Cat and Mouse (18 page)

“God knows,” said Tinka. “I don’t see how one ever can know. But I’ve had lots of ‘attacks of sex’ before, and never anything remotely like this.” She said, miserably: “It
hurts
so much!”

“Me and Harry was just the same,” said Mrs. Love. “Bellyful of butterflies, I used to say, and hurt! Why the hours I’ve spent sitting by that telephone in the old days, you wouldn’t credit it. I’ve told you about how Harry and me met, dear, haven’t I? Because that was romantic, if you like.”

“Yes, you have indeed,” said Katinka hastily. “And it certainly was extraordinarily romantic. But Mrs. Love, I wanted to ask you about what happened yesterday—up at the house, I mean, before she fell.”

Mrs. Love swung her stout legs, swirling her dreadful drink round and round, faintly fizzing, in her glass. “After you left, you mean? Well, goodness knows! Dai Trouble and I, we skipped out of the way, him not wanting to hear any more about letting you and that Chucky up in the attic, and me hoping Mr. Carlyon would see her ladyship up to her room and not leave it all to me. She was creating something awful, howling and carrying on. I heard her from the kitchen, and him trying to reason with her and after a bit I stuck my head out thinking I’d better do me duty, and arst if there’s anything I can do. He was looking worn out, pore man, but he gives a jerk of his head sending me back to the kitchen, and says in a low voice that he’ll manage her himself. Sooner you than me, I thinks, and morphia again tonight, I thinks, and I went back into the scullery. After a bit there’s peace and I’m singing away to meself and I happens to glance out of the window, and what do I see? Her hobbling and sliding up towards the top of the mountain, him running after her, giving a hop and a skip every now and again as if he’s hurt his leg, and sure enough it seems he did give it a twist and it slowed him down dreadful, pore man—otherwise, of course, he’d have caught up with her.”

“So you went after them?”

“Yes, I pipes up for Dai, and he comes running downstairs putting a shirt over his head as he comes, and out of the front door and up the mountain too. Out I goes, but a couple of yards up that ’illside and I’m done. Not for you, my girl, I thinks, you’re a darn sight too fat to be skipping up mountains like a ruddy goat. You run straight across, I says to meself, and that’s what I done. And just in time to see her fall.” She stopped her thrilling narrative and two tears came into her eyes and peeled off runnels through the thick powder on her cheeks.

“You actually saw her fall?”

“I didn’t see her at the top, dear. More sort of hurtle past; and then on the rocks.” She burrowed into her paper bag again, but automatically. Her mind was with the sprawled body at the foot of Tarren Goch.

Nothing about the rabbit snare. Tinka breathed a sigh of relief. “I had some beautiful pipe dream, Mrs. Love, that all the time it was Angela, Mrs. Carlyon, who had been writing to me as ‘Amista.’ But of course the fact that this assignation note was written
to
Angela, means that it can’t have been. She’d hardly be writing letters asking herself to meet herself.”

“She’d hardly be writing letters for beauty hints, anyway, dear, now would she?”

“Well, but she wrote in first for a lotion to whiten her hands because they were all sunburned; and that one poor hand was all she had left to keep beautiful.”

“Yes, but it wouldn’t get very sunburned laying in a nursing-home.”

“Oh, how idiotic of me!” said Tinka.

“And besides she can only—could only,” corrected Mrs. Love sadly, “she could only write with her left hand, not proper writing at all.”

“Amista wrote with her left hand to disguise her writing; that’s what made it all the more a possible theory. But anyway, that’s exploded. And now that ass, Chucky, has developed the really wonderful idea that Mr. Carlyon wrote the assignation note himself—in fact wrote all the letters, I suppose.”

Mrs. Love was enchanted with the notion of Carlyon writing soppy letters about himself to an unknown correspondent on a women’s magazine. She delved into the bag and fairly crammed her mouth with toffees. During the resultant enforced silence, Tinka developed the bewildering theme of Amista’s identity. “After all, somebody wrote those letters, Mrs. Love.
You
swear that you’ve never had the slightest knowledge of anybody in the house who could possibly be Amista,” (Mrs. Love nodded violently, trying frantically to unstick her jaws and add voice to gesture) “and there certainly is nobody else but Mr. Carlyon. You can hardly imagine Dai Trouble indulging in such a freak, and as for yourself, you simply never had the necessary knowledge. I mean you’d never even been to the place till you brought Mrs. Carlyon down here—
had
you?”

Mrs. Love shook her head as emphatically as she had nodded it, and was understood to say that Miss Jones could ask the seckertarry at the (inaudible) Nursing Association if it were not honestly so.

And anyway, fat, jolly, gay Mrs. Love with her fat, jolly, vulgar lover and no frustration or regrets in all the world, driven to so odd, so unbalanced, so pointless a practical joke, even if she had had the time and the requisite knowledge to carry it out. And there was nobody else. She turned over and over in her mind the Inspector’s hints about Carlyon, as though they had been a long-dead bird found rotting on a woodland walk. All right, face facts. Think it all out courageously. …

All that afternoon and all that night and all through the following morning, thinking, thinking, thinking, worrying, worrying, worrying. And on through the inquest the following morning. Carlyon standing in the witness box with a face like a dull clay mask. Name? Charles Lion. I called myself Carlyon when I first came here because I wanted to avoid publicity for my wife when eventually I was able to bring her home. It was a little sort of—pet name—that she had for me.

Charles Lion, do you identify the body of deceased as that of your wife?
Yes. Angela Mary Lion, née Angela Erleigh, parents deceased.

Your wife was unfortunately disfigured in a motoring accident?
Yes. The accident was my fault. I took my hand off the wheel for a moment, the car went over the edge. It was my fault that she was disfigured.

There is no need, Mr. Lion, to subject yourself to distress.
Thank you: I prefer to face the facts.

And owing to this disfigurement you brought your wife down here to this lonely place…?

Katinka sat frozen in the hot, stuffy courtroom and her nails made scalloped indents in the palms of her hands. A mask of a woman, an unrecognizable mask of a woman, shut away in this lonely house from the knowledge of men; prevented by half a hundred delicate devices from communication with such men of the outside world as might penetrate its ivory fastnesses. She recalled Carlyon’s grudging permission for her single interview with Angela, the shaded light, the absence of pencil and paper, of all the material for communication between them; the promise of “impersonality” so easily extracted from herself, the unobtrusive policing of the interview. But the darkness had not been acceptable to the sick girl; she had put out her terrible broken hand as Katinka began to move away and had switched on the light. Had she, also, consented to promises, delicately extracted? Pretend, only pretend for one moment, that Carlyon is not the Carlyon I—love; that something is dreadfully wrong here, that Angela is not Angela. She felt again the pointed nail, the dry, slow scratching in the palm of her hand. A—M… Carlyon had explained glibly that what Angela had wanted had been a mirror, that her message traced out through the broken window had been the first two letters of the words: a mirror. But by the time they had met in the bedroom, Angela had seen herself in a mirror; why should she be demanding one again? Had she really ever asked for a mirror? Had not the message on the outer wall been also the slow spelling out of her real name: Amista? A girl who jerked impatiently when addressed as “Angela,” whom Carlyon was careful not to address as “Angela,” resorting to pet names, sweetheart, darling, angel… Not Angela Mary Erleigh at all, but Amista, trying to tell the world with what slight means of communication were left to her that this was Amista, lying unrecognizable here.

Now, Mr. Lion, you had been anxious as to the possibility of your wife’s attempting her own life?
We were all anxious. She was very unhappy and we had to keep her to some extent under drugs. That in itself was weakening to her moral stamina.

So
that when you saw her running across the mountain to the rocks…?
My first thought was that she was making for the precipice. It had always had a sort of fascination for her. She’d had a bad shock recently: she’d seen herself in a mirror and realized that the plastic surgeons were making less progress than she’d hoped. And a—a friend had visited her and she was distressed at her leaving. She came down to the hall to say goodbye. I got her upstairs at last and to her room, but the moment my back was turned she must have come down again. The next thing I knew was when I glanced out of the window and saw her making her way up the path at the back of the house.

She would know the various paths across the mountain?
Yes. She went out a good deal, walking on the mountain. She always carried a veil, and we had it all arranged that if she should meet anyone, she would put the veil across her face. But I believe she was never-disturbed. …

Very well, then. Pretend—only
pretend
—that the disfigured Angela is not Angela Erleigh at all, but Amista Somebody, background as yet unknown. Presumably it can be proved all right, that Carlyon really did marry Angela sometime about a year ago. They start off together on the motor drive over the Grande Corniche. Angela Erleigh (parents deceased) is never seen again; only a wreck of a woman who may be Angela, or may be another young woman now called Angela. Has Amista some property or money which will be Carlyon’s while she is in his power? Or is it not more likely that she replaces the true Angela—that Angela died in the accident, and this unrecognizable creature introduced to replace her—Carlyon meanwhile benefitting by an income that would cease if it were known that the true Angela is dead. Was this what Dai Trouble had meant when he had said that Carlyon would not kill the goose that laid the golden eggs?

Your name is Marie Lloyd Love, née Marie Lloyd Briggs?
That’s right: named after dear old Marie, my mother and father being in The Profession, you see, and why in the world I ever took up nursing…

Why had Amista not confided immediately in Mrs. Love? A hospital nurse with indisputable credentials, who had come into their lives only in the past few months, as the Inaudible Nursing Association would no doubt be able to testify. Would not Mrs. Love in due course have confided in her, in Katinka—if not before, at least during this morning’s conversation. But alas! Money talks, and nursing is not the most remunerative profession in the world and Carlyon was in a position to pay out very tempting bribes for the keeping of secrets somehow made to seem innocent enough; and for the rest, Mrs. Love’s forebears had been in The Profession and no doubt handed on a legacy of their histrionic powers. As for Dai Jones Trouble—was it not he who had found this lonely place, who had warned off inquisitive enquirers, who acknowledged when slightly in his cups that there was much connected with “the accident” that had better
not
be talked about by servants slightly in their cups?

Members of the jury, I think you will consider this a pretty straightforward case. …

Dai Trouble who had spoken to her so quietly and earnestly about drugs, who had expounded his religious faith that a man was entitled to endure the suffering that God sent him, that it should be for himself to accept or reject, not for others to make the choice. … A curious subject, if he were merely trying to ingratiate himself with her, to pull the wool over her eyes. But it brought her round to drugs. By what right was Amista-Angela kept so frequently under the debasing influence of morphia? She thought of the pretexts under which Carlyon had ordered morphia given by the (unsuspecting?) Mrs. Love. Angela got into “states,” Angela “needed peace,” Angela was terribly upset after seeing her face in the mirror in the hall. Had Angela really seen herself that day? She had been standing there making strange animal noises that might have meant anything; Carlyon had said she was weeping because she had seen her face at last. He had swept her up to her room and that night there had been morphia and the next day she had been quiet and apparently resigned during Katinka’s visit. But that evening there had been a terrible “state” again, according to Carlyon, who had “sat up with her all night.” More morphia. And Carlyon is striding the hills at daybreak, and that evening Angela-Amista falls to her death from the top of Tarren Goch.

Had Carlyon set any rabbit snares during his wanderings at dawn?

The inquest was breaking up. Formal verdict: suicide while the balance of the mind was disturbed. A rider of commiseration for the bereaved husband and a general feeling that it was a bloody old shame, mun, happening to a lovely gentleman like Mr. Carlyon—for “Carlyon” he was obviously destined to remain. Katinka jostled out with Miss Evans the Milk twittering at her side. “What do we do now? Can we go back to your house and get away from all this?” But Miss Evans bustled off, scandalized, what with half her milk round still to do.

Inspector Chucky passed, walking as stiff and straight as a guardsman, a slender ramrod in a posh dark blue serge suit for the occasion. Carlyon walked through the thin crowd, Dai Jones and Mrs. Love keeping a respectful distance behind: they were like two flesh and blood spaniels nervously dogging the footsteps of a ghost hound, gaunt and grim. He overtook Katinka. She said, faintly: “Good afternoon,” and he said: “Good afternoon. I hear you have been talking about me to the police.”

“The police have been talking to me,” said Katinka. “Which is slightly different.”

“Oh. I thought perhaps you’d been rehearsing your story for the press. Or has that been telephoned to London hours ago?”

“You’re most bitterly unfair, Mr. Carlyon,” said Tinka. “I’ve never breathed a word of this story to anyone, let alone to the press. I don’t intend to and I never did. I’ve never mentioned your name to a soul outside your own household.”