Cat and Mouse (27 page)

“
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 thrust 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.

T
HE 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.

“What
now
?” said Miss Let’s-be-Lovely.

“That gentleman’s here again. He’s sitting in the waiting-room with a huge bunch of country looking flowers, I mean not from a shop at all, and the funny part
is
,” said the junior typist, blushing a little in her earnestness, “that he doesn’t look silly a bit. Would that be the gentleman that saved her life?”

“No,” said Miss Let’s-be-Lovely. “That would be the poor sap that stood waving a gun about and letting a woman do all the work, as usual.”

“Still, he did arrive just in the nick of time,” said Pat, who thought that Mr. Chucky was ever so lovely and his hopeless attachment ever so romantic, good enough for
Girls Together
itself.

“He was always arriving in the nick of time, as far as I can make out,” said Miss Let’s-be-Lovely, “and never doing anything about it when he got there. Whenever she was in more than ordinary peril, he made a point of setting out for some place called Neath, thinking better of it halfway, and tramping across fifty miles of wet mountains to be in at the—literally, in at the death. On this occasion he seems to have said that he didn’t know Katinka was going back to the house until Mrs. Love happened to mention it in the car.”

“But anyway, poor little Miss Evans got there first?”

“That’s what I say—a woman was left to do the dirty work. Of course she wasn’t there at all when Carlyon pretended to see her at the Tarren rocks; that was only a ruse to get Katinka to the precipice. Then he waited to see the boat get across the river; but as it happened, by then Miss Evans had missed her seal, and she went back up the path to look for it. The deaf woman wouldn’t wait for her—she calmly pinched the boat and rowed herself across the river. Her arms were strong although her legs might be crippled. But Miss Evans, going up the path, must have looked up and seen Tinka and Carlyon on the ledge: Tinka thinks she was probably worried in case they had found the seal, and she crept up through the corridor to listen and see if they were talking about it. God knows how much she heard of what Carlyon was saying, but anyway, there she was when she was needed. And now she’s dead—and Carlyon too.”

“Fancy—a mass murderer!”

“Three wives is too many,” said Miss Let’s-be-Lovely, “but I don’t know that you can call it
mass.
Of course there may have been more that the police haven’t yet found out about.”

“You don’t really think so?” said the junior typist, deliriously thrilled.

“No, I don’t,” said Liz, hastily. “There were only three lots of clothes and stuff in the attic.”

“He must have been mad to keep all those incriminating things!”

“Oh, yes, of course he was
mad
,” said Liz. “And it was the sort of madness that murders for pure gain. After all, he’d done fairly well out of the earlier wives; he was able to prove to solicitors and people that he was pretty well off. He was just mad for possessions, and I suppose he couldn’t bear to part with anything so he hoarded it all away in boxes in that attic. He must have known it would be fatal if anyone found it, but he was too mad to be able to bear to chuck it all away. Up to then the police had only suspected, but the minute Chucky wangled himself into the house and discovered that attic—it was just a matter of time. At least, so he says.”

“Did he know for certain, then?”

“He says he knew for certain when he saw the slippers on Katinka.”

“The slippers?” said Pat, increasingly thrilled. None of the others had been able to get anything out of anybody about this Miss Friendly-wise business, and the Editor had just made them all a sort of terribly brief speech and said to behave as if nothing had happened. “The slippers?”

“He inveigled Miss Friendly-wise into trying some on. She has small feet, but then so had poor Angel Soone. And the slippers were miles too big. That’s why he took her up there.”

“Well, fancy!” said the junior typist, confounded by this masterpiece of detective ingenuity.

“What
I
can’t forgive him,” said Miss Let’s-be-Lovely, “is involving Tinka in it at all; and him supposed to be so keen on her all along.”

“I don’t see why he kept telling her that he had three children at home?”

“Mr. Chucky has a somewhat peculiar sense of humour,” said Miss Let’s-be-Lovely, coldly. “He lives with his sister and she has got three children, so in a sense it was true. He says it never occurred to him that she would believe him—I can’t think why.”

“It wouldn’t have mattered, anyway,” said Pat, “because she simply hates him. Whenever he comes, she just says, ‘Tell him to go to hell,’ and goes on dictating her letters. And the
letters
!” She held out the notebook dumbly to Miss Let’s-be-Lovely.

“Read it out,” said Miss Let’s-be-Lovely crossly. “I can’t be expected to understand all these squiggles.” She folded her hands across the bust bodice and leaned back to listen, as she had listened so often to Amista’s letters so many months ago. Pat read out the latest effusion of Miss Friendly-wise on the subject of Love at First Sight.

“‘My dear, ‘You ask me if there is such a thing as love at first sight. Yes, of course there is, but it is something to beware of because it brings with it nothing but disillusionment and pain and regret and despair. Love at first sight is like a rainbow—it is too perfect too soon, and when it vanishes, it vanishes for ever. It is founded on charm, and charm is a terrible weapon, never more cruel and dangerous than when it seems most sincere…’ It’s ever so cynical,” said the junior typist, “and I don’t know what the Editor would say if he ever saw these letters that Miss Friendly-wise sends out.”

“She ought to be out of this job,” said Miss Let’s-be-Lovely. “It’s doing her no
good
.”

“That’s just what the gentleman says,” said Pat, surprised. “He says, ‘Tell her that this job is no good to her any more and she ought to come home to the mountains.’ And then a lot of stuff about the mountains bringing it all back into proportion again.”

“
Does
he?” said Miss Let’s-be-Lovely. She thought for a little while and then with an air of decision leapt to her feet. “Well, all right, Pat, leave it to me. I’ll take care of this.” She marched off down the corridor, the protesting junior behind her, and threw open the pink-painted door of the pink-painted waiting-room. “Oh,” she said, abruptly closing it again. “I needn’t have bothered—it seems to be taking care of itself.”

Which was as well, perhaps; for in her agitation she had forgotten to take off the brassière.

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