by Roy Vickers
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Contents
Roy Vickers
PART ONE MISS PAISLEY’S CAT
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
PART TWO A MAN AND HIS MOTHER N LAW
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
PART FOUR A SENTIMENTAL HOUSE AGENT
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
PART FIVE A FOOL AND HER MONEY
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
PART SIX THE CASE OF THE PERPETUAL SNEER
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
PART EIGHT THE HAIR SHIRT
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Roy Vickers
Eight Murders in the Suburbs
Roy Vickers
Roy Vickers was the author of over 60 crime novels and 80 short stories, many written under the pseudonyms Sefton Kyle and David Durham. He was born in 1889 and educated at Charterhouse School, Brasenose College, Oxford, and enrolled as a student of the Middle Temple. He left the University before graduating in order to join the staff of a popular weekly. After two years of journalistic choring, which included a period of crime reporting, he became editor of the Novel Magazine, but eventually resigned this post so that he could develop his ideas as a freelance. His experience in the criminal courts gave him a view of the anatomy of crime which was the mainspring of his novels and short stories. Not primarily interested in the professional crook, he wrote of the normal citizen taken unawares by the latent forces of his own temperament. His attitude to the criminal is sympathetic but unsentimental.
Vickers is best known for his ‘Department of Dead Ends’ stories which were originally published in Pearson’s Magazine from 1934. Partial collections were made in 1947, 1949, and 1978, earning him a reputation in both the UK and the US as an accomplished writer of ‘inverted mysteries’. He also edited several anthologies for the Crime Writers’ Association.
PART ONE
MISS PAISLEY’S CAT
Chapter One
There are those who have a special affection for cats: and there are those who hold them in physical and even moral abhorrence. The belief lingers that cats have been known to influence a human being—generally an old maid and generally for evil. It is true that Miss Paisley’s cat was the immediate cause of that emotionally emaciated old maid reaching a level of perverted greatness—or stark infamy, according to one’s viewpoint. But this can be explained without resort to mysticism. The cat’s behaviour was catlike throughout.
Miss Paisley’s cat leapt into her life when she was fifty-four and the cat itself was probably about two. Miss Paisley was physically healthy and active—an inoffensive, neatly dressed, self-contained spinster. The daughter of a prosperous business man—her mother had died while the child was a toddler—she had passed her early years in the golden age of the middle classes, when every detached suburban villa had many of the attributes of the baronial hall: if there was no tenantry there was always a handful of traditionally obsequious tradesmen—to say nothing of a resident domestic staff.
She was eighteen, at a ‘finishing school’ in Paris when her father contracted pneumonia and died while in course of reorganising his business. Miss Paisley inherited the furniture of the house, a couple of hundred in cash and an annuity of a hundred and twenty pounds.
Her relations, in different parts of the country, rose to the occasion. Without expert advice they pronounced her unfit for further education or training and decided that, between them, they must marry her off—which ought not to be too difficult. Miss Paisley was never the belle of a ball of any size, but she was a good looking girl, with the usual graces and accomplishments.
In the first round of visits, she accepted the warm assurances of welcome at their face value—yet, she was not an unduly conceited girl. It was her father who had given her the belief that her company was a boon in itself. The technique of the finishing school, too, had been based on a similar assumption.
During the second round of visits—in units of some six months—she made the discovery that her company was rather tolerated than desired—a harsh truth from which she sought immediate escape.
There followed an era of nursery governessing and the companioning of old ladies. The children were hard work and the old ladies were very disappointing. In paid companionship, it is the payee who listens to tales of past grandeur.
Penuriousness and the old ladies were turning her into a humble creature, thankful for the crumbs of life. In her early twenties she obtained permanent employment as a ‘female clerk’ in a Government office. She made her home in Rumbold Chambers, Marpleton, about fifteen miles out of London, and about a mile from the house that had once been her father’s. The Chambers—in this sense a genteel, Edwardian word-meaning flatlets—had already seen better days, and were to see much worse.
The rent would absorb nearly half her annuity; but the Chambers, she believed, had tone. The available flatlet looked over the old cemetery to the 17th century bridge across the river. She signed a life lease. Thus, she was in that flatlet when the cat came, thirty-two years later.
She had taken out of the warehouse as much furniture as would go into the flatlet. The walls were adorned with six enlarged photographs, somewhat pompously framed, of the house and garden that had been her father’s.
The radio came into general use: the talkies appeared and civil aviation was getting into its stride—events which touched her life not at all. Light industry invaded Marpleton and district. Every three months or so she would walk past her old home, until it was demolished to make room for a factory.
If she made no enemies, she certainly made no friends. The finishing school had effectively crippled her natural sociability. At the end of her working day, she would step back thirty odd years into her past.
When the cat appeared, Miss Paisley was talking vivaciously to herself, as is the habit of the solitary.
“I sometimes think Father made a mistake in keeping it as a croquet lawn. Croquet is old fashioned … Oh! How on earth did you get there!”
The cat had apparently strolled on to the window sill—a whole story plus some four feet above ground level. “Animals aren’t allowed in the Chambers, so you must go … Go, please. Whooosh!”
The cat blinked and descended, somewhat awkwardly, into the room.
“What an ugly cat! I shall never forget Aunt Lisa’s
Persian. It looked beautiful, and everybody made an absurd fuss of it. I don’t suppose anybody ever wants to stroke you. People tolerate you, rather wishing you didn’t exist, poor thing!” The cat was sitting on its haunches, staring at Miss Paisley. “Oh, well, I suppose you can stay to tea. I’ve no fish, but there’s some bloater paste I forgot to throw away—and a little milk left over from yesterday.”
Miss Paisley set about preparing tea for herself. It was Saturday afternoon. Chocolate biscuits and two cream eclairs for today, and chocolate biscuits and two meringues for Sunday. When the kettle had boiled and she had made the tea, she scraped a nearly empty tin of bloater paste, spreading it on a thin slice of dry bread. She laid a newspaper on the floor—the carpet had been cut out of the drawing-room carpet of thirty-four years ago. The cat, watching these preparations, purred its approval.
“Poor thing! It’s pathetically grateful,” said Miss Paisley, placing the bloater paste and a saucer of yesterday’s milk on the newspaper.
The cat lowered its head, sniffed the bloater paste but did not touch it. It tried the milk, lapped once, then again sat back on its haunches and stared at Miss Paisley.
The stare of Miss Paisley’s cat was not pleasing to humanity. It was, of course, a normal cat’s stare from eyes that were also normal, though they appeared not to be, owing to a streak of white fur that ran from one eyelid to the opposite ear, then splashed over the spine. A wound from an air-gun made one cheek slightly shorter than the other, revealing a glimpse of teeth and giving the face a suggestion of a human sneer. Add that it had a stiff foreleg, which made its walk ungainly, and you have a very ugly cat—a standing challenge to juvenile marksmanship.
“You’re a stupid cat, too,” said Miss Paisley. “You don’t seem to make the most of your opportunities.”
Miss Paisley sat down to tea. The cat leapt on to the table, seized one of the eclairs, descended cautiously and devoured the eclair on the carpet, several inches from the newspaper.
This time, it was Miss Paisley who stared at the cat.
“That is most extraordinary behaviour!” she exclaimed. “You thrust yourself upon me when I don’t want you. I treat you with every kindness—”
The cat had finished the eclair. Miss Paisley continued to stare. Then her gaze shifted to her own hand which seemed to her to be moving independently of her will. She watched herself pick up the second eclair and lower it to the cat, who tugged it from her fingers.
She removed the saucer under her still empty tea cup, poured today’s milk into it and placed the saucer on the floor. She listened, fascinated, while the cat lapped it all. Her pulse was thudding with the excitement of a profound discovery.
Then, for the first time for thirty odd years, Miss Paisley burst into tears.
“Go away!” she sobbed. “I don’t want you. It’s too late—I’m fifty-four!”
By the time her breath was coming easily again, the cat had curled up on the Chesterfield that was really Miss Paisley’s bed.
Chapter Two
It was a month or more before Miss Paisley knew for certain that she hoped the cat would make its home with her. Her attitude was free from the kind of sentimentality which one associates with an old maid and a cat. She respected its cathood, attributed to it no human qualities, The relationship was too subtle to have need of pretence. Admittedly, she talked to it a great deal. But she talked as if to a room-mate, who might or might not be attending. In this respect, the cat’s role could be compared with that of a paid companion.
“Excuse me, madam!” Jenkins, the watchdog and rent collector, who had replaced the porter of palmier days, had stopped her in the narrow hall. “Would that cat with the black-and-white muzzle be yours by any chance?”
A month ago, Miss Paisley would have dithered with apology for breaking the rules and would have promised instant compliance.
“It is my cat, Jenkins. And I would be very glad to pay you half a crown a week for any trouble it may be to you.”
“That’s very kind of you, madam, and thank you. What I was goin’ to say was that I saw it jump out o’ Mr. Rinditch’s window with a bit o’ fish in its mouth what Mr. Rinditch had left from his breakfast.” He glanced down the passage to make sure that Mr. Rinditch’s door was shut. “You know what Mr. Rinditch is!”
Miss Paisley knew that he was a street bookmaker, with a number of runners who took the actual bets, and that Jenkins stood in awe of him as the only tenant of any financial substance. Mr. Rinditch was a stocky, thickset man with a large sullen face and a very large neck. Miss Paisley thought he looked vulgar, which was a matter of character, whereas the other tenants only looked common, which they couldn’t help.
“I’ll give it proper cats’ meat: then it won’t steal.”
“Thank you, madam!”
The ‘madam’ cost Miss Paisley about four pounds a year. None of the other women were ‘madam’, and none of the men were ‘sir’—not even Mr. Rinditch. Two pounds at Christmas and odd half crowns for small, mainly superfluous services. For Miss Paisley it was a sound investment. In her dream life she was an emigrée, awaiting recall to a style of living which, did she but know it, had virtually ceased to exist in England. It was as if the thirty odd years of unskilled clerical labour were a merely temporary expedient. Through the cat she was acquiring a new philosophy, but the dream was untouched.
“I have to cut your meat,” she explained that evening. “And I’m rather dreading it. You see, I’ve never actually handled raw meat before. It was not considered a necessary item in my education. Though I remember once—we were on a river picnic—two of the servants with the hamper were being driven over …”
She had to ask Jenkins’ advice. He lent her a knife—a formidable object with a black handle and a blade tapering to a point. A French knife, he told her, and she could buy one like it at any ironmonger’s—which she did on the following day. There remained the shuddery business of handling the meat. She sacrificed a memento—a pair of leather driving gloves, which she had worn for horse-riding during her holidays from school.
On the third day of the fourth month the cat failed to appear at its meal time. Miss Paisley was disturbed. She went to bed an hour later than usual, to lie awake until dawn, struggling against the now inescapable fact that the cat had become necessary to her, though she was unable to guess why this should be true. She tried to prove it was not true. She knew how some old maids—and some virile young men, too, for that matter—would dote upon a particular cat, perpetually fondling it and talking baby to it. For her cat she felt nothing at all of that kind of emotion. She knew that her cat was rather dirty, and she never really liked touching it. Indeed, she did not like cats, as such. But there was something about this particular cat—
The cat came through the open window shortly after dawn. She got out of bed and uncovered the meat. The cat yawned, stretched and ignored it, then jumped on to the foot of her bed, circled and settled down, asleep before her own head returned to her pillow. Miss Paisley was now cat-wise enough to know that it must have fed elsewhere, from which she drew the alarming inference that a cat which had strayed once might stray again.
The next day she bought a collar, had it engraved with her name and address and, in brackets, (£1 Reward For Return). She could contemplate expenditure of this kind without unease because, in the thirty odd years, she had saved more than five hundred pounds.
That evening, she fastened the collar in position. The cat pulled it off. Miss Paisley unfastened the special safety buckle and tried again—tried five times before postponing further effort.
“Actually, you yourself have taught me how to handle this situation,” she said, the following morning. “You refused the bloater paste and the not very fresh milk. You were right! Now, it will be a great pity if we have to quarrel and see no more of each other, but—no collar—no meat!”
After small initial misunderstandings the cat accepted the collar for the duration of the meal. On the third evening the ca
t forgot to scratch it off after the meal. In a week, painstaking observation revealed that the cat had become unconscious of the collar. Even when it scratched the collar in course of scratching itself, it made no effort to remove the collar. It wore the collar for the rest of its life.
After the collar incident, their relationship was established on a firmer footing. She bought herself new clothes—including a hat that was too young for her and a lumber-jacket in suede, as green as a cat’s eyes. There followed a month of tranquillity, shadowed only by a warning from Jenkins that the cat had failed to shake off its habit of visiting Mr. Rinditch’s room. She noticed something smarmy in the way Jenkins told her about it—as if he enjoyed telling her. For the first time, there came to her the suspicion that the ‘madam’ was ironic and a source of amusement to Jenkins.
On the following Saturday came evidence that, in this matter at least, Jenkins had spoken truly. She would reach home shortly after one on Saturdays. While she was on her way across the hall to the staircase, the door of Mr. Rinditch’s room opened. Mr. Rinditch’s foot was visible, as was Miss Paisley’s cat. The cat was projected some four feet across the corridor. As it struck the panelling of the staircase, Miss Paisley felt a violent pain in her own ribs. She rushed forward, tried to pick up her cat. The cat spat at her and hobbled away. For a moment she stared after it, surprised and hurt by its behaviour. Then suddenly, she brightened.
“You won’t accept pity!” she murmured. She tossed her head: her eyes sparkled with a kind of happiness that was new to her. She knocked on Mr. Rinditch’s door. When the large, sullen face appeared, she met it with a cat-like stare.
“You kicked my cat.”
“Your cat, is it! Then I’ll thank you to keep it out o’ my room.”
“I regret the trespass—”
“So do I. If I catch ’im in ’ere again, he’ll swing for it, and it’s me tellin’ yer.” Mr. Rinditch slammed his door.
