth, all bloodstained, was open in screaming, his pale eyes looked down blindly into hers; his hair—his hair was “soft and sort of spikey” so that you must long to put up your hand and stroke it gently out of the witless eyes. …

  Swaying and stumbling, dreadfully dancing, they moved to the crumbling edge of the precipice; and, still locked together, hurtled, screaming, down to the rocks below.

  Little Miss Evans had longed for her lover, and now lay at peace for ever and ever, close to his evil heart.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  THE JUNIOR TYPIST, NOTEBOOK in hand, softly closed the pink office door behind her and went down the long pink corridor to the pink office door of Miss Let’s-be-Lovely. Miss Let’s-be-Lovely looked up from her typewriter. She wore an extravagant bust bodice over her dress which pointed her rounded bosoms to the skies. “What do you think of this for a title on brassières, Pat—‘Keeping Up Appearances’?”

  Pat said that Miss Friendly-wise had used that long ago for a bit about false spiritualists, and added that ackcherly it was about Miss Friendly-wise that she wanted advice.