Authors: Christianna Brand
“Did he touch her?” said Chucky.
“No,” said Katinka sharply.
He eyed her alertly. “But I was asking Miss Evans.”
“Miss Evans and I both agree that he never got near enough to touch her, to catch hold of her.”
“Right, right,” agreed Miss Evans, only too glad to have someone else do the talking for her.
“I was watching from a break in the rocks, almost down at the bottom of the caves. I saw it all happen. He flung out his hands to save her, but he couldn’t clutch her, he may just have touched the ends of her scarf, that’s all. He—he turned and plunged back into the caves. I didn’t see any more, I was running down, myself, out of the corridor with all the rest of them following me.”
“You joined Miss Evans beside the body?”
It was over: the danger-point was passed, they were beyond the moment where the rabbit snare had been thrown down, and if only she were a little clever, she could keep him from ever going back to it. She began to gabble a little in her nervous eagerness. “Miss Evans was kneeling there beside her. She got up and ran forward to meet me. She said, ‘Don’t look!’” She put her head for a moment in her hands, and gave way to sick dizziness at the memory of it. “But I went and looked down at her.”
Inspector Chucky said gently: “She was a distressing sight, I’m afraid.”
“She had been a distressing sight for a long time,” said Katinka. (If I am to have softness, let it not be from this unspeakable little cad!)
Inspector Chucky flicked over another page of his notebook. “Now, ladies, about this paper she was carrying…”
“She had it in her hand—the good hand. You could just see it sticking out.”
“Neither of you interfered with it?”
“I didn’t, and you didn’t, Miss Evans, before I got there?”
“I wouldn’t have had time,” said Miss Evans, simply, “even if I’d wanted to. But why should I touch it?”
He spread it out before them, holding it nipped between two fingertips. You could almost hear the clicking of the tumblers as he read it over to himself and fed it to his brain. “‘Angela. Meet me at the top of the caves tonight. Amista.’” Katinka said: “It’s Amista’s writing.”
He looked up sharply. “You recognize it?”
She looked at it more closely. “Well, it’s just
like
it. But then I’ve always thought Amista’s letters were written with the left hand, as a sort of disguise. I suppose most left-hand writing would be much the same.”
“And this was clutched in her hand?”
“The dead hold fast,” said Miss Evans. “They can take so little with them; if they have anything in their grasp when they die, they never let it go.” Always, thought Katinka, you would find in the Welsh these odd glimpses of drama and poetry, however humble the surface personality. She recognized them within herself, but they were so deeply hidden beneath layers and layers of sophistication and “towniness” that she had almost lost sight of them.
Mr. Chucky was at present concerned only with hard fact. “You’re certain this was held tight in her hand?”
“For Pete’s sake,” said Katinka. “What the hell does it matter whether she was clutching it or not?”
“It matters very much,” said Chucky. “Because if Miss Evans is sure that she was holding it, then it couldn’t have been thrown down after she fell.”
Angela’s body had lain on the tumbled rocks at the foot of the Tarren Goch, and two or three feet from the body had been the tangled rabbit snare. (She had kicked it aside. With some swift foreboding of danger, she had moved it farther away from the body, with the thought hot in her mind of Carlyon standing on the ledge two hundred feet above them, opening his hands and letting something drop down, down, down, after the tumbling body. …) But suppose that the presence of the snare had been fortuitous; suppose it had been the note that Carlyon had thrown down. She stammered: “What on earth would Mr. Carlyon have thrown it down for?”
“I didn’t
say
Mr. Carlyon,” said Chucky.
“Nobody else threw… Nobody else was in a position to throw anything down.”
Miss Evans came flying out of the tangled undergrowth of her thoughts, dabbed down a contribution to the discussion, and fled back. “How can you throw an old paper down? Float, it would, float in the air like a feather.”
“It could be wrapped round a stone.”
“And the wrapping duly came undone and by an extraordinarily convenient chance fell neatly just to her hand. Besides,” insisted Katinka, “why? Why should he throw it down? Here is this assignation note, written by Amista, whoever she turns out to be. …”
“Well—perhaps,” said Chucky.
“What do you mean—perhaps?”
“I mean perhaps it was an assignation note and perhaps it was sent by Amista-whoever-she-turns-out-to-be.”
“Why in the world should you doubt that it was an assignation?”
“It’s a very odd one, to say the least of it,” said Chucky. “And it’s inconsistent. This Amista is writing a note—obviously a secret note—to Mrs. Carlyon. She’s going to hand it to her, or ask somebody to hand it to her, or put it in some prearranged place where she will find it. Why address it ‘To Angela’ on the inside part of the note, mark you, not on the outer fold where a note is usually addressed? And why write ‘To Angela’ at all? In all three cases Angela will know well enough that it’s intended for her: to write it only makes discovery more sure if the note should be intercepted.”
“Some people are extra careful and fussy about things like that,” suggested Katinka, but doubtfully.
He bowed his head gravely. “Splendid. Now we see how this extra-careful and fussy person makes an assignation. ‘Meet me tonight.’ Just ‘tonight.’ Any time between, say, six or seven o’clock and dawn. And then, ‘at the caves.’ Does that mean at the top of the caves or at the bottom, or inside them or outside them? You could play hide-and-seek for a week in those caves and all round them, especially after it got dark.”
“If they were in the habit of meeting one another at a certain time and place?” suggested Miss Evans, timidly.
“Then why not—this very careful and fussy person—avoid risk of discovery by merely saying, ‘At the usual time and place’?” He acknowledged: “It’s slight. But somehow it doesn’t ring true.
I
don’t believe that this was an assignation note at all.”
Katinka fought for comprehension, for understanding of what all this might mean to Carlyon. “Assignation note or not—why should Mr. Carlyon throw it down?”
Mr. Chucky shrugged. “Just to get rid of it?”
“To get rid of it, he pitches it neatly beside the body?”
“You yourself suggested,” said Chucky, “that that would have been an extraordinary chance.”
“A very extraordinary chance indeed that it should blow right into her hand and nestle there.”
“If it was right in her hand,” said Chucky.
“But Miss Evans says…”
“Miss Evans says it was held fast in her dead hand,” said Chucky. “And all I’m saying to Miss Evans is, are you sure?”
Katinka pounded on the table with her fists, an impotent tattoo of impatience and irritation. “Why should he care two hoots about the note? Why should Mr. Carlyon want to get rid of a letter written by Amista?”
“My idea was,” said Mr. Chucky blandly, “that the letter might not have been written by Amista.”
Miss Evans gave a startled sideways jump like a cat playing with a toy which it has decided to treat as an enemy. Tinka said slowly: “Then who in the world do you think did write the note?”
“I thought it just possible that Mr. Carlyon might have written it himself,” said Inspector Chucky.
As soon as she was released, she flew down the mountain road to the ford. Miss Evans had set off doggedly on her milk-round, but if necessary she would pick up her skirts and wade; after two fine days the river depth must surely have dropped. And she must see Carlyon, she must warn Carlyon. That Carlyon had murdered his wife she did not for one single moment believe. She had seen the outflung hand that caught at the backward-streaming scarf, she knew that it had not touched, let alone pushed that teetering figure at the cliff’s edge. If he had thrown down the rabbit snare, that was an action explicable in half a dozen ways—the automatic reaction of the dazed mind to the horror of contact with the means of dreadful death. But if already the police were suspicious, the knowledge that he had thrown down the snare would set the seal on their mistrust of him. She must see him, she must warn him that by way of this nonsense about the note they were working in their dunderheaded way towards a theory that he had lured his wife to her death, that mention of the rabbit snare would be fatal. She must tell him that she and Miss Evans would keep silent about the snare.
At the bottom of the hill a small crowd deflected her attention. She knew what must be happening. The police were at the ford, they had brought a boat of their own up the river and now were clumsily transferring a covered stretcher aboard. The men uncovered, the women stood silent and respectful as the stretcher was borne up the hill and placed in a police van. Carlyon, utterly expressionless, passed close by without seeing her and went off in a second car with the police.
Dai Trouble wasted not one moment after the car had turned the precipitous corner, but shot into the dark back-doorway of the local pub and came out again very shortly, wiping his mouth on a red handkerchief. Mrs. Love had joined Katinka and he stopped in his hurried passage down to the waterside. “Well, there you are, then, Miss Jones! How are you doing, my girl? Missed you we have at Penderyn, Mrs. Love and me. …” That drink wasn’t your first today, old boy, thought Katinka.
“Got to hurry back now—orders!” said Dai, waving a rather wild hand towards the opposite mountain. “‘Don’t you let none of these bloody journalists up to the house, Dai,’ he says, ‘and if that Miss Jones comes pokin’ her nose in,’ he says… Well, well, don’t you fret, Miss Jones, bach…”
“Dai, I simply must speak to Mr. Carlyon as soon as I can. The police have been getting at me (that Chucky—a policeman all the time!), and they’re asking me all sorts of most peculiar questions. They’ve got it into their asinine heads that Mr. Carlyon—well, that he may have
wanted
her to die.”
“You mean that he pushed her over, miss?” said Dai, coolly. “Don’t you take no notice of that. That’s what they always say—it’s a bloody lie.”
“How do you mean, ‘always say’? She didn’t make a habit of falling over cliffs?”
“There was the other accident,” said Dai. “When he turned the car over.”
Her heart stopped. “For God’s sake…”
“Only talk, you know. Natural enough—she was a rich girl, there you are.”
“Yes, but… I mean, what good would it do him to wreck his wife’s beauty?” But her whirling brain had to accept the truth. “You mean that they suggested that he’d intended to kill her? That he’d faked the accident?”
“There had to be a bit of an enquiry, Miss Jones, fair play. Lot of old Frenchies coming around, peaked caps with a bit of braid round them—there’s funny! ‘You’re welcome,’ he says to them. ‘Anything you want to know.’”
“Didn’t anybody see the accident happen?”
“A motor cyclist come up a bit afterwards. He was just trying to lift her, carry her back to the road. Dazed he was, the man says, and white as death. ‘If only she had been killed!’ he says, over and over; and the man thinks it’s a bit funny and tells the police. Natural enough it seems to me, him seeing the state she was in and thinking she would die soon anyway, and better she had been killed outright and save the sufferin’. But it caused talk of course. And him with not a scratch on him. Not surprisin’ they had a bit to say.”
Beneath their feet, the crumbly road sloped down sharply to the river. Over them loomed the mountain, the Tarren Goch a raw wound in its side; but Katinka was on another hillside, under the violent post-cardy blue Riviera skies, when an upturned car lay smoking in its ruins and a dazed, white-faced man said over and over and over: “If only she had been killed!”
“How vile people are, Dai Trouble, how vile they are!”
“Oh, dammo, what’s a lot of Frogs?” said Dai. “I says to them, a man can’t arrange to be killed himself, just because he turns his motor-car over. And she so pretty, I says, and a bit of hot stuff what’s more; and he like an old Tom cat around her, flowers and presents and rubbish every day of their life. And she’s rich, I says, and nobody wants to kill the goose that…” He broke off. “Oh, duw, duw—there I go, opening my big mouth again, as usual.” A waft of beer came over to her as he tugged at his cap and rolled off, a little unsteadily, down the crumbly road. “Goose—what goose?” she said to Mrs. Love.
Mrs. Love put a heavy arm about her shoulders. “Goose yourself to take any notice of him; tight as a coot and on a day like this. Not but what…” She glanced across at the pub, with a gleam in her eye.
Five minutes later they were ensconced in a dark corner by a slightly scandalized Mrs. Richards the Tap, and provided with glasses of thick red port. Katinka sipped hers, shuddering; but Mrs. Love called cheerfully for fizzy lemonade, emptied her glass into it and drank heartily without apparent ill effect. She produced a bag of sweets. “Have one, dearie. Cheer you up!”
“No thank you, Mrs. Love, honestly.”
Mrs. Love delved thumb and three bunched fingers into the bag. “Well,
I
dunno—we all need something and that’s a fact! And if I wasn’t a soppy date, I could be in a train for London this time Tuesday, after the inquest. But no, no! ‘Mrs. Love,’ he says, as cool as a cucumber, ‘you’ll stay on and see me through the next few weeks till I decide what to do?’ and yessir, I says, of courssir, I says, as if there was nothing in the world I wanted more than this one-horse village and this goddam mountain and the thought of that pore thing going screaming over the edge. And what my Harry will say! But there you are! That’s Love for you: always the softhearted fool.”
“Oh, yes, Mrs. Love, do stay with him, don’t let him down! A man’s so sort of—helpless. Don’t leave him.”
Mrs. Love looked at her curiously. “Bit of a soppy date yourself, aren’t you?”
“Soppy’s the word,” said Katinka ruefully.
Mrs. Love took a swig of her port and lemon and scrabbled in the bag again. “What is it, dear? The genuine article or just an attack of good old sex?”