Eight Murders In the Suburbs (3 page)

The man had recovered the leash and was soothing the dog. Again Miss Paisley extemporised a prayer, this time of thankfulness. Then the habit of years asserted itself over the teaching she believed she had received from the cat.

“I am afraid, sir, my cat has injured your dog. I am very sorry. If there is anything I can do—”

“That's all right, miss,” a genial cockney voice answered. “He asked for it, an' he got it.” The dog was bleeding under the throat, and there were two long weals on its chest. “That's the way cats ought to fight—get in under and strike UP, I say!”

“I have some iodine in my flat—”

“Cor, he don't want none o' that! Maybe your cat has saved 'im from losing an eye to the next one. Don't you give it another thought, miss!”

Miss Paisley bowed, sadly confused in her social values, which were also her moral values. The man's cockney accent was as inescapable as the excellence of his manners. Miss Paisley's world was changing too fast for her.

She enjoyed another six days and nights of the cat's company, which included four and a half days at the office. But these can be counted in, because the attention she gave to her work had become automatic and did not disturb her inner awareness of the relationship. She never defined that relationship, had not even observed the oddity that she had given the cat no name.

It was a Tuesday evening. The cat was not at home when she arrived.

“You've started being late for meals again,” she grumbled. “Tonight, as it so happens, you can have ten minutes' grace.”

Her subscription to an illustrated social weekly was overdue. She filled up the renewal form, went out to buy a money order.

In the hall, Mr. Rinditch's voice reached her through the closed door of his apartment—apparently swearing to himself. There followed a muffled, whistling sound, as of cord being drawn sharply over metal. Then she heard a queer kind of growling cough and a scratching on woodwork—the kind of scratching sound that could be made by a cat's claws on a wooden panel, if the cat's body were suspended above the floor.

She stood, holding her breath, paralysed by a sense of urgency which her imagination refused to define. She seemed to be imprisoned within herself, unable to desire escape. The sound of scratching grew thinner until it was so thin that one could doubt whether one had heard it at all.

“You are imagining things!” she said to herself.

She smiled and went on her way to the post office. The smile became fixed. One must, she told herself, be circumspect in all things. If she were to start brawling with her neighbours every time she fancied—well, this-that-and-the-other—without a shred of evidence—people would soon be saying she was an eccentric old maid. She wished she could stop smiling.

She bought the money order, posted it and returned to her apartment, assuring herself that nothing at all had happened. That being agreed, everything could proceed as usual.

“Not home yet! Very well, I shan't wait for you. I shall cut up your meat now, and if it gets dry you've only yourself to blame.” She put on the gloves with which she had held reins thirty-seven years ago. “Just over a year! I must have used them to cut up your meat more than three hundred times, and they're none the worse for wear. You couldn't buy gloves like this nowadays. I don't fancy tinned salmon. I think I'll make myself an omelette. I remember Cook was always a little uncertain with her omelettes.”

She made the omelette carefully, but ate it quickly. When she had finished her coffee, she went to the bookcase above the escritoire. She had not opened the glass doors for more than ten years. She took out
Ivanhoe
, which her father had given to her mother before they were married.

At a quarter past ten, she closed the book.

“You know I've never waited up for you! And I'm not going to begin now.”

The routine was to leave the curtains parted a little—about the width of a cat. Tonight she closed them. When she got into bed, she could soon see moonlight through the chinks by the rings—and then the daylight. In the morning, she took some trouble to avoid meeting Jenkins. As if he had lain in wait for her, he popped out from the service cupboard under the staircase.

“Good morning, madam. I haven't seen your pussy cat this morning.”

Pussy cat! What a nauseating way to speak of her cat!

“I'm not worrying, Jenkins. He often goes off on his own for a couple of days. I'm a little late this morning.”

She was not late—she caught her usual train to London with the usual margin. At the office, her room mates seemed more animated than usual. A fragment of their chatter penetrated. “If
Lone Lass
doesn't win tomorrow, I shall be going to London for my summer holiday.” A racehorse, of course. One of the so-called classic races tomorrow, but she could not remember which. It reminded her of Mr. Rinditch. A very low, coarse man! Her thoughts shifted to that very nice man who owned the dog. One of nature's gentlemen! ‘
Get in under and strike UP
.'

She did not go out in the lunch hour, so did not buy any catsmeat.

That evening, at a few minutes to eight, she heard Jenkins' footstep on the landing. He knocked at her door.

“Good evening, madam. I hope I'm not disturbing you. There's somethink I'd like to show you, if you can spare a couple o' minutes.”

On the way downstairs, there broke upon Miss Paisley the full truth about herself and Jenkins. Madam! She could hear now the contempt in his voice—could even hear the innumerable guffaws that had greeted his anecdotes of the female clerk who gave herself the airs of a lady in temporarily distressed circumstances. But her dignity had now passed into her own keeping.

He led her along the corridor, through the door giving on to the yard, to the Corporation ash-cans. He lifted a lid. On top of the garbage was the carcase of her cat. Attached to the neck was a length of green blind cord.

“Well, Jenkins?” HIer fixed smile was unnerving to him.

“He was in Mr. Rinditch's room again, soon after you come 'ome last night. You can't really complain, knowin' what he said he'd do. And hangin' an animal isn't torture if it's done properly, like this was. I don't suppose your pore little pussy cat felt any pain. Just pulled the string over the top of the coat-hook and it was all over.”

“That is immaterial.” She knew that her cold indifference was robbing this jackal of the sadistic treat he had promised himself. “How do we know that Mr. Rinditch is responsible? It might have been anybody in the building, Jenkins.”

“I tell you, it was him! Last night, when my missus went in with his evenin' meal, same as usual, she saw a length o' that blind cord stickin' out from under his bed. And there was a bit o' green fluff on the coat-hook, where the cord had frayed. The missus did a bit more nosing while she was clearing away, an' she spotted the cat's collar in the waste paper basket. You couldn't hang a cat properly with that collar on, ' cause o' the metal. She said the strap part had been cut—like as it might be with a razor.”

Miss Paisley gazed a second time into the ash-can. The collar had certainly been removed. Jenkins, watching her, thought she was still unwilling to believe him. Like most habitual liars, he was always excessively anxious to prove his word when he happened to be telling the truth.

“Come to think of it, the collar will still be in that basket,” he said, mainly to himself. “Listen! He keeps it near enough to the front window. Come round to the front and maybe you'll be able to see it for yourself.”

The basket was of plaited wicker. Through the interstices Miss. Paisley could see enough of the collar to banish doubt.

She could listen to herself talking to Jenkins, just as she had been able to see herself standing at the ash-can, knowing what was under the lid before Jenkins removed it. How easy it was to be calm when you had made up your mind!

When she returned to her room it was only five minutes past eight. Never mind. The calm would last as long as she needed it. In two hours and twenty-five minutes, Mr. Rinditch would come home. She was shivering. She put on the green suede lumber-jacket, then she sat in her armchair, erect, her outstretched fingers in the folds of the upholstery.

“Before Mr. Rinditch comes back, I want you to know that I heard you scratching on his wall. You were alive then. We have already faced the fact that if I had hammered on the door and—brawled—you would be alive now. We won't argue about it. There's a lot to be said on both sides, so we will not indulge in recriminations.”

Miss Paisley was silent until twenty-five minutes past ten, when she got up and put on the riding gloves, as if she were about to cut meat for her cat. The knife lay on the shelf in its usual place. Her hand snatched at the handle, as if someone were trying to take it away from her.

“‘Get in under and strike UP!'”
she whispered—and then Miss Paisley's physical movements again became unmanageable. She was gripping the handle of the knife, but she could not raise it from the shelf. She had the illusion of exerting her muscles, of pulling with all the strength of her arm against an impossibly heavy weight. Dimly she could hear Mr. Rinditch come home and slam his door.

“I've let myself become excited! I must get back my calm.”

Still wearing the gloves and the lumber-jacket, she went back to her chair.

“At my age, I can't alter the habits of a lifetime—and when I try, I am pulled two ways at once. I told you in the first place that you had come too late. You oughtn't to have gone into Mr. Rinditch's room. He killed you in malice, and I betrayed you—oh, yes, I did!—and now I can't even pray.”

Miss Paisley's thoughts propounded riddles and postulated nightmares with which her genteel education was unable to cope. When she came to full consciousness of her surroundings it was a quarter to three in the morning. The electric light was burning and she was wearing neither the gloves nor the green suede lumber-jacket..

“I don't remember turning on the light—I'm too tired to remember anything.” She would sleep on in the morning, take a day off. She undressed and got into bed. For the first time for more than a year, she fell asleep without thought of the cat.

She was awakened shortly after seven by a number of unusual sounds—of a clatter in the hall and voices raised, of a coming and going on the stairs. She sat up and listened. On the ground floor Mrs. Jenkins was shouting while she cried—a working-class habit which Miss Paisley deplored. A voice she recognised as that of the boilermaker who lived on the top floor, shouted up the stairs to his wife.

“Oi, Emma! They've taken him away. Hangcuffs an' all! Cor!”

Miss Paisley put on her long winter coat, pulled the collar up to her chin, and opened her door.

“What is all the fuss about?” she asked the boilermaker.

“That bookie on the ground floor, miss. Someone cut 'is throat for ' im last night. The pleece've pinched Bob Jenkins.” He added: “Hangcuffs an' all!”

“Oh!” said Miss Paisley. “I see!”

Miss Paisley shut the door. She dressed and prinked with more care than usual. She remembered trying to pick up the knife—remembered sitting down in an ecstasy of self-contempt—then groping in a mental fog that enveloped time and place. But there were beacons in the fog.
‘Get in under and strike UP'
was one beacon, the slogan accompanied by a feeling of intense pride. And wasn't there another beacon? A vague memory of slinking, like a cat, in the shadows—to the river. Why the river? Of rinsing her hands in cold water. Of returning to her chair. Return.
£1 Reward For Return.
Her head was spinning. Anyhow, ‘someone had cut his throat for him in the night.'

So far from feeling crushed, Miss Paisley found that she had recovered the power to pray.

“I have committed murder, so I quite see that it's absurd to ask for anything. But I really must keep calm for the next few hours. If I may be helped to keep calm, please, I can manage the rest myself.”

At the local police station, Miss Paisley gave an able summary of events leading to the destruction of her cat, and her own subsequent actions, ‘while in a state of trance.'

The desk sergeant stifled a yawn. He produced a form, and asked her a number of questions concerning her identity and occupation, but no questions at all about the murder. When he had finished writing down the answers, he read them aloud.

“And your complaint is, Miss Paisley, that it was you who killed William Rinditch, in—in a state of trance you said, didn't you?”

Miss Paisley assented, thinking this was a funny way of putting it, and signed her statement.

“Just at present, the inspector is very busy,” said the sergeant, “so I must ask you to take a seat in the waiting room.”

Miss Paisley, who had expected the interview to end with ‘hangcuffs,' clung to her calm and sat in the waiting room, insultingly unguarded, for more than an hour. Then she was grudgingly invited to enter a police car, which took her to county headquarters.

Chief Inspector Graun, who had served his apprenticeship at Scotland Yard, had dealt with a score or more of self-accusing hysterics. He knew that about one in four would claim to have committed the murder while in a trance—knew, too, that this kind could be the most troublesome if they fancied they were treated frivolously.

“Then you believe Rinditch killed your cat, Miss Paisley, because Jenkins told you so?”

“By no means!” She described the cat's collar and the method of killing, which necessitated the removal of the collar. She added details about the waste-paper basket.

“Then the collar is still in that basket, if Jenkins was telling the truth?”

But investigation on the spot established that there was no cat's collar in the waste-paper basket, nor anywhere else in the apartment. Miss Paisley was astonished—she knew she had seen it in that basket. The interview was resumed in her flatlet, where she asserted that she had intended to kill Mr. Rinditch when he returned at ten-thirty, but was insufficiently prepared at that time. She did not know what time it was when she killed him, but knew that it was not later than a quarter to three in the morning. The weapon had been the knife which she used exclusively for cutting the cat's special meat.