Hangmans Holiday (21 page)

“Well, my dear,” said Mr. Doe, “will he do? You don’t object to the colour, eh?”

“Oh, no. He’s a beautiful cat. I like him very much.”

“Right. Then we’ll take him. Here you are, Miss Maitland. Ten shillings. Please sign this receipt. Thanks. Never mind about the change from the half-crown. There you are, my dear; you’ve got your cat, and I hope we shall see no more of those mice. Now”—he glanced at his watch—“I’m afraid you must say good-bye to your pet quickly, Miss Maitland; we’ve got to get off. He’ll be quite safe with us.”

Monty strolled out with gentlemanly reticence into the hall while the last words were said. It was, no doubt, the same gentlemanly feeling which led him to move away from the sitting-room door towards the back part of the house; but he had only waited a very few minutes when Jean Maitland came out, sniffing valiantly into a small handkerchief, and followed by Mrs. Doe.

“You’re fond of your cat, aren’t you, my dear? I do hope you don’t feel too—”

“There, there, Flossie,” said her husband, appearing suddenly at her shoulders, “Miss Maitland knows he’ll be well looked after.” He showed them out, and shut the door quickly upon them.

“If you
don’t
feel happy about it,” said Mr. Egg uneasily, “we’ll have him back in two twos.”

“No, it’s all right,” said Jean. “If you don’t mind, let’s get in at once and drive away—rather fast.”

As they lurched over the uneven road, Mr. Egg saw a lad coming down it. In one hand he carried a basket. He was whistling loudly.

“Look!” said Monty. “One of our hated rivals. We’ve got in ahead of him, anyhow. ‘The salesman first upon the field gets the bargain signed and sealed.’ Damn it!” he added to himself, as he pressed down the accelerator, “I
hope
it’s O.K. I wonder.”

Although Mr. Egg had worked energetically to get Maher-shalal-hashbaz settled in the world, he was not easy in his mind. The matter preyed upon his spirits to such an extent that, finding himself back in London on the following Saturday week, he made an expedition south of the Thames to make inquiries. And when the Maitlands’ door was opened by Jean, there by her side, arching his back and brandishing his tail, was Maher-shalal-hashbaz.

“Yes,” said the girl, “he found his way back, the clever darling! Just a week ago to-day—and he was dreadfully thin and draggled—how he did it, I can’t think. But we simply couldn’t send him away again, could we, Maggie?”

“No,” said Mrs. Maitland. “I don’t like the cat, and never did, but there! I suppose even cats have their feelings. But it’s an awkward thing about the money.”

“Yes,” said Jean. “You see, when he got back and we decided to keep him, I wrote to Mr. Doe and explained, and sent him a postal order for the ten shillings. And this morning the letter came back from the Post Office, marked ‘Not Known.’ So we don’t know what to do about it.”

“I never did believe in Mr. John Doe,” said Monty. “If you ask me, Miss Maitland, he was no good, and I shouldn’t bother any more about him.”

But the girl was not satisfied, and presently the obliging Mr. Egg found himself driving out northwards in search of the mysterious Mr. Doe, carrying the postal order with him.

The door of the villa was opened by a neatly dressed, elderly woman whom he had never seen before. Mr. Egg inquired for Mr. John Doe.

“He doesn’t live here. Never heard of him.”

Monty explained that he wanted the gentleman who had purchased the cat.

“Cat?” said the woman. Her face changed. “Step inside, will you? George!” she called to somebody inside the house, “here’s a gentleman called about a cat. Perhaps you’d like to—” The rest of the sentence was whispered into the ear of a man who emerged from the sitting-room, and who appeared to be, and was in fact, her husband.

George looked Mr. Egg carefully up and down. “I don’t know nobody here called Doe,” said he; “but if it’s the late tenant you’re wanting, they’ve left. Packed and went off in a hurry the day after the old gentleman was buried. I’m the caretaker for the landlord. And if you’ve missed a cat, maybe you’d like to come and have a look out here.”

He led the way through the house and out at the back door into the garden. In the middle of one of the flowerbeds was a large hole, like an irregularly shaped and shallow grave. A spade stood upright in the mould. And laid in two lugubrious rows upon the lawn were the corpses of some very dead cats. At a hasty estimate, Mr. Egg reckoned that there must be close on fifty of them.

“If any of these is yours,” said George, “you’re welcome to it. But they ain’t in what you might call good condition.”

“Good Lord!” said Mr. Egg, appalled, and thought with pleasure of Maher-shalal-hashbaz, tail erect, welcoming him on the Maitlands’ threshold. “Come back and tell me about this. It’s—it’s unbelievable!”

It turned out that the name of the late tenants had been Proctor. The family consisted of an old Mr. Proctor, an invalid, to whom the house belonged, and his married nephew and the nephew’s wife.

“They didn’t have no servant sleeping in. Old Mrs. Crabbe used to do for them, coming in daily, and she always told me that the old gentleman couldn’t abide cats. They made him ill like—I’ve known folks like that afore. And, of course, they had to be careful, him being so frail and his heart so bad he might have popped off any minute. What it seemed to us when I found all them cats buried, like, was as how maybe young Proctor had killed them to prevent the old gentleman seeing ’em and getting a shock. But the queer thing is that all them cats looks to have been killed about the same time, and not so long ago, neither.”

Mr. Egg remembered the advertisement, and the false name, and the applicants passed out by a different door, so that none of them could possibly tell how many cats had been bought and paid for. And he remembered also the careful injunction to bring the cat at 6 o’clock precisely, and the whistling lad with the basket who had appeared on the scene about a quarter of an hour after them. He remembered another thing—a faint miauling noise that had struck upon his ear as he stood in the hall while Jean was saying good-bye to Maher-shalal-hashbaz, and the worried look on Mrs. Proctor’s face when she had asked if Jean was fond of her pet. It looked as though Mr. Proctor junior had been collecting cats for some rather sinister purpose. Collecting them from every quarter of London. From quarters as far apart as possible—or why so much care to take down names and addresses?

“What did the old gentleman die of?” he asked.

“Well,” said Mrs. George, “it was just heart-failure, or so the doctor said. Last Tuesday week he passed away in the night, poor soul, and Mrs. Crabbe that laid him out said he had a dreadful look of horror on his poor face, but the doctor said that wasn’t anything out of the way, not with his disease. But what the doctor didn’t see, being too busy to come round, was them terrible scratches on his face and arms. Must have regular clawed himself in his agony—oh, dear, oh, dear! But there! Anybody knew as he might go off at any time like the blowing out of a candle.”

“I know that, Sally,” said her husband. “But what about them scratches on the bedroom door? Don’t tell me he did that, too. Or, if he did, why didn’t somebody hear him and come along to help him? It’s all very well for Mr. Timbs—that’s the landlord—to say as tramps must have got into the house after the Proctors left, and put us in here to look after the place, but why should tramps go for to do a useless bit of damage like that?”

“A ’eartless lot, them Proctors, that’s what I say,” said Mrs. George. “A-snoring away, most likely, and leaving their uncle to die by himself. And wasn’t the lawyer upset about it, neither! Coming along in the morning to make the old gentleman’s will, and him passed away so sudden. And seeing they came in for all his money after all, you’d think they might have given him a better funeral. Mean, I call it—not a flower, hardly—only one half-guinea wreath—and no oak—only elm and a shabby lot of handles. Such trash! You’d think they’d be ashamed.”

Mr. Egg was silent. He was not a man of strong imagination, but he saw a very horrible picture in his mind. He saw an old, sick man asleep, and hands that quietly opened the bedroom door, and dragged in, one after the other, sacks that moved and squirmed and mewed. He saw the sacks left open on the floor, and the door being softly shut and locked on the outside. And then, in the dim glow of the night-light, he saw shadowy shapes that leapt and flitted about the room—black and tabby and ginger—up and down, prowling on noiseless feet, thudding on velvet paws from tables and chairs. And then, plump up on the bed—a great ginger cat with amber eyes—and the sleeper waking with a cry—and after that a nightmare of terror and disgust behind the locked and remorseless door. A very old, sick man, stumbling and gasping for breath, striking out at the shadowy horrors that pursued and fled him—and the last tearing pain at the heart when merciful death overtook him. Then, nothing but a mewing of cats and a scratching at the door, and outside, the listener, with his ear bent to the keyhole.

Mr. Egg passed his handkerchief over his forehead; he did not like his thoughts. But he had to go on, and see the murderer sliding through the door in the morning—hurrying to collect his innocent accomplices before Mrs. Crabbe should come—knowing that it must be done quickly and the corpse made decent—and that when people came to the house there must be no mysterious miaulings to surprise them. To set the cats free would not be enough—they might hang about the house. No; the water-butt and then the grave in the garden. But Maher-shalal-hashbaz—nobel Maher-shalal-hashbaz had fought for his life. He was not going to be drowned in any water-butts. He had kicked himself loose (“and I hope,” thought Mr. Egg, “he scratched him all to blazes”), and he had toiled his way home across London. If only Maher-shalal-hashbaz could tell what he knew! But Monty Egg knew something, and he could tell.

“And I
will
tell, what’s more,” said Monty Egg to himself, as he wrote down the name and address of Mr. Proctor’s solicitor. He supposed it must be murder to terrify an old man to death; he was not sure, but he meant to find out. He cast about in his mind for a consoling motto from the
Salesman’s Handbook,
but, for the first time in his life, could find nothing that really fitted the case.

“I seem to have stepped regularly out of my line,” he thought sadly; “but still, as a citizen—”

And then he smiled, recollecting the first and last aphorism in his favourite book:

To serve the Public is the aim

Of every salesman worth the name

F
OR PERHAPS THE TWENTIETH
time since the train had left Carlisle, Pender glanced up from
Murder at the Manse
and caught the eye of the man opposite.

He frowned a little. It was irritating to be watched so closely, and always with that faint, sardonic smile. It was still more irritating to allow oneself to be so much disturbed by the smile and the scrutiny. Pender wrenched himself back to his book with a determination to concentrate upon the problem of the minister murdered in the library. But the story was of the academic kind that crowds all its exciting incidents in the first chapter, and proceeds thereafter by a long series of deductions to a scientific solution in the last. The thin thread of interest, spun precariously upon the wheel of Pender’s reasoning brain, had been snapped. Twice he had to turn back to verify points that he had missed in reading. Then he became aware that his eyes had followed three closely argued pages without conveying anything whatever to his intelligence. He was not thinking about the murdered minister at all—he was becoming more and more actively conscious of the other man’s face. A queer face, Pender thought.

There was nothing especially remarkable about the features in themselves; it was their expression that daunted Pender. It was a secret face, the face of one who knew a great deal to other people’s disadvantage. The mouth was a little crooked and tightly tucked in at the corners, as though savouring a hidden amusement. The eyes, behind a pair of rimless pince-nez, glittered curiously; but that was possibly due to the light reflected in the glasses. Pender wondered what the man’s profession might be. He was dressed in a dark lounge suit, a raincoat and a shabby soft hat; his age was perhaps about forty.

Pender coughed unnecessarily and settled back into his corner, raising the detective story high before his face, barrier-fashion. This was worse than useless. He gained the impression that the man saw through the manœuvre and was secretly entertained by it. He wanted to fidget, but felt obscurely that his doing so would in some way constitute a victory for the other man. In his self-consciousness he held himself so rigid that attention to his book became a sheer physical impossibility.

There was no stop now before Rugby, and it was unlikely that any passenger would enter from the corridor to break up this disagreeable
solitude à deux.
But something must be done. The silence had lasted so long that any remark, however trivial, would—so Pender felt—burst upon the tense atmosphere with the unnatural clatter of an alarm clock. One could, of course, go out into the corridor and not return, but that would be an acknowledgment of defeat. Pender lowered
Murder at the Manse
and caught the man’s eye again.

“Getting tired of it?” asked the man.

“Night journeys are always a bit tedious,” replied Pender, half relieved and half reluctant. “Would you like a book?”

He took
The Paper-Clip Clue
from his attaché-case and held it out hopefully. The other man glanced at the title and shook his head.

“Thanks very much,” he said, “but I never read detective stories. They’re so—inadequate, don’t you think so?”

“They are rather lacking in characterisation and human interest, certainly,” said Pender, “but on a railway journey—”

“I don’t mean that,” said the other man. “I am not concerned with humanity. But all these murderers are so incompetent—they bore me.”

“Oh, I don’t know,” replied Pender. “At any rate they are usually a good deal more imaginative and ingenious than murderers in real life.”