Touch Not The Cat Read Online Free PDF Page A

Underhill’s sister, whose husband was stationed at the USAF base near Bristol. As far as Mr. Underhill was concerned, it didn't seem to matter where he was based; I gathered he managed to struggle home most weekends, but spent his weeks shuttling between Paris, London, Mexico, and Teheran, where the company's current major operations were. He had told Mr. Emerson that it didn't make a bit of difference where he was actually domiciled as long as he got "back home" to Houston, Texas, for Board Meetings, and that his wife was keen to live for a while in a "real old English home," and that it would do Cathy a world of good to have a taste of country peace and quiet. Myself, I wondered about that; I had never been to Los Angeles, but one could imagine that Ashley, in contrast, might possibly not have much to offer to an eighteen-year-old girl with all the money in the world to burn. But they had stayed, and liked it, and I gathered that Cathy was still there with them.
    "The bit about the cat," I said. "Do you think the car might have swerved to avoid a cat, or something, and was going too fast at the bend, and mounted the pavement and hit him?"
    "It is possible. That's the way the police see it. There actually is no pavement on that section of the road, but there is a kind of footway worn in the verge of the wood, and, heaven knows, Jon might have been speaking loosely when he talks of a 'pavement.' That was where he had to stop talking and rest for a while."
    "But this last bit, Dr. Gothard. He wasn't speaking loosely there. He says I have to be careful, and there's some danger."
    "Indeed." His eyes were troubled. "When he speaks of 'this thing I can feel,' he seems to mean danger of some kind. It could hardly be pain; he was under sedation."
    "He wouldn't mean that." I took a breath and met the kind pale eyes above the glinting half-moons of glass. "You're a doctor, so I don't expect you to believe me, but some of us— the Ashleys, I mean—have a sort of . . . I can only call it a kind of telepathy. Empathy, perhaps? Er, do you have that word?"
    "Certainly. We say 'mit fuhlen.' The power of entering imaginatively into someone else's feelings or experience."
    "Yes, except that in our case it's not just imaginative, it's real. I've only known it work between members of the family, and it's kind of spasmodic, but if someone you love is hurt, you know."
    "Why should I not believe you?" he asked calmly. "It's reasonably common."
    "I know, but you'd be surprised—or perhaps you wouldn't—what people don't believe, or don't want to believe. The Ashleys have had this thing in one degree or another as far back as about the sixteen hundreds when the Jacobean Ashley married a gorgeous girl called Bess Smith, who was half gipsy. She was burned for witchcraft in the end. After that it seems to have cropped up every so often, but we kept quiet about it. Anyway, it isn't the kind of thing you tell people.
    Nobody likes being laughed at."
    "You really think this is what your father meant?"
    "It might be. I've sometimes wondered. We never spoke about it, but I'm pretty sure he had it to some extent. I know once when I was at school and fell out of a tree and broke my leg, he telephoned about ten minutes later to ask if I was all right. And last night in Madeira . . . Well, I felt something, and I think some of it came from him. And on the way here in the plane this morning, at ten o'clock, I knew."
    He said nothing for a while. An early bee zoomed in through the open window, circled droning in the sunlight, then homed in on the hyacinths and crawled up them, its wings quiet. Walther stirred. "I see. But at the end, as you see, he states that he 'told' someone, presumably meaning that he told him about this important paper, and about this danger to you. If it is so very important, no doubt 'he' will tell you. And if 'the boy knows,' then perhaps 'the boy' may tell you, too?"
    I watched the bee. I wasn't prepared to meet those kind, clever