Come Home and Be Killed

by Jennie Melville

  Kathy peeled a few potatoes while she thought about things. If Mumsy and Janet had planned to be out to supper tonight without telling her that would alter things. Admittedly not like them because the three women usually shared plans. Anyway, didn’t that cut Rob’s telephone message? He expected to find Janet in as usual. Or did he? Perhaps you couldn’t read Rob as easily as you’d thought.

  The kitchen door bell rang with a shrillness and persistence that made her jump. It would be wrong to say Kathy was as yet afraid, but the first little frissons of alarm were running up and down her nerves. She was beginning to think she ought to be afraid.

  ‘Hiya,’ said a high voice. ‘ Groceries is here.’ He marched in and planted a great big box of groceries on the kitchen table. ‘That ought to keep you going for a while.’ He was a tall lank young man with a cheerful smile and a private worry: he feared he was out-growing his strength. Kathy knew that he usually got a cup of tea from Mrs Birley.

  ‘You’re late tonight,’ she said, trying to think.

  ‘Listen. I’ve been calling all day with these. Couldn’t get anyone in. Usually leave ’em anyway. Couldn’t. The back door was locked. Not usually.’

  ‘When was that?’

  ‘This morning.’ He looked round the kitchen. ‘Where’s the old lady?’

  ‘Out,’ said Kathy tersely.

  ‘Is she now?’ He looked round the kitchen. ‘ Well she wasn’t expecting to be, not this morning.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘She said so. Home all day, she said. Besides, she was going to give herself a home hair treatment. She’d never go out dripping.’

  Kathy knew this to be true. Mrs Birley had her hair dyed with regularity on the second Friday of the month, every other month. Kathy thought she overdid it, but it was her hair.

  ‘How do you know that?’ she asked mechanically.

  The boy looked at her scornfully. ‘ Oh go on,’ he said. ‘Every so often on a Friday, she shouts down to me, “leave the goods on the table, Harry.” Or else she wears a turban and says “ I’ve only got a cold, Harry.” Cold! I know she was dyeing her hair, she knew I knew too, but we kept it up. Saw her shopping for it yesterday. My girl works in the chemist’s. She was getting a new sort of dye. Sweetie Pie Black it was called.’

  … That was Deerham Hills all over thought Kathy resentfully. You couldn’t keep a thing to yourself. Even the errand boy knew when you dyed your hair and what colour.

  ‘She might have put off the job.’

  ‘No, she hadn’t when she telephoned, she had to ring off quick because it was dripping all down her back.’

  ‘You have television eyes I presume?’ said Kathy.

  ‘No, the baker told me.’

  ‘Well, hair dye or not,’ said Kathy slowly, ‘she’s not here now.’

  ‘Listen,’ said the boy getting up, ‘ when she gets back tell her that I’ve got a good line in devilled shrimps coming up. She was asking.’

  ‘I’ll tell her,’ said Kathy, wishing he would go. But he stood there for a minute or two longer. Then he drew a little pile of money, a note and some silver from his pocket and with a side-long glance at Kathy placed it carefully on the table. ‘ Here, that’s her winnings from the two-thirty at Kempton Park. Ten to one.’

  ‘So that’s it,’ thought Kathy. ‘I always knew there was something. All that talking and giggling over the teacups.’

  Trembling, Kathy found herself locking the door behind the boy. ‘I don’t like his face,’ she said to herself. ‘I don’t care what you say, he’s not a nice boy. Mumsy ought not to have encouraged him. Why it’s putting temptation his way. Supposing she had a big win, would he hand the money over?’

  She went upstairs to wash her hands. The bathroom was a pretty room with bright blue curtains covered with little fish. The bath was blue and so was the hand basin. It was warm and cosy and snug and represented all that the Birley women liked about bathrooms: it was one of the few points where they all saw the same picture.

  Kathy stood there at the blue hand basin and let the warm water trickle over her fingers. It was relaxing and soothing. She could admit now that she was frightened and worried. The fear was one she had tried very hard to push to the back of her mind, and to keep up the mask of being normal. But here in this little blue room she could let it slip for a second and admit the truth. She was afraid. She closed her eyes and dreamed she was out of here, bathing in a warm lagoon and the water that was running over her hands was enfolding her entire body. When she opened her eyes she at once spotted something wrong. It was a small spot of blood on the blue tile by the side of the bath. A round blob of dark dried red. Only blood could look like that. It was not hair dye, or lipstick, or nail varnish, but blood. Blood where no blood should be.

  Kathy sat there on the edge of the bath and considered things.

  You had to come down to brass tacks. The house which should have been full of people was empty. Two people, who by rights should have been milling round in the kitchen getting in each other’s way, laughing and quarrelling, were just not there. They had disappeared.

  The house was quiet and motionless, but it still breathed the warm airs of living, the flowers smelled sweet and the coal furnace creaked. It was awfully hard not to believe that Mrs Birley was not down there in the kitchen, cooking supper. Or in her case, burning it.

  Kathy went into Mumsy’s room and shut the door behind her. She leaned against it and thought. Every door and most of the drawers were gaping wide open. All the women in Mumsy’s family suffered slightly from claustrophobia, and Kathy was often very glad indeed that she was not, actually, of the blood.

  Was there some clue to where if anywhere Mumsy and Janet had got to? By now it was pretty clear to anyone that Janet wasn’t coming home. To all intents and appearances she had given her sister the slip (half-sister and a thin half at that) and cleared out.

  Kathy went over to her sister’s cupboards. Janet had been wearing, when last seen, a grey suit with a short jacket and a pleated skirt. It was an expensive model. Janet paid entirely too much for her clothes. Be funny if that suit was here, thought Kathy with grim amusement. But it wasn’t. Mumsy had been wearing a bright pink check skirt and a peasant blouse, and you wouldn’t expect her to go out in that, although knowing Mumsy she might well have done. She could see by the trail of powder across the dressing-table that Mumsy had applied her usual layer of pretty pink face powder before setting out. Mumsy was using powder and nail varnish in a shade ‘Pink with a Wink,’ although when Mumsy was in full fig, it was more like ‘Pink with a Blink.’ It conjured up a vivid picture of that gay, plump, innocent, and often maddening face. Kathy frowned. The frown tuned up the muscles on her face, made her look vulnerable and younger and tired. Mumsy’s top coat had gone and that made sense of the picture of her rushing off.

  But there was another thing, or rather a collection of other little things, and because of them Kathy stood by the door feeling slightly sick and anxious.

  Certain clothes were gone. Just gone. Janet’s clothes were in such a muddle you couldn’t tell what was what, and anyway, just having been away on a visit, Janet naturally had a few things with her. But Mumsy’s clothes were kept in an order of a sort, that is to say her old clothes were piled on top of each other and her new ones got reasonable treatment. And because of this, because of empty bags and hangers, Kathy could see straight away that Mumsy’s best fur trimmed mock Balenciaga winter coat had gone, and the hat that went with it and the shoes and the bag. AND the older tweed coat Mumsy went shopping in and her old hat. She wondered if Mumsy was selling her clothes again, she did sometimes sell her clothes if driven to it by financial straits, but Kathy had not heard of anything lately and for sure she would have heard. Somehow she didn’t like the disappearance of the coat and hat.

  Once again, irrationally, Kathy thought of the blood in the bathroom. She had wiped it away off the wall but she couldn’t wipe it out of her mind. Nor, come to think of it, had sh
e rinsed out the cloth. She must do that.

  Walking towards the front door, anxiously mulling over what she had found, Kathy saw the scratches on the floor. They were a track of long scratches, as of nails, on the hard polished wood floor.… They’ll take some getting out, thought Kathy’s housewifely mind. How did they get there and what caused them? asked a nervous worried fret in her head.

  It was the sort of scratch a heavy body being dragged might make.

  Supposing I was a detective, thought Kathy, what would I make of that?

  She gave herself a little shake. You couldn’t have thoughts like that just from looking at three or four scratches. Four scratches, said the accurate observer that lived inside Kathy and looked out so sharply at the world from behind her big eyes, four scratches. She bent down and measured them, there was half an inch between one scratch and the next, then about a foot, and then another scratch half an inch from the next one. They trailed towards the door.

  Back in the kitchen Kathy made herself more tea. It was now utterly impossible not to admit to worry, puzzle and alarm.

  She sat down to her cup of tea and began to wonder at what time it would look natural, and not utterly fantastic and mad to call the police.

  The house was quiet and still and ominous. Usually she loved the kitchen, it was her kitchen, especially, as now, when so empty and sweet and tidy. The tea swam about uneasily inside her and she realised that it was many hours since she had last eaten. Far, far too many hours for good sense. She made herself butter a piece of bread and eat it with a slice of the ham she had cooked herself, and therefore trusted. She washed and dried her dishes tidily, and as she pulled the knife drawer out to replace the ham knife a shower of the little green stamps fell out, stamps which Mumsy was perpetually collecting for something or other (currently a hair dryer). All the hopes for the future, all the food bought, cooked and consumed in the past, that they represented suddenly, swept over Kathy and she felt great tears welling up inside her. ‘Idiot,’ she said, dabbing at her eyes. But all the same she sat down at the table, put her head on her hands and had a good cry.

  There was a newspaper tucked underneath the table on a narrow shelf. Probably she wouldn’t have noticed it but for the photograph. It was the photograph of a pale pretty girl, no one she knew. But scribbled across the face of the girl was a telephone number. That is, it was probably a telephone number.

  She dialled it. A man’s voice answered it with the number straightaway. In the background there was music playing.

  ‘Hello,’ she said hesitantly, huskily.

  ‘Is that you Ray?’ he said at once. ‘Where’ve you been? My God, I’ve been sitting here waiting … Ray, it’s been tearing me in two with worry.’

  Mistily Kathy thought she heard him start on the word ‘ plan’ … then he called her Ray again. Ray was Mrs Birley, Mumsy’s pet name. Slowly she put the receiver down.

  She sat and waited. In a little while what she knew must happen, did happen. The telephone began to ring and ring.

  She let it ring.

  He was calling back.

  She tried very hard to recall if she had ever heard the voice before, it was full, throaty and rather coarse, but she never had. He was completely unknown to her.

  No one likes to think that a person they have lived close to and thought they knew inside out has a secret life, and to Kathy it was particularly unnerving (for it certainly looked as though Mumsy had just been doing that).

  Emily Carter pushed open the gate and walked up the garden path with a predetermined air. She had made up her mind. Behind her she had left a dissentient husband and indignant baby but she knew she was right to come. She straightened her back just a little bit more on account of what the dissentient husband had said and marched on. ‘Emily,’ he had pleaded, ‘Em, don’t go sticking your neck out, interfering, get into what’s not your business. What so you have noticed something screwy about next door? Let ’em get on with it. It’s their business, not yours.’ And then, seeing he was getting nowhere, added pathetically, ‘Em, I want my supper.’ And then, when she still took no notice. ‘Emily Carter, I forbid you to go.’

  ‘Forbid,’ Emily muttered to herself as she walked. ‘ Forbid indeed. He says forbid.’ The blood of numerous north country freemen ran in Emily’s veins mingled with just a trace of southern Irish. It made her extraordinarily difficult to drive.

  She shoved open the door, which Kathy had left unlocked as usual, no one in Deerham Hills ever locked their front door during the day … it was part of keeping up the fiction that they lived in the country … and went on into the hall.

  ‘Kathy,’ she called out, and then questioningly ‘Kathy?’ All the time she was taking a good look round. The hall seemed pretty normal. Tidy, tidier than hers ever was, but the three women didn’t have a man with fishing rods and boots and a baby with a walker around. Or was it so tidy? Kathy’s case was still in the hall. Her coat had fallen off a chair. A little pile of letters lay on the table underneath a bowl of flowers. And at the flowers Emily really did frown: they were wedged and shoved in the vase as if a hasty and careless hand had just grabbed them and put them there.

  Kathy came out of the kitchen just then and greeted her eagerly. ‘Em. It’s good to see you. Come in. Have a cup of tea, I was just having one.’

  Emily allowed herself to be towed in.

  ‘Jim all right? And Bobby?’ said Kathy as she poured stale tea.

  ‘Oh fine, fine,’ said Emily: it seemed to her uneasy ear that in the distance she could hear the roar of her baby’s voice. Or there again it might be his father. ‘They’ve never been better.’

  ‘Oh you are lucky Em, those two fine people dependent on you and loving you.’ … Very dependent, very loving, thought Emily grimly.

  ‘You don’t know how alone I get to feel sometimes.’ Kathy was breathing hard: Emily registered this professionally.

  ‘I just came over to see how you were, Kathy,’ she said soothingly. Meanwhile she was looking round the kitchen. She would dearly like to confirm her own little suspicions of the significance of what she had seen before she voiced them to Kathy. ‘Mother’s not home?’

  ‘No.’

  Emily nodded. She was seeking to put into words what she wanted to say to Kathy. ‘If you’re all on your own why don’t you come over with me and have supper?’ she said brightly.… You’ll only find a general war on between me and Jim, and over you Kathy, over you.’

  Kathy shook her head. ‘No, I couldn’t. Thanks but I couldn’t. I must wait for them.’

  ‘Out on a party?’ said Emily, even more brightly. She was asking too many questions and she knew it.

  Kathy shook her head. ‘ I don’t think so. To tell you the truth I don’t know where they are.’

  The kitchen looked tidier than it had done the last time Em had seen it. Which suggested that Mrs Birley had been out quite a long time. But there was something else funny about the kitchen and at the moment Emily couldn’t quite pin it down. Emily frowned. She was troubled.

  In spite of Kathy’s attempt at self-control the words came out with more finality and sharper apprehension than she had intended. She started to talk nervously. ‘Well, I mean I came home expecting to find Janet here before me or anyway home soon after, and Mumsy here cooking supper, and there’s no one. No one. I’ve waited and waited … I tell you Em, I don’t know what’s happened.’

  She looked at Emily, hoping to get back reassurance and comfort but Emily said nothing. So Kathy said it for herself. ‘Oh I expect I’m worrying about nothing and that they’ll both be home soon surprised at me for being worried.’

  ‘Hum,’ said Emily.

  ‘Oh Emily.’ Kathy dropped all pretence at calm. ‘Do you think I ought to go to the police?’

  And here again Em surprised her. Instead of saying at once, yes or no, she hemmed and hawed, did what the Scots call swithering.

  ‘I just don’t know, Kathy,’ she said at last. ‘Let’s leave it for a bit shal
l we?’ She looked round the kitchen, and was inspired. ‘Let’s have a cup of tea.’

  ‘I’m blown out with tea,’ cried Kathy. ‘I’m so worried about what could have happened to them.’

  ‘Well, what could have happened?’ asked Emily bluntly. ‘ What do you think could have happened?’

  ‘An accident. They might be in hospital. Trouble anyway.’

  ‘Yes, trouble,’ said Emily, half to herself.

  ‘They’d be here, I’m sure they would, if there wasn’t some reason.’ Kathy sounded hysterical.

  ‘Look,’ said Emily, ‘let’s take a look at this. They’ve only been gone a few hours. Would you have got so worked up about this so quickly if there wasn’t some background in your mind? If you weren’t, in a way, half expecting trouble?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Kathy doubtfully, ‘I’m not sure what you mean.’ She avoided looking at Emily. ‘ ’Course Janet’s been having trouble with Robert, I think. But nothing’s been said.’

  ‘Said,’ muttered Emily impatiently, ‘if you waited for that pair to say anything you’d wait till Doomsday, but haven’t you felt, Kathy? …’

  Kathy looked at her with big puzzled eyes, she started to look upset again.

  There was a pause.

  Kathy didn’t say anything.

  ‘It seems to me that you must have something to go on,’ said Emily reasonably. ‘No one gets this worked up so fast unless they’re worried already.’

  Kathy shook her head obstinately.

  ‘Well, I’ve felt something odd for days,’ persisted Emily. Dimly in the distance she seemed to hear the faint voice of her husband saying: Don’t go psychic, Emily.

  ‘Perhaps they have been a bit funny lately,’ admitted Kathy. ‘Whispering together.’

  ‘This is your house and not theirs.’

  Kathy stared at Emily.

  ‘You’re away a good deal,’ said Emily. ‘They’re here all the time. You don’t know everything that goes on in this house. They have friends and interests you don’t know about.’