Eight Murders In the Suburbs (2 page)

It was a month or more before Miss Paisley knew for certain that she hoped the cat would make its home with her. Her attitude was free from the kind of sentimentality which one associates with an old maid and a cat. She respected its cathood, attributed to it no human qualities, The relationship was too subtle to have need of pretence. Admittedly, she talked to it a great deal. But she talked as if to a room-mate, who might or might not be attending. In this respect, the cat's role could be compared with that of a paid companion.

“Excuse me, madam!” Jenkins, the watchdog and rent collector, who had replaced the porter of palmier days, had stopped her in the narrow hall. “Would that cat with the black-and-white muzzle be yours by any chance?”

A month ago, Miss Paisley would have dithered with apology for breaking the rules and would have promised instant compliance.

“It is my cat, Jenkins. And I would be very glad to pay you half a crown a week for any trouble it may be to you.”

“That's very kind of you, madam, and thank you. What I was goin' to say was that I saw it jump out o' Mr. Rinditch's window with a bit o' fish in its mouth what Mr. Rinditch had left from his breakfast.” He glanced down the passage to make sure that Mr. Rinditch's door was shut. “You know what Mr. Rinditch is!”

Miss Paisley knew that he was a street bookmaker, with a number of runners who took the actual bets, and that Jenkins stood in awe of him as the only tenant of any financial substance. Mr. Rinditch was a stocky, thickset man with a large sullen face and a very large neck. Miss Paisley thought he looked vulgar, which was a matter of character, whereas the other tenants only looked common, which they couldn't help.

“I'll give it proper cats' meat: then it won't steal.”

“Thank you, madam!”

The ‘madam' cost Miss Paisley about four pounds a year. None of the other women were ‘madam', and none of the men were ‘sir'—not even Mr. Rinditch. Two pounds at Christmas and odd half crowns for small, mainly superfluous services. For Miss Paisley it was a sound investment. In her dream life she was an
emigrée
, awaiting recall to a style of living which, did she but know it, had virtually ceased to exist in England. It was as if the thirty odd years of unskilled clerical labour were a merely temporary expedient. Through the cat she was acquiring a new philosophy, but the dream was untouched.

“I have to cut your meat,” she explained that evening. “And I'm rather dreading it. You see, I've never actually handled raw meat before. It was
not
considered a necessary item in my education. Though I remember once—we were on a river picnic—two of the servants with the hamper were being driven over …”

She had to ask Jenkins' advice. He lent her a knife—a formidable object with a black handle and a blade tapering to a point. A French knife, he told her, and she could buy one like it at any ironmonger's—which she did on the following day. There remained the shuddery business of handling the meat. She sacrificed a memento—a pair of leather driving gloves, which she had worn for horse-riding during her holidays from school.

On the third day of the fourth month the cat failed to appear at its meal time. Miss Paisley was disturbed. She went to bed an hour later than usual, to lie awake until dawn, struggling against the now inescapable fact that the cat had become necessary to her, though she was unable to guess why this should be true. She tried to prove it was not true. She knew how some old maids—and some virile young men, too, for that matter—would dote upon a particular cat, perpetually fondling it and talking baby to it. For her cat she felt nothing at all of that kind of emotion. She knew that her cat was rather dirty, and she never really liked touching it. Indeed, she did not like cats, as such. But there was something about this particular cat—

The cat came through the open window shortly after dawn. She got out of bed and uncovered the meat. The cat yawned, stretched and ignored it, then jumped on to the foot of her bed, circled and settled down, asleep before her own head returned to her pillow. Miss Paisley was now cat-wise enough to know that it must have fed elsewhere, from which she drew the alarming inference that a cat which had strayed once might stray again.

The next day she bought a collar, had it engraved with her name and address and, in brackets,
(£1 Reward For Return)
. She could contemplate expenditure of this kind without unease because, in the thirty odd years, she had saved more than five hundred pounds.

That evening, she fastened the collar in position. The cat pulled it off. Miss Paisley unfastened the special safety buckle and tried again—tried five times before postponing further effort.

“Actually, you yourself have taught me how to handle this situation,” she said, the following morning. “You refused the bloater paste and the not very fresh milk. You were right! Now, it will be a great pity if we have to quarrel and see no more of each other, but—no collar—no meat!”

After small initial misunderstandings the cat accepted the collar for the duration of the meal. On the third evening the cat forgot to scratch it off after the meal. In a week, painstaking observation revealed that the cat had become unconscious of the collar. Even when it scratched the collar in course of scratching itself, it made no effort to remove the collar. It wore the collar for the rest of its life.

After the collar incident, their relationship was established on a firmer footing. She bought herself new clothes—including a hat that was too young for her and a lumber-jacket in suede, as green as a cat's eyes. There followed a month of tranquillity, shadowed only by a warning from Jenkins that the cat had failed to shake off its habit of visiting Mr. Rinditch's room. She noticed something smarmy in the way Jenkins told her about it—as if he enjoyed telling her. For the first time, there came to her the suspicion that the ‘madam' was ironic and a source of amusement to Jenkins.

On the following Saturday came evidence that, in this matter at least, Jenkins had spoken truly. She would reach home shortly after one on Saturdays. While she was on her way across the hall to the staircase, the door of Mr. Rinditch's room opened. Mr. Rinditch's foot was visible, as was Miss Paisley's cat. The cat was projected some four feet across the corridor. As it struck the panelling of the staircase, Miss Paisley felt a violent pain in her own ribs. She rushed forward, tried to pick up her cat. The cat spat at her and hobbled away. For a moment she stared after it, surprised and hurt by its behaviour. Then suddenly, she brightened.

“You won't accept pity!” she murmured. She tossed her head: her eyes sparkled with a kind of happiness that was new to her. She knocked on Mr. Rinditch's door. When the large, sullen face appeared, she met it with a cat-like stare.

“You kicked my cat.”

“Your cat, is it! Then I'll thank you to keep it out o' my room.”

“I regret the trespass—”

“So do I. If I catch 'im in 'ere again, he'll swing for it, and it's me tellin' yer.” Mr. Rinditch slammed his door.

Miss Paisley, who affected an ignorance of cockney idiom, asked herself what the words meant. As they would bear an interpretation which she would not allow her imagination to accept, she assured herself that they meant nothing. She began to wonder at her own audacity in bearding a coarse, tough man like Mr. Rinditch, who might well have started a brawl.

In the meantime, the cat had gone up the stairs and was waiting for her at the door of her apartment. It still did not wish to be touched. But when Miss Paisley rested in her easy chair before preparing her lunch, the cat, for the first time, jumped on to her lap. It growled and changed its position, steadying itself with its claws, which penetrated Miss Paisley's dress and pricked her. Then it settled down, purred a little and went to sleep. The one-time dining-room clock chimed two o'clock: Miss Paisley discovered that she was not hungry.

On Sunday the cat resumed its normal routine, and seemed none the worse. It tackled its meat ration with avidity, and wound up with Miss Paisley's other meringue. But that did not excuse the gross brutality of Mr. Rinditch. On Monday morning, Miss Paisley stopped Jenkins on the first floor landing and asked for Mr. Rinditch's full name, explaining that she intended to apply for a summons for cruelty to animals.

“If you'll excuse me putting in a word, madam, you won't get your own back on
him
by gettin' him fined ten bob. Why, he pays somthink like fifty pounds a month in fines for 'is runners—thinks no more of it than you think o' your train fare.”

Miss Paisley was somewhat dashed. Jenkins enlarged.

“You'd be surprised, madam, at the cash that comes his way. The night before a big race, he'll be home at six with more'n a couple o' hundred pound in that bag o' his: then he'll go out at a quarter to eight, do his round of the pubs and be back at ten thirty with as much cash again.”

The amount of the fine, Miss Paisley told herself, was irrelevant. This was a matter of principle. The lawyer, whom she consulted during her lunch hour, failed to perceive the principle. He told her that she could not prove her statements: that, as the cat admittedly bore no sign of the attack, the case would be ‘laughed out of court.'

She had never heard that phrase before, and she resented it, the resentment being tinged with fear.

When she reached home, she found the cat crouching on the far side of the escritoire. It took no notice of her, but she could wait no longer to unburden herself.

“We should be laughed out of court,” she said. “In other words, Mr. Rinditch can kick us, and the Law will laugh at us for being kicked. I expect we look funny when we are in pain!”

In the whole of Miss Paisley's life, that was the unluckiest moment for that particular remark. If her eyes had not been turned inward, she would have interpreted the behaviour of the cat, could not have failed to recognise that its position by the escritoire was strategic. She was still talking about her interview with the lawyer when the cat pounced, then turned in her direction, a live mouse kicking in its jaws.

“Oh, dear!” She accepted the situation with a sigh. She was without the physiological fear of mice—thought them pretty little things, and would have encouraged them but for their insanitary habits.

Now, Miss Paisley knew—certainly from the
cliché
, if not from experience—the way of a cat with a mouse. Yet it took her by surprise, creating an unmanageable conflict.

“Don't—oh,
don't
! Stop! Can't you see? … We're no better than Mr. Rinditch! Oh, God, please make him stop! I can't endure it. I
mustn't
endure it! Isn't it any use praying? Are You laughing, too?”

Physical movement was not at Miss Paisley's command, just then. The feeling of cold in her spine turned to heat, and spread outwards over her body, tingling as it spread. In her ears was the sound of crackling, like the burning of dried weeds.

Her breathing ceased to be painful. The immemorial ritual claimed first her attention, then her interest.

After some minutes, Miss Paisley tittered. Then she giggled. The cat, which can create in humanity so many illusions about itself, seemed to be playing its mouse to a gallery, and playing hard for a laugh.

Miss Paisley laughed.

There were periods of normality, of uneventful months in which one day was indistinguishable from another, and Miss Paisley thought of herself as an elderly lady who happened to keep a cat.

She deduced that the cat wandered a good deal, and sometimes begged or stole food from unknown persons. She had almost persuaded herself that it had abandoned its perilous habit of visiting Mr. Rinditch's flatlet. One evening in early summer, about a fortnight before the end came, this hope was dashed.

At about half-past eight, the cat had gone out, after its evening meal. Miss Paisley was looking out of her window, idly awaiting its return. Presently she saw it on top of the wall that divided the yard from the old burial ground. She waved to it: it stared at her, then proceeded to wash itself, making a ten-minute job of it. Then it slithered down via the tool shed, but instead of making straight for the drain pipe that led past Miss Paisley's window sill, its changed direction. By leaning out of the window, she could obtain an oblique view of Mr. Rinditch's rear window.

She hurried downstairs along the corridor, past Mr. Rinditch's door to the door that gave on to the yard, skirted a group of six Corporation ash-cans, and came to Mr. Rinditch's window, which was open about eighteen inches at the bottom. She could see the cat on Mr. Rinditch's bed. She knew she could not tempt it with food so soon after its main meal. She called coaxingly, then desperately.

“We are in great danger,” she whispered. “Don't you care?”

The cat stared at her, then closed its eyes. Miss Paisley took stock of the room. It was sparsely but not inexpensively furnished. The panelling was disfigured with calendars and metal coat-hooks.

The sill was more than four feet from the ground. She put her shoulders in the gap, and insinuated herself. She grasped the cat by its scruff, with one finger under its collar, and retained her hold while she scrambled to the safety of the yard, neglecting to lower the window to its usual position. They both reached her apartment without meeting anyone.

During that first fortnight that remained to them, Miss Paisley received—as she would have expressed it—a final lesson from the cat. She was returning from work on a warm evening. When some fifty yards from the chambers, she saw the cat sunning itself on the pavement. From the opposite direction came a man with a Labrador dog on a leash. Suddenly the dog bounded, snatching the leash from the man's hand.

“
Danger
! Run away!” screamed Miss Paisley.

The cat saw its enemy a second too late. Moreover, its stiff leg put flight out of the question. While Miss Paisley ran forward, she felt the dog's hot breath on the back of her neck, nerved herself for the breaking of her bones. And then, as it seemed to her, the incredible happened. The dog sprang away from the cat, ran round in a circle, yelping with pain, while the cat clambered to the top of a nearby gatepost.