Cat's Eyes

by Alan Scholefield

  “Are you still there, Rachel?” The voice was mocking now.

  The moon had come up from behind the clouds and Rachel could see Celia’s figure outlined at the window. Then she smelled a well-known smell and realised what was happening: Celia was pouring kerosine through the window and down the coal-chute. It ran on to the floor and began to form a small pool.

  “Celia! For God’s sake ... !”

  “For who’s sake? Never heard of him. For Bill’s sake. For Charlie’s sake. Yes, that’s more like it.”

  “Charlie!”

  “You weren’t content with Bill. You had to have Charlie too.”

  “That’s a lie!”

  “Do you think I believe that? You wanted him. You led him on. Do you think I believed all that rubbish about how he tried to rape you?”

  “It was you!” Rachel said. “You were the one he was having an affair with. Mrs. Leech knew there was someone. She thought it was me. But it was you. When he was supposed to be working for you.”

  “Clever Rachel. Clever, clever Rachel! My God, it took you long enough. Yes, me. We only had ten days. Then you killed him.”

  “I didn’t ...”

  “I don’t care how. You killed him.”

  “It was an accident!”

  Celia ignored her. “People think you can simply strike a match and light kerosine,” she said, conversationally.

  Suddenly, Rachel felt Alec’s hand on her arm. “The gun!” he whispered.

  She had completely forgotten the shotgun clamped to the beam but as soon as she tried to rise to her feet, she knew her leg would never stand it. “My knee! I can’t,” she whispered back.

  “ ... they’re always doing it in the movies,” Celia went on. Rachel strained her eyes, but could not make out what she was doing. “A tin of the stuff, a match and, whoosh, a whole building gone.”

  “Keep her talking,” Alec said. “I’ll try ...”

  “ ... nonsense,” Celia said. “It won’t light. You must have kindling.”

  Alec began to pull himself along the floor, dragging his body through the pool of kerosine.

  “Celia, please listen!” Rachel wasn’t sure what she was going to say, only that she had to go on talking.

  But Celia was lost in her own thoughts. “Wood shavings make good kindling. I found some in the shed. Hope you don’t mind.”

  The kerosine had reached Rachel and was soaking into her clothing. Again she tried to stand, but could not.

  Her eyes had become accustomed to the darkness and she could see that Alec was now just below the gun. Instead of pulling himself upright against the freezer, he crawled on, and she realised he was making for the chute and the string which, if he could grasp it, would fire the gun.

  “This isn’t the way I planned it,” Celia went on. “But it’ll do. Charred body of young mother found in burnt house. What could have happened?”

  “Do you think the police are fools?” Rachel said.

  Alec had managed to reach the chute.

  “The police? Why should they investigate?” Celia said. “These old houses. Something must have gone wrong with the wiring. What about suicide? Balance of the mind disturbed. She had been acting strangely lately. Thought a cat was haunting her. A cat? Yes, a cat. Such a shame. And so young. There. That’s just about right.”

  Below her line of vision Alec was pulling himself upright against the chute, reaching his hand towards the string. And then Rachel saw something was wrong. In his semi-blindness, in the dark of the cellar, he was reaching to the wrong side of the window, his hand a foot away from the line of the string.

  “Alec!” she hissed.

  Startled, he jerked backwards, did not have the strength to recover, and fell.

  “Alec! Are you all right?” She heard him struggling to his feet, and she remembered the torch. His voice echoed in her mind from the hours they had spent in the cellar, waiting for the cat: “ ... aim it at the tear in the mesh. Only way I can see with this bloody eye. If she could illuminate the string for him now ...

  She switched on the torch. Celia was leaning forward, her face witchlike, about to strike a match and light the wood shavings. Below her, on the floor, lay Alec. The light no longer mattered to him. And then she saw the eyes, cat’s eyes, flaring in the light of the torch.

  *

  Invisible as it crouched below the window, the cat had stayed where it was even when the woman had piled her shavings beside its body.

  But the torch provided the shock which finally roused it into one last effort at self-preservation. Hissing, it launched itself upwards, claws extended, straight into Celia’s face. She screamed and beat at the bundle of black fur. As she struggled, she fell forward, her elbow smashed through the hole in the mesh and caught the string.

  There was a roar as the shotgun went off and the cat and the woman flew backwards.

  In the cellar, Rachel was deafened by the noise and her nose was filled with cordite fumes.

  As the echoes of the blast died down she heard a voice shouting: “Rachel! Rachel!” It was coming from outside. She heard feet running on gravel.

  “Rachel! Where are you? Are you all right?”

  Bill had come home.

  *

  “That’s what I can’t seem to take in,” Rachel said. “That Celia was Sally.”

  She was sitting with Bill in front of the fire. Their arms were intertwined, their fingers laced, as though subconsciously they were locking on to each other like vines. It was dawn, but neither of them felt like sleep. Instead, they had made a huge pot of coffee and had laced it with brandy. The police and the ambulances had gone. Celia’s body had been removed for an autopsy and Alec had been rushed to an intensive care unit in Chichester. They had made separate statements to the police. Now, to each other, they went over them again and again, trying to make sense of the situation. They finished the first pot of coffee and made another. They smoked too many cigarettes. They talked and talked, and gradually the story behind the story emerged.

  Celia was its pivot, and always had been. “I married her when I was twenty-one and she was twenty,” Bill said. “We’d only known each other for a few weeks. After the wedding, the first thing I discovered about her was that she was a pathological liar. She liked to use different names. She had told me her first name was Sally, for instance. They were lies like that, pointless, something you could find out about immediately. But she didn’t seem to care. Anyway, I was amused by it at first, so I went on calling her Sally. But she told more serious lies, too, and when I found out she would be angry. And she’d steal — take money out of my pockets and then deny it. Once she sold my silver cigarette case, but blamed our cleaning woman for having stolen it.”

  “She tried that on with Penny,” Rachel said.

  “I began to watch her more carefully and after a while I realised something: I’d been doing research on psychopaths for a novel and, Christ, here was one in my own house. She was a classic case. No remorse, no conscience, erratic behaviour, amoral attitudes. It was all there. And at the same time, she could be absolutely charming.”

  “She said she’d had a baby. Was that a lie?”

  “No, it was real enough,” he said bleakly. “It was a mistake, of course. By the time I knew what she was, the last thing I wanted her to be was the mother of my child. But once she knew she was pregnant, there was nothing I could do about it. She refused to have an abortion. In fact, she became obsessed by her unborn child. Her whole life centred around it. She related everything to it: the food she ate, drinking, smoking, walking, driving, everything ...” His voice trailed off.

  “What happened?”

  ‘The baby was a girl, three weeks premature. They put her in an oxygen tent because, like a lot of premature babies, she had a respiratory problem. But apparently there’s also a problem with an oxygen tent. If you keep a baby in too long it can go blind, if you take it out too soon it can have breathing difficulties. Well, in this case they made the wrong decision
. They took her out of the oxygen tent and she died twenty-four hours later. Sally went off her head. Accused the hospital of murder and then attacked one of the nurses with a pair of scissors. Bloody nearly killed the woman. So they put her away in a psychiatric ward until she’d got over it.

  “When she came home, things went from bad to worse. She’d always slept around. Now she didn’t even try to cover up. She went after any man in sight. Once I found her in bed with the chap who had come to fix the dish-washer.” He reached for the pot and poured himself another cup of coffee. “I’d had enough by then, so I left her.”

  “Did you ever see her again?”

  “All too often,” he said grimly. “She began to haunt me, out of pure malice. She would wait for me outside my flat. She even used to go to my publishers and tell them the most appalling lies about me.”

  “What did you do?”

  “I ran away. Took off for the States. I’d only been there a couple of months when I heard she’d been picked up for shoplifting in Harrod’s and had tried to kill the store detective. So they put her away again for observation and from there they sent her to Rapley.”

  “Rapley?”

  “It’s a psychiatric unit in Yorkshire. She had been born up that way. I came back to England then, and one day I got a call from the superintendent of the unit saying Sally had been asking to see me. He said it might do her some good if I went. But she wouldn’t speak to me. They put the two of us in a private room and she just sat there, looking out of the window. I remember it was winter and snow on the ground. Very bleak. I tried and tried to get her to talk but she just stared out at the snow. Then when I was leaving she smiled at me in that way she had, sort of ...”

  “Mocking.”

  “Yes. And she said, ‘The baby wasn’t yours, of course.’ That was all. I left.”

  “Oh, darling ...”

  “I found out something else while I was there. Since I was in the district I thought I’d check on her family — she’d always claimed she had no relations — in case there was someone who might help her. I went to the local newspaper office and asked an old reporter if he knew anyone around there called James and he said it was a common name, but if I meant the Jameses then of course he knew them, or knew about them, anyway. Most people did. He let me have the newspaper files and I read about it.”

  “About what?”

  “The case. Well, not a case really, she’d been too young. But apparently she and her mother had lived in a large house near Rapley, and one day the house burned down. Her mother died. She’d been locked in a cupboard. Sally was only ten then and said they’d been playing hide and seek.”

  Rachel shivered. “She’d locked her mother in?”

  “Bolted the door, to be exact. But no one could prove anything. The door might have buckled in the heat and the bolt might have moved into the socket. It was just a possibility. In any case, there was no proof and no apparent motive.”

  “But you think ... ?”

  “Yes. I think she did it.”

  “What happened when she came out of Rapley?”

  “Obviously, she started looking for me. It wouldn’t have been difficult. She only needed a copy of Bird of Paradise. Remember the blurb? ‘William Chater now lives with his wife in a country house near Chichester, Sussex.’ ”

  “So she bought the cottage, but you had left for America and she found Charlie and Sophie and me — and Alec.”

  “That’s about it. And set out to destroy us.”

  Rachel sat up suddenly. “Bill! Your book! I found a piece of paper with my dream on it and — and a plan to get rid of an unwanted wife. When Celia told me that story about Sally being in America, I thought ... She stopped.

  “That you were the unwanted wife?” He began to laugh. “Darling, your imagination is far ahead of mine! I used that dream of yours as the basis for the plot but I didn’t tell you because I didn’t want to say anything at that stage that would remind you of the accident. The book’s nearly finished, incidentally, you can read it any time you like.”

  She felt the last shadows falling from her mind. After a moment, she said: “Alec said Celia loved cats. Is that why you don’t like them?”

  “Yes. She always had the house full of them. She was like a witch with her familiars. When I left her I never wanted to see another cat.”

  She thought of something else, and frowned. “Darling, what made you come back so suddenly?”

  “My God, don’t you remember? You wrote me that letter about your trip to London with her. You mentioned her name. I was terrified. Within, oh, less than an hour, I’d made a booking for the next flight to New York. I tried to call you, but the line was engaged, so I asked Talini to send the telegram. I must have been well on the way by the time you got it.”

  “And you’re here to stay?”

  He shook his head and she felt suddenly sick.

  “You have to go back?”

  “We have to go back.”

  If you enjoyed Cat’s Eyes, check out Endeavour Press’s other books here: Endeavour Press - the UK’s leading independent publisher of digital books.

  For weekly updates on our free and discounted eBooks sign up to our newsletter.

  Follow us on Twitter and Goodreads.

  Table of Contents

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16