Cat and Mouse (8 page)

But the screams went on.

She sat absolutely still, the sheets clutched up under her chin as though they alone could protect her heart from that muffled screaming. Little muffled, cut-off, squealings; not animal and yet—not human. Something, not animal, not human, was being tortured in this house and she must drive herself forth from this refuge of her quiet room, and go to its aid, must leave this oasis of white bed, warm blankets, hard, cool, comfortable pillows and cross the desert of the lonely floor and fling open the door and face whatever horror was outside. Half hoping that the door would be locked and give her good reason for flying back to the frail security of the bed, half praying that it be open and leave her free to intervene, she crept across the room. Slowly, slowly she turned the handle. The door inched open. She thought, faint with terror: in a moment I shall
know
.

Somewhere in the house a door closed, and abruptly the sobbings and squealings were cut off. She stood for a half moment, staring, transfixed, into the corridor; and then slammed the door shut and rushed back across the room and flung herself down upon the bed, writhing with her face pressed into the pillows in uncontrollable terror.

So utterly unexpected; so utterly, sickeningly, terrifyingly unexpected. … For in a doorway at the far end of the corridor, standing staring intently at her own slowly opening door, she had seen a man. A man with a round, white face, stupidly staring at her slowly opening door, standing staring at the door, moving his hands over and over one another in a dry, washing movement, over and over and over. A man with a round, white European face—and brown, Indian hands. Hands flecked with blood and foam.

N
OW THE HOUSE WAS
absolutely still. Nobody moved, nobody spoke. She lay shuddering on her bed, watching with beating heart for the slow, stealthy opening of her door; but it did not come. The crying had ceased with the slamming of that other, far-away door, and all was silence.

Absolute silence. Had he seen her watching him? He had been looking straight at her door, but had he seen her there? By comparison with the corridor, her room was dark—it was not as though a gleam of light could have shone out, giving her away. She found herself praying to the gods of her childhood to make it so, to make her safe from the steady, purposeful advance of the man with the round white English face and the brown, Indian hands, to protect her from the sight of her door once again slowly, slowly opening in.

Somewhere, sometime she had seen this man before; just as she had seen the woman Mrs. Love before, so she had seen the man; had seen them together, somewhere, and connected them with death. People in courtrooms, people in prison cells, people in morgues, at gravesides, in the waiting-rooms of hospitals. … So many people that a journalist saw in the daily routine. And somewhere, sometime not so very long ago, she had seen these two people, this woman and this man; and in her mind they were inseparable from Death.

How long had the man been in the house? Had he been there all along—creeping about the bright corridors avoiding her, dodging into doorways, peering out at her, standing hiding while she went by, motionless but for the over and over washing movement of the dreadful thick brown hands. She thought suddenly of the voices she had heard in the house before she fell asleep: men’s voices rumbling in the room below, while Mrs. Love spoke to Dai Trouble on the stairs. Whose had those voices been? Who—if the two servants were halfway up the stairs—was Carlyon speaking to in the room below? She stared ahead of her at the close-drawn curtains. Why, after all, had those curtains been pulled? To ease her non-existent headache? Or to discourage her from looking out of the window, to prevent her seeing who was arriving at the house? But she had looked out; and what, after all, had she seen? No rainbow—the rainbow that had been “like love at first sight” had faded from the sky; only the thin sunshine and the silver river and the two little toiling figures coming up the path to the house. Dai Jones Trouble and Miss Evans, the little woman who brought the milk.

But Miss Evans had brought the milk to Penderyn earlier in the morning. Why should she come again? Would she not simply have rowed Dai across the river and rowed back again, her job done? Who then had come up the mountain path with Dai? Katinka recollected suddenly that it had not been until Mrs. Love had seen Dai Jones Trouble “on the way over with your things” that she had developed this sudden solicitude, had forced a headache upon her, had hustled her off to the carefully curtained room. Carlyon had started off on his walk up the mountainside and had seen the boat—the boat bringing not only Dai Jones and the milk-woman, but a third figure as well.

The white man with the brown hands.

She scrambled out of bed and began feverishly to dress. This is the end. I’m going, I’m getting out. I’ll run down the path and try to attract attention from the other side of the river; or if the worst comes to the worst, I’ll just have to hide on the mountain till Miss Evans comes over in the morning, I’ll hide in those caves that Chucky told me about. It was terrifying, horrible to think of leaving even the uncertain fortress of her room, creeping out through the chocolate hall, into the dank evening air; but go she must. She left the things that had been sent from the hotel, her nightie, dressing-gown, slippers, washing gear; better lose them all and get a new lot than be impeded by brown paper parcels in her flight from the house.

There was nobody in the corridor; the door at which the piebald man had stood, was closed. She began with infinite caution to creep down the stairs.

A voice was lifted up in song, ringing forth suddenly from the kitchen; was as suddenly hushed, as though Dai Trouble had abruptly remembered that gentlemen’s gentlemen do not break forth into loud song while they go about their duties. From the sitting-room came a subdued murmur of voices. She crept on.

The kitchen door opened and Dai Trouble came out into the hall. She flattened herself against the wall and kept very still. He went to a cupboard in the hall, took something from it and returned to the kitchen. For a moment, the shock of so near a discovery almost drove her back to her room, but she forced herself on, creeping softly, silently down the stairs, her gloved hand sliding along the shoddy rail. She must get out and away; must get across the river and to the village and there find the first policeman and tell him everything. The thought of a village policeman was solid and comforting.

And besides, she had friends in the village of Pentre Trist! Miss Evans the Milk was quite a friend of hers already, and there were the men she had talked to the day before, Dai Ych-y-fi and the rest. It was true that Miss Evans had denied Amista, but Dai Ych-y-fi had seen her, had spoken to her. She recalled now the description in one of Amista’s rambling letters, the excitement because a man had come to do the drains, Dai Ych-y-fi who had “a romantic scar down one side of his face. …”

But the man had said… Dai Jones Ych-y-fi had said…

They had all said that they did not know Amista, did not know of any Mrs. Carlyon. And Dai Jones, the plumber, had said that he had seen Mrs. Love and of course Dai Trouble, but, “you never see anyone else from Penderyn.” And he had put up his hand and wiped with his hard palm the scarred cheek that Amista had described. There would be no help from the village.

She crept on down the creaking stair and, on the bottom step, paused for a moment with her hand on the round wooden ball on the bannister-post. Only half a dozen more paces and she would be out of the house and free; six steps across the hall and she would be rid for ever of its cloying brown menace, out of this place for ever and ever, away from the mystery and the terror and the echo of those cut-off, muffled screams.

She stepped down into the hall; and the door of the sitting-room quietly opened and the man stood there, two yards from her, with Carlyon and Mrs. Love at his shoulder.

They stood stock still, facing one another. The man’s round white face was blank with surprise, Mrs. Love’s eyes were two bright buttons of astonishment, Carlyon—Carlyon looked into Katinka’s face with a sick, haggard look as though he could stand not one moment more of drama and fuss and exhausting explanation, and turned his head away. She said to the man: “I want to speak to you.”

A white, European face. Hands plunged into coat pockets. He had a foreign inflection, very soft and sweet. “Yais?”

“
I
want to speak to you alone,” said Katinka, looking full at Carlyon.

The man glanced over his shoulder uncertainly. Carlyon drew back at once. He gestured the man forward into the hall and, with Mrs. Love, stepped back into the sitting-room and closed the door. Mrs. Love followed him obsequiously; but it was not with the air of a servant that she had been following the little man out of the sitting-room door; taking, if anything, precedence of Carlyon.

The man stood gazing at Tinka. His brown eyes were opened very wide, his mouth was a little o of bewilderment. He looked a mild little man, with a shock of brown hair under a round, pork-pie hat, and those two round staring eyes and the little, open jam-tart mouth. He said again, softly: “Yais?” and remembered the pork-pie hat and took it off and held it in front of him. The ghastly brown hands were covered up now with bright yellow wash-leather gloves.

She began to talk, eagerly, gabblingly, pouring out her plea for enlightenment, for explanation, for help. … “You see I know, I
know
, that that girl’s in the house. And today. I heard the—the screaming.
You
know something about that. You do, don’t you? What are you doing up here in this house? I saw you, I saw you standing in the corridor upstairs. You were… Your hands… What were you doing there? What had you been doing, why was she screaming?” As he merely stared at her speechlessly, she grabbed at his arm and shook it till the yellow gloves flailed helplessly in the air. “I warn you, I’m not going to just let this thing slide. If you, if someone, doesn’t give me a reasonable explanation, I warn you I’m going to the police, I shall tell them everything I know.”

He looked at her blankly, blankly. He lifted his wash-leather glove and solemnly replaced the little pork-pie hat, and began quietly to force a way past her, to the front door. “Excusse pleasse. I am from
Char-
many. Nineteen-thirty-four refuchee from Nazioppressed
Char
-many. …” He had obviously rolled it out so many times before. “Excusse. I do not speak English.” He turned back to rattle with his stick against the sitting-room door, and after a moment Carlyon appeared there with Mrs. Love. He gave her just the bare hint of a mocking smile, and quietly followed the little man out of the hall. This time, Mrs. Love walked in the rear. They disappeared round the bend of the little path; and far away across the river, Katinka saw that, by the makeshift landing stage, there was no crazy old boat. Evidently Miss Evans had been hired to bring the man across to this bank and wait an hour or so for his return. Miss Evans the Ferry, more like! she thought; but no doubt it added to the meagre income of Miss Evans the Milk.

She went out onto the gravelled path that surrounded the house and stood there uncertainly, wondering what to do next. The evening sun lit the glass windows to a rosy glow, but in the wing which turned at an angle from the main frontage the windows were in shadow. (How odd, when one came to think of it, had been that discussion as to which room she should occupy. In what other house did the man-servant lay down the law as to which room should be given to a guest? “The front room,” he had said, flatly, and Carlyon had chimed in with a sort of you’ve-got-something-there inflection. Was it not that the room over the dining-room lay at the end of a corridor, a little apart from the rest of that too-compact house? She remembered the laughing words of Miss Let’s-be-Lovely in their cosy pink offices a thousand, thousand impassable miles away: “He probably keeps a mad wife in the attic, a la
Jane
Eyre!” and shuddered at the memory.

Behind a window pane, something was moving. In a room far removed from the room she had been given, someone was stirring. And she could hear Dai Trouble singing softly in the kitchen. And Carlyon and Mrs. Love were not in the house. She stood looking up at the window.

Dai Jones sang on—a little, crooning tune that swelled and soared into full-throated song, sung as only the Welsh can sing, tossed up into the air like a fountain of silver notes; thundering down the scale, shivering to a thousand fragments of whispering music dying away upon the silent air. “The tail of little David’s shirt is hanging out,” sang Dai Jones Trouble in his liquid Welsh; and something was moving inside that shadowed window pane, fumbling at the clouded glass in little, baffled movements, trying to find its way out. Something was knocking softly at the window pane. “Bread from Evans’s,
bread
from Evans’s,” carolled Dai’s golden tenor; and Tinka screamed out above the singing, “Break the window! Break the window and tell me what you want!”

The moving whiteness swam behind the pane. There was a tinkle of falling glass. And still the song rolled on.

It was a small pane, low down in the window. Now it was starred with a hole, surrounded by jagged points of thick, patterned glass. A hand felt its way delicately through the hole, a little hand, very soft and smooth, with long, red, varnished nails; and groped about the empty air. It was horrible, it was like the head of a blinded snake, feeling its way about in the empty air. It groped its way to the angle of the stuccoed wall, and found a flat surface and, for a moment, rested there. The little, soft white wrist was thrust cruelly through the jagged hole in the glass.

And the scarlet-tipped forefinger began to trace letters on the surface of the wall. An A… A long pause. “Go on, go on!” screamed Katinka above the lovely notes of Dai Trouble’s song. “Yes, write it! What do you want me to do?”

An M.

“Yes, yes, I can read it, I understand, I’m here to help you. Yes. Go on!”

An I.

A—M—I… There was a tinkle of glass, more broken glass crashing to the gravel beneath as the hand was suddenly withdrawn; a tinkle that sounded loud and sharp in the sudden silence. For the song was ended; and Dai Jones Trouble stood at the angle of the wall and his eyes were blazing like the eyes of a cat in the dark. He took one step towards her. She moved back a step. “I… Oh, Dai, there you are… I was just…” He looked down at the broken glass beneath the window and up at the broken pane; and back at Katinka. She ran screaming away from him along the beaten track that led up the mountainside away from the house.