Cat and Mouse Read Free

billboard across the dingy façade of the single cinema; and across the valley was the mountain—the great, solid, splendid bulk of it, heavy and grey beneath its mantle of softly, ceaselessly failing rain.
    And high up on the mountain, crouching like a bird against its rugged breast, a house. Katinka pointed it out to one of half a dozen men who lounged, cigarette on lip, against a wall.
    “Would that be Mr. Carlyon’s house over there?”
    The man took the stub from his mouth with thumb and forefinger and looked over at the house. He had a deep scar running down one side of his face. “Well, properly speakin’ now—no, it wouldn’t he Mr. Carlyon’s house.”
    A second man detached himself from the group and came towards her. “Don’t let him pull your leg, my girl. It’s old Mrs. Williams’s house, but she’s been dead ten year, and now Mr. Carlyon’s rented it for a bit. Dai Jones Trouble came down and took it for him, a few months back. Eh, boys?”
    “That’s right,” said the men. They eyed her with a friendly curiosity.
    “Dai Jones Trouble?” said Katinka. “What a lovely name.”
    “Don’t you know Mr. Carlyon?” said the man, evidently surprised. He elaborated: “Otherwise, you’d surely know Dai Trouble.”
    “Dai Jones come from round these parts,” said the first speaker. “He’s Mr. Carlyon’s man now; and when the master wanted a quiet place, it seems, Dai thinks back to his boy’ood and come down here and took Penderyn for him.” He gestured towards the grey roofs of the house across the valley.
    “But why is he called Dai Jones Trouble?”
    They all looked ever so faintly down their noses. “Sort him out from all the other Dai Joneses round here,” said the man with the scar. “Including me.” He smiled. “They call me Dai Jones Ych-y-fi.”
    Memory groped back into the days of childhood. “That’s what my nurse used to say to me when I was a dirty little girl: Ych y fi!”
    “Well, he’s a dirty little boy,” said the men, laughing. “He’s the plumber.”
    “And Dai Jones Trouble?” (She could probably get a few pounds from somewhere for an article on these odd Welsh names, when she got back to Fleet Street.)
    They all looked down their noses again. “He got all the girls round here into trouble,” said the second man who had spoken to her. “And finally skipped off to London—not a moment too soon! But that was—twenty years ago, boys?”
    “I wonder what became of that Gwladys Griffiths,” said the first man.
    “ And Bronwen Hughes!”
    But they were too well mannered to discuss local gossip before a stranger who could not be interested. “You don’t come from round Pentre Trist?”
    “No,” said Tinka. “Though my name’s Jones, too. But I was born in Swansea, and my uncle Jo still lives out by the reservoir.”
    “Is that Jo Jones the Waterworks?”
    “It was,” said Tinka. “He’s probably the late Jo Jones by now. He was just about to have a stroke when I left, largely due to the colour of my nails.” It was her habit to repose her confidences in the most unlikely strangers.
    “And now you’re going to see Mr. Carlyon?” said the second man who had spoken.
    He was different from the rest. Instead of their uncreased trousers and threadbare coats, he wore a good suit of just too intense a brown, and a neat tie and collar. He was perhaps thirty-five: a handsome man—an extraordinarily handsome man when one looked at him a second time—with the aesthetic good looks of the romantic clergyman in a Victorian novel; a thin, pale face, dark hair, astonishingly upright of carriage, just the least bit prim. “I was thinking of going over to see Mr. Carlyon myself,” he said.
    “Actually it was Mrs. Carlyon I wanted,” said Katinka.
    No information seemed forthcoming about Mrs. Carlyon. “They don’t come to the village,” said Dai Ych-y-fi. “Too posh, I daresay. I seen that old woman they got working there with Dai Trouble, but you