With his right hand clapped to his arm, he looked down and saw at his feet, shards of pale green porcelain gaily patterned.
His arm, from being numb, began to hurt abominably. He thought, no, not broken, that would be too much, and found that with an effort he could close and open his hand and then, very painfully, slightly flex his elbow. He peered at the shards scattered round his feet and recognized the remains of the vase that stood on a little table in the gallery: a big and, he was sure, extremely valuable vase. No joy for Bill-Tasman, thought Alleyn.
The pain was settling into a sort of rhythm, horrid but endurable. He tried supporting his forearm inside his jacket as if in a sling. That would do for the present. He moved to the foot of the stairs. Something bolted down them, brushed past him, and shot into the shadows under the gallery. He heard a feline exclamation, a scratching and a thud. That was the green baize door, he thought.
A second later, from somewhere distant and above him, a woman screamed. He switched on the gallery lights and ran upstairs. His arm pounded with every step.
Cressida came galloping full tilt and flung herself at him. She grabbed his arms and he gave a yelp of pain.
“No!” Cressida babbled. “No! I can’t stand it. I won’t take it! I hate it. No, no, no!”
“For the love of Mike!” he said. “What is it? Pull yourself together.”
“Cats! They’re doing it on purpose. They want to get rid of me.”
He held her off with his right hand and felt her shake as if gripped by a rigor. She laughed and cried and clung to him most desperately.
“On my bed,” she gabbled. “It was on my bed. I woke up and touched it. By my face. They know! They hate me! You’ve got to help.”
He managed agonizingly to get hold of her wrists with both his hands and thought, “Well, no bones broken, I suppose, if I can do this.”
“All right,” he said. “Pipe down. It’s gone. It’s bolted. Now, please. No!” he added as she made a sort of abortive dive at his chest. “There isn’t time and it hurts. I’m sorry but you’d better just sit on the step and get hold of yourself. Good. That’s right. Now, please stay there.”
She crouched on the top step. She was clad in a short, diaphanous nightgown and looked like a pin-up girl adapted to some kind of sick comedy.
“I’m cold,” she chattered.
The check system on the stair lights cut out and they were in near darkness. Alleyn swore and groped for a wall-switch. At the same moment, like a well-timed cue in a French farce, the doors at the far ends of the gallery opened simultaneously, admitting a flood of light. Out came Troy, on the left hand, and Hilary on the right. A row of wall-lamps sprang to life.
“What in the name of Heaven—” Hilary began but Alleyn cut him short. “Cover her up,” he said, indicating Cressida. “She’s cold.”
“Cressida! Darling! But what with?” Hilary cried. He sat beside his fiancée on the top step and made an ineffectual attempt to enclose her within the folds of his own dressing gown. Troy ran back into the guest-room corridor and returned with an eiderdown counterpane. Voices and the closure of doors could be heard. Alleyn was briefly reminded of the arousing of the guests at Forres.
Mr. Smith and Mrs. Forrester arrived in that order, the former in trousers, shirt, braces and stocking feet, the latter in her sensible dressing gown and a woollen cap rather like a baby’s.
“Hilary!” she said on a rising note. “Your uncle and I are getting very tired of this sort of thing. It’s bad for your uncle. You will put a stop to it.”
“Auntie Bed, I assure you —”
“Missus!” said Mr. Smith, “you’re dead right. I’m with you all the way. Now! What about it, ’Illy?”
“I don’t know,” Hilary snapped, “anything. I don’t know what’s occurred or why Cressida’s sitting here in her nighty. And I don’t know why you all turn on me. I don’t like these upsets any more than you do. And how the devil, if you’ll forgive me, Aunt Bed, you can have the cheek to expect me to do something about anything when everything’s out of my hands, I do not comprehend.”
Upon this they all four looked indignantly at Alleyn.
“They’re as rum a job lot as I’ve picked up in many a long day’s night,” he thought and addressed himself to them.
“Please stay where you are,” he said. “I shan’t, I hope, keep you long. As you suggest, this incident must be cleared up, and I propose to do it. Miss Tottenham, are you feeling better? Do you want a drink?”
(“Darling! Do you?” urged Hilary.)
Cressida shuddered and shook her head.
“Right,” Alleyn said. “Then please tell me exactly what happened. You woke up, did you, and found a cat on your bed?”
“Its eyes! Two inches away! It was making that awful tumbling noise and doing its ghastly pounding bit. On me! On me! I smelt its fur. Like straw.”
“Yes. What did you do?”
“Do! I screamed.”
“After that?”
After that, it transpired, all hell was let loose. Cressida’s reaction set up an equally frenzied response. Her visitor tore round her room and cursed her. At some stage she turned on her bedside lamp, and revealed the cat glaring out from under the petticoats of her dressing table.
“Black-and-white?” Hilary asked. “Or tabby?”
“What the hell does it matter?”
“No, of course. No. I just wondered.”
“Black-and-white.”
“Smartypants, then,” Hilary muttered.
After the confrontation, it seemed, Cressida, on the verge of hysteria, had got off her bed, sidled to the door, opened it, and then thrown a pillow at Smartypants, who fled from the room. Cressida, greatly shaken, slammed the door, turned back to her bed, and was softly caressed round her ankles and shins.
She looked down and saw the second cat, Slyboots, the tabby, performing the tails-up brushing ceremony by which his species make themselves known.
Cressida had again screamed, this time at the top of her voice. She bolted down the corridor and into the gallery and Alleyn’s reluctant embrace.
Closely wrapped in her eiderdown, inadequately solaced by the distracted Hilary, she nodded her head up and down, her eyes like great damp pansies and her teeth still inclined to chatter.
“All right,” Alleyn said. “Two questions. How do you think the cats got into your room? When you visited Troy, did you leave your door open?”
Cressida had no idea.
“You do leave doors open, rather, my darling,” Hilary said, “don’t you?”
“That queen in the kitchen put them there. Out of spite. I know it.”
“Now, Cressida! Really!”
“Yes, he did! He’s got a thing about me. They all have. They’re jealous. They’re afraid I’m going to make changes. They’re trying to frighten me off.”
“Where,” Alleyn asked before Hilary could launch his protests, “is the second cat, now? Slyboots?”
“He was walking about the corridor,” Troy began and Cressida immediately began a sort of internal fight with her eiderdown cocoon. “It’s all right,” Troy said quickly. “He came into my room and I’ve shut the doors.”
“Do you swear that?”
“Yes, I do.”
“In Heaven’s name!” Mrs. Forrester ejaculated, “Why don’t you take her to bed, Hilary?”
“Really, Aunt B! Well, all right. Well, I will.”
“Give her a pill. She takes pills, of course. They all do. Your uncle mustn’t have any more upsets. I’m going back to him. Unless,” she said to Alleyn, “you want me.”