Authors: Christianna Brand
“My husband!” Angel had protested, laughing. “I can just see him!” (Carlyon composing a silly, vulgar pretentious little bit of nonsense like that!)
But Tinka had not then heard the name of Carlyon, had never even heard of Mr. Charles Lion. “Oh, now I’ve given away that I really am married, haven’t I? But look, Miss—Er, don’t give us away, will you? We do so want to keep it a private affair. Just say that yes, I’m married—but I think you’ll find that really everybody knows—and that we’re going off soon on a belated honeymoon. And ask the public to be nice and kind and not worry me, and when I come back I promise there’ll be lots of news and photographs and plans and lots and lots of lovely new tunes.” And she had taken the ring out of Katinka’s hand and looked at it lovingly. “Do you like it? We found it in an old antique shop and it’s simply ages old. I always wear it when I play now, I’m going to turn it into a sort of mascot and have the signature tune to go with it and all that. Only I’ve had to leave it off for the last few days because it’s chipped and making a sore place on my finger. …”
So that was where she had seen the ring before; that was how she knew that inside one of the wings was that little unevenness. Angel! Angel Soone, with her halo of fluffy gold hair, talking away so gaily and charmingly and sincerely, sending one away so blissfully unaware that one had been given not an iota of “hard” news. Angel, whose brilliant rendering of the showier musical classics brought down to earth by an occasional chirping little, improper little song, had brought her a fortune in concert and music-hall appearances; whose life had been spent in one long blare of publicity, whose tragic disfigurement would have provided such fare as half the reporters in England would have been despatched to secure. But Angel had quietly faded out. Nothing had been heard of her and it was assumed that she was still travelling incognito on a protracted honeymoon. The accident had evidently somehow been hushed up; and Carlyon had been wise indeed to bring his famous wife to this mountain fortress—might indeed be forgiven for supposing every unidentified visitor a news-hound on the scent.
A finger-nail delicately drawing its message inside the palm of a hand. An A, and an N. And, yes, Katinka remembered now that at first she had recognized a G. ANG… Angel Soone, who had nodded violently when Carlyon addressed her outright as Angel, but one had supposed it to be merely an endearment; who had tried to force upon Katinka’s attention the jade sphinx ring, had tried, gruesomely struggling, to recall that long-ago interview, to tell her visitor that here, beneath this mask of gristle and skin-graft, lay the famous, the fabulous Angel Soone; rich wife of Carlyon, the Goose that had laid the Golden Eggs!
Carlyon was looking at her across the table, looking intently at her as she came slowly out of her day-dream, and, lit with a new hope, a new fire, a new heaven of confidence in him, she looked him in the eyes. He said: “Yes. My wife was Angel Soone,” and turned on his heel and went out into the hall. They heard the wet swish of his mackintosh as he jerked it down from its hook and swung it about his shoulders; the faint evening light was blotted out for a moment from the window, as he strode past it through the teeming rain.
B
REAKFAST NEXT MORNING WAS
positively gay. Mrs. Love was off to London by the eleven-something from Neath, and full of jolly badinage at the prospect of her reunion with Harry and the form it was likely to take, and her differences with Katinka seemed all forgotten. By common consent, last night’s revelation remained undiscussed. Inspector Chucky had exhorted them all to keep mum and not make a lot more trouble for Mr. Carlyon who, after all, had had a perfect right to keep his own counsel all this time. As for Amista, only one more word had been spoken. “A course, I knew it couldn’t be you really, dear,” said Mrs. Love in the sanctity of Miss Evans’s little spare bedroom, reluctantly shared with her by Katinka. “You couldn’t have put that first letter in the hall, the one on the hall stand, you know, the day you came to Penderyn.”
“Carlyon would say I could have slipped it on when I went over to the table.”
“Oh, no, you couldn’t,” said Mrs. Love. “I was watching you, hanging over the banisters wondering who you could be. I saw you as plain as plain. I could see the letter with the little red seal like you said, and you bent over and looked at it, but you never put your hand out, that I do know, and’ll swear to it in any court of law.”
Katinka wished that she might have sworn to it under the innumerable other situations that had meanwhile offered themselves. It would have saved a considerable amount of heart-ache and trouble. But she contented herself with extracting a promise from Mrs. Love that she would pass on this information to Inspector Chucky before she left South Wales, and they composed themselves to rest, Mrs. Love making a great parade of threatened insomnia, prior to snoring heavily through every remaining hour of the night.
And now her bus was almost due. Her heavier luggage was to be brought over from Penderyn by Dai, and she set forth to meet him, encumbered only by a bulging over-night bag, a caved-in hatbox, assorted brown paper parcels and a large, cretonne knitting bag holding everything in the world except needles and wool. How she had negotiated them all across the river the night before, Katinka could not pause to discover; she was set only upon seeing that Mrs. Love confided to Mr. Chucky, before she left, the confirmatory story of the letter on the hall stand. Miss Evans had gone ahead to procure his attendance at the bus stop.
He was waiting for them there, chatting idly with that same group of men who had lounged there against the wall, a thousand aeons ago, when first Katinka had come to Pentre Trist, the Village of Grief. Dai stood at the roadside with an assortment of suitcases and carrying a large, flat parcel under one arm. Mrs. Love deposited the rest of her impedimenta with him.
“Well, don’t make me miss my bus,” he said. “I got to go down to Swansea with this old parcel, for ’im.” He jerked his head back towards Penderyn, presumably to indicate Mr. Carlyon, and at the same time flapped like a bird’s wing the elbow that pressed the flat parcel to his side.
Mr. Chucky advanced upon them full of early morning good cheer, and Mrs. Love, badgered and prompted by Tinka, finally got out the story of the incident in the hall. Mr. Chucky gravely undertook to convey this information to Mr. Carlyon. A red bus chugged up the hill, gathered in Dai Trouble and his parcel like a vacuum cleaner, and chugged on, leaving Mrs. Love’s luggage dumped by the side of the road. A blue bus crossed with it on the brow of the hill and started the steep ascent. Mr. Chucky had an inspiration. “This old bus’ll get you in hours before your train, Mrs. Love. I’m going to Neath myself, this morning, in a police car. I’ll take you in with me.”
Mrs. Love was enchanted to think that she would have a male escort to the station, and further enraptured to think that she would not have to struggle into the bus with all her luggage. It stopped, sucked in its passengers and rolled on down the hill. One traveller, however, had dismounted. Exquisitely elegant among the stout Welshwomen in their printed cotton overalls over outworn Sunday black, oddly artificial, superlatively sophisticate, Milgrim-Molyneux-Rue de la Paix came limping towards them down the shabby village street. It was the woman who, three days ago, had called to see Carlyon; who had crossed the Atlantic Ocean, sought out this remote Welsh village, toiled painfully across the river and up the rough mountain-path—and then had argued about a painting and some pottery and gone away again, not staying to see the girl that she had loved, who now lay stricken and monstrous a few yards away.
Fair play, thought Katinka in the Welsh idiom, fair play, you couldn’t catch old Chucky on the hop! Quick as thought, he had stepped forward and intercepted the woman, presented his credentials, entered into one-sided conversation. Miss Evans debouched from a side street, leading her stubby pony by the bridle. She left it to its own uninspired devices and came forward to speak to Katinka. “It’s the lady I took across to Penderyn in my boat.”
This seemed an excellent pretext for cutting in upon Mr. Chucky’s most unfair monopoly. Katinka swept Miss Evans forward, all nervous blushings and bobbings. The woman acknowledged the slight acquaintance with almost weepy gratitude. She had been hoping to find Miss Evans and persuade her to take her across once more to Penderyn. She dived into her slim handbag and produced an envelope.
Mr. Chucky stood quietly to one side, watching with sardonic amusement the efforts of Miss Jones to ingratiate herself with the lady. The woman accepted the intrusive stranger without enquiry. She wished to be rowed across the river and she cared not how many outlandish Welshwomen chaffered among themselves about the job. It appeared, however, from the gesturings of this one, the little rather round one, that there would be some delay. The other one, the little thin one with the blue eyes, must apparently arrange for someone to continue with the stubby pony on his round. It would be necessary to wait a little while until this was arranged, and there was much pointing towards a little white house, above the level of the main road. More delay! More terrible, unendurably fatiguing effort to be somehow undertaken! But her fingers closed over the ivory handles of her sticks; almost perceptibly she thanked her gods that though her legs might be weak and helpless, she still had two strong arms to drag their faltering steps along.
“Hoi! What about me?” cried Mrs. Love, left with her parcels at the side of the road.
Mr. Chucky whistled up a henchman with instructions to pile Mrs. Love into a police car with her possessions and call for him in twenty minutes time at Miss Evans the Milk’s. He caught up with the party toiling up the little hill. “Do you suppose your new friend knows,” he said, conversationally, to Katinka, “that her niece is dead?”
Tinka stopped, horrified. “My God! Do you think she doesn’t?”
“She wasn’t at the inquest: she’d left the hotel she was staying at in Swansea. We thought she’d gone back to London, but we couldn’t locate her there.”
“Good lord! I wonder… Well, you’ll have to break it to her before she goes up to the house.”
“I thought as you were so palsy-walsy,” said Chucky, “you might undertake the job yourself.”
“What me? Not likely! Do your own dirty work. And look here, by the way—I wanted to talk to you.”
“That makes a change,” said Mr. Chucky, grinning.
“This new development about Angela being Angel Soone…”
“New to you, perhaps,” said Chucky complacently. “Not to me.”
“You knew all along?”
“I’ve known for a good long time.”
“I don’t believe a word of it: you haven’t!”
“Didn’t I hum her signature tune to help you to recognize the ring? You were always saying that you’d seen it somewhere before. You’d been a reporter—it wasn’t so difficult to cheek with Consolidated any people you might have interviewed who’d worn a sphinx ring as a publicity stunt. And then it all fitted in so neatly: the description ‘artist’ on the marriage certificate, all those masses and masses of clothes in the attic. Painters don’t call themselves artists, they call themselves painters, and it would be her profession for her to put it on her passport and all that, but it’s not a great many women painters that make a whole-time profession of it. …”
“All right, all right,” said Tinka. “Don’t labour it. I’m convinced. You knew. But what I wonder is—did you see the significance of what you knew?”
“Well, yes,” said Chucky, considering. “I daresay I’d see it as clearly as most.”
“That’s why I want to go to Penderyn just once again,” said Tinka. “I’ve said I’ll take the deaf woman up there, and I can return the ring to him—he forgot to take it last night.”
“I thought you was going back home today?” said Chucky. “Miss Evans can take the lady to the house all right, and I’ll take charge of the ring and give it back to him.” He gave her his teasing glance.
“Oh, don’t be so damn silly—you know I want an excuse. The truth is I’d like to be the one to tell him, now that he’s cleared of suspicion. …”
Ahead of them, Miss Evans pushed open the little front door and ushered the lame woman in. Inspector Chucky said: “Suspicion of what?”
“Suspicion of what? Suspicion of murder, you fool!”
“’Ere, ’ere, ’ere,” said Inspector Chucky. “More respect for the police force,
hif
you please!” And he looked at her kindly and rather sadly and said: “Love is dimming your wits, my dear Miss Jones. If ever a motive for murder had been established—here it is. Which was not so clear before.”
“Oh, crikey!” said Katinka, impatiently. She brushed aside his kindly glance and marched forward into the tiny hall and through to the sitting-room where already the visitor was installed in the best fireside chair, while Miss Evans hung out of the window and called shrilly to the woman next door for permission to ask her small girl to lead the pony on its familiar round. Over her shoulder, Katinka said to Chucky as she marched: “Your only idea is that Mr. Carlyon should have slain his wife for sordid gain. Why should he have tried to do so when she was capable of earning simply thousands of pounds a year?”
The deaf woman looked up at them blankly as they came in and resumed her patient waiting. Mr. Chucky said: “But
was
she capable of earning thousands of pounds a year?”
“Capable? Of course she was capable. What do you mean?”
“Only that her face was—well, no longer beautiful. And her hands not in the best of trim for piano playing.”
Katinka beat with her fists on the green table-cloth. “I’m talking about the first accident, of course. And what I say is—it
was
an accident.”
“And what I say is,” said Chucky, “that it may have been. But—that having happened—there was plenty of motive for the second one to be murder.”
The deaf woman sat tapping softly on her elegant handbag with her elegantly gloved hand. Katinka stammered out at last that there had been the assignation note. Once more—who and what and where was Amista? If Mr. Chucky really knew…