Three Act Tragedy

by Agatha Christie

  “You can’t ask a professional singer to sing,” murmured Mr. Satterthwaite. “Can one ask a professional detective to detect? Yes, a very nice point.”

  “Just an opinion,” said Sir Charles.

  There was a gentle tap on the door, and Hercule Poirot’s face appeared, peering in with an apologetic expression.

  “Come in, man,” cried Sir Charles, springing up. “We were just talking of you.”

  “I thought perhaps I might be intruding.”

  “Not at all. Have a drink.”

  “I thank you, no. I seldom drink the whisky. A glass of sirop, now—”

  But sirop was not included in Sir Charles’s conception of drinkable fluids. Having settled his guest in a chair, the actor went straight to the point.

  “I’m not going to beat about the bush,” he said. “We were just talking of you, M. Poirot, and—and—of what happened tonight. Look here, do you think there’s anything wrong about it?”

  Poirot’s eyebrows rose. He said:

  “Wrong? How do you mean that—wrong?”

  Bartholomew Strange said, “My friend has got an idea into his head that old Babbington was murdered.”

  “And you do not think so—eh?”

  “We’d like to know what you think.”

  Poirot said thoughtfully:

  “He was taken ill, of course, very suddenly—very suddenly indeed.”

  “Just so.”

  Mr. Satterthwaite explained the theory of suicide and his own suggestion of having a cocktail glass analysed.

  Poirot nodded approval.

  “That, at any rate, can do no harm. As a judge of human nature, it seems to me unlikely in the extreme that anyone could wish to do away with a charming and harmless old gentleman. Still less does the solution of suicide appeal to me. However, the cocktail glass will tell us one way or another.”

  “And the result of the analysis, you think, will be—what?”

  Poirot shrugged his shoulders.

  “Me? I can only guess. You ask me to guess what will be the result of the analysis?”

  “Yes—?”

  “Then I guess that they will find only the remains of a very excellent dry Martini.” (He bowed to Sir Charles.) “To poison a man in a cocktail, one of many handed round on a tray—well, it would be a technique very—very—difficult. And if that charming old clergyman wanted to commit suicide, I do not think he would do it at a party. That would show a very decided lack of consideration for others, and Mr. Babbington struck me as a very considerate person.” He paused. “That, since you ask me, is my opinion.”

  There was a moment’s silence. Then Sir Charles gave a deep sigh. He opened one of the windows and looked out.

  “Wind’s gone round a point,” he said.

  The sailor had come back and the Secret Service detective had disappeared.

  But to the observant Mr. Satterthwaite it seemed as though Sir Charles hankered slightly after the part he was not, after all, to play.

  Four

  A MODERN ELAINE

  “Yes, but what do you think, Mr. Satterthwaite? Really think?”

  Mr. Satterthwaite looked this way and that. There was no escape. Egg Lytton Gore had got him securely cornered on the fishing quay. Merciless, these modern young women—and terrifyingly alive.

  “Sir Charles has put this idea into your head,” he said.

  “No, he hasn’t. It was there already. It’s been there from the beginning. It was so frightfully sudden.”

  “He was an old man, and his health wasn’t very good—”

  Egg cut the recital short.

  “That’s all tripe. He had neuritis and a touch of rheumatoid arthritis. That doesn’t make you fall down in a fit. He never had fits. He was the sort of gentle creaking gate that would have lived to be ninety. What did you think of the inquest?”

  “It all seemed quite—er—normal.”

  “What did you think of Dr. MacDougal’s evidence? Frightfully technical, and all that—close description of the organs—but didn’t it strike you that behind all that bombardment of words he was hedging? What he said amounted to this: that there was nothing to show death had not arisen from natural causes. He didn’t say it was the result of natural causes.”

  “Aren’t you splitting hairs a little, my dear?”

  “The point is that he did—he was puzzled, but he had nothing to go upon, so he had to take refuge in medical caution. What did Sir Bartholomew Strange think?”

  Mr. Satterthwaite repeated some of the physician’s dictums.

  “Pooh-poohed it, did he?” said Egg thoughtfully. “Of course, he’s a cautious man—I suppose a Harley Street big bug has to be.”

  “There was nothing in the cocktail glass but gin and vermouth,” Mr. Satterthwaite reminded her.

  “That seems to settle it. All the same, something that happened after the inquest made me wonder—”

  “Something Sir Bartholomew said to you?”

  Mr. Satterthwaite began to feel a pleasant curiosity.

  “Not to me—to Oliver. Oliver Manders—he was at dinner that night, but perhaps you don’t remember him.”

  “Yes, I remember him very well. Is he a great friend of yours?”

  “Used to be. Now we scrap most of the time. He’s gone into his uncle’s office in the city, and he’s getting—well, a bit oily, if you know what I mean. Always talks of chucking it and being a journalist—he writes rather well. But I don’t think it’s any more than talk now. He wants to get rich. I think everybody is rather disgusting about money, don’t you, Mr. Satterthwaite?”

  Her youth came home to him then—the crude, arrogant childishness of her.

  “My dear,” he said, “so many people are disgusting about so many things.”

  “Most people are swine, of course,” agreed Egg cheerfully. “That’s why I’m really cut up about old Mr. Babbington. Because you see, he really was rather a pet. He prepared me for confirmation and all that, and though of course a lot of that business is all bunkum, he really was rather sweet about it. You see, Mr. Satterthwaite, I really believe in Christianity—not like Mother does, with little books and early service, and things—but intelligently and as a matter of history. The Church is all clotted up with the Pauline tradition—in fact the Church is a mess—but Christianity itself is all right. That’s why I can’t be a communist like Oliver. In practice our beliefs would work out much the same, things in common and ownership by all, but the difference—well, I needn’t go into that. But the Babbingtons really were Christians; they didn’t poke and pry and condemn, and they were never unkind about people or things. They were pets—and there was Robin….”

  “Robin?”

  “Their son…He was out in India and got killed…I—I had rather a pash on Robin….”

  Egg blinked. Her gaze went out to sea….

  Then her attention returned to Mr. Satterthwaite and the present.

  “So, you see, I feel rather strongly about this. Supposing it wasn’t a natural death….”

  “My dear child!”

  “Well, it’s damned odd! You must admit it’s damned odd.”

  “But surely you yourself have just practically admitted that the Babbingtons hadn’t an enemy in the world.”

  “That’s what’s so queer about it. I can’t think of any conceivable motive….”

  “Fantastic! There was nothing in the cocktail.”

  “Perhaps someone jabbed him with a hypodermic.”

  “Containing the arrow poison of the South American Indians,” suggested Mr. Satterthwaite, gently ridiculing.

  Egg grinned.

  “That’s it. The good old untraceable stuff. Oh, well, you’re all very superior about it. Someday, perhaps, you’ll find out we are right.”

  “We?”

  “Sir Charles and I.” She flushed slightly.

  Mr. Satterthwaite thought in the words and metre of his generation when Quotations for All Occasions was to be found in every bookcase.
>
  “Of more than twice her years,

  Seam’d with an ancient swordcut on the cheek,

  And bruised and bronzed, she lifted up her eyes

  And loved him, with that love which was her doom.”

  He felt a little ashamed of himself for thinking in quotations—Tennyson, too, was very little thought of nowadays. Besides, though Sir Charles was bronzed, he was not scarred, and Egg Lytton Gore, though doubtless capable of a healthy passion, did not look at all likely to perish of love and drift about rivers on a barge. There was nothing of the lily maid of Astolat about her.

  “Except,” thought Mr. Satterthwaite, “her youth….”

  Girls were always attracted to middle-aged men with interesting pasts. Egg seemed to be no exception to this rule.

  “Why hasn’t he ever married?” she asked abruptly.

  “Well…” Mr. Satterthwaite paused. His own answer, put bluntly, would have been, “Caution,” but he realized that such a word would be unacceptable to Egg Lytton Gore.

  Sir Charles Cartwright had had plenty of affairs with women, actresses and others, but he had always managed to steer clear of matrimony. Egg was clearly seeking for a more romantic explanation.

  “That girl who died of consumption—some actress, name began with an M—wasn’t he supposed to be very fond of her?”

  Mr. Satterthwaite remembered the lady in question. Rumour had coupled Charles Cartwright’s name with hers, but only very slightly, and Mr. Satterthwaite did not for a moment believe that Sir Charles had remained unmarried in order to be faithful to her memory. He conveyed as much tactfully.

  “I suppose he’s had lots of affairs,” said Egg.

  “Er—h’m—probably,” said Mr. Satterthwaite, feeling Victorian.

  “I like men to have affairs,” said Egg. “It shows they’re not queer or anything.”

  Mr. Satterthwaite’s Victorianism suffered a further pang. He was at a loss for a reply. Egg did not notice his discomfiture. She went on musingly.

  “You know, Sir Charles is really cleverer than you’d think. He poses a lot, of course, dramatises himself; but behind all that he’s got brains. He’s far better sailing a boat than you’d ever think, to hear him talk. You’d think, to listen to him, that it was all pose, but it isn’t. It’s the same about this business. You think it’s all done for effect—that he wants to play the part of the great detective. All I say is: I think he’d play it rather well.”

  “Possibly,” agreed Mr. Satterthwaite.

  The inflection of his voice showed his feelings clearly enough. Egg pounced on them and expressed them in words.

  “But your view is that ‘Death of a Clergyman’ isn’t a thriller. It’s merely ‘Regrettable Incident at a Dinner Party.’ Purely a social catastrophe. What did M. Poirot think? He ought to know.”

  “M. Poirot advised us to wait for the analysis of the cocktail; but in his opinion everything was quite all right.”

  “Oh, well,” said Egg, “he’s getting old. He’s a back number.” Mr. Satterthwaite winced. Egg went on, unconscious of brutality: “Come home and have tea with Mother. She likes you. She said so.”

  Delicately flattered, Mr. Satterthwaite accepted the invitation.

  On arrival Egg volunteered to ring up Sir Charles and explain the nonappearance of his guest.

  Mr. Satterthwaite sat down in the tiny sitting room with its faded chintzes and its well-polished pieces of old furniture. It was a Victorian room, what Mr. Satterthwaite called in his own mind a lady’s room, and he approved of it.

  His conversation with Lady Mary was agreeable, nothing brilliant, but pleasantly chatty. They spoke of Sir Charles. Did Mr. Satterthwaite know him well? Not intimately, Mr. Satterthwaite said. He had a financial interest in one of Sir Charles’s plays some years ago. They had been friends ever since.

  “He has great charm,” said Lady Mary, smiling. “I feel it as well as Egg. I suppose you’ve discovered that Egg is suffering badly from hero-worship?”

  Mr. Satterthwaite wondered if, as a mother, Lady Mary was not made slightly uneasy by that hero-worship. But it did not seem so.

  “Egg sees so little of the world,” she said, sighing. “We are so badly off. One of my cousins presented her and took her to a few things in town, but since then she has hardly been away from here, except for an occasional visit. Young people, I feel, should see plenty of people and places—especially people. Otherwise—well, propinquity is sometimes a dangerous thing.”

  Mr. Satterthwaite agreed, thinking of Sir Charles and the sailing, but that this was not what was in Lady Mary’s mind, she showed a moment or two later.

  “Sir Charles’s coming has done a lot for Egg. It has widened her horizon. You see, there are very few young people down here—especially men. I’ve always been afraid that Egg might marry someone simply from being thrown with one person only and seeing no one else.”

  Mr. Satterthwaite had a quick intuition.

  “Are you thinking of young Oliver Manders?”

  Lady Mary blushed in ingenuous surprise.

  “Oh, Mr. Satterthwaite, I don’t know how you knew! I was thinking of him. He and Egg were together a lot at one time, and I know I’m old-fashioned, but I don’t like some of his ideas.”

  “Youth must have its fling,” said Mr. Satterthwaite.

  Lady Mary shook her head.

  “I’ve been so afraid—it’s quite suitable, of course, I know all about him, and his uncle, who has recently taken him into his firm, is a very rich man; it’s not that—it’s silly of me—but—”

  She shook her head, unable to express herself further.

  Mr. Satterthwaite felt curiously intimate. He said quietly and plainly:

  “All the same, Lady Mary, you wouldn’t like your girl to marry a man twice her own age.”

  Her answer surprised him.

  “It might be safer so. If you do that, at least you know where you are. At that age a man’s follies and sins are definitely behind him; they are not—still to come….”

  Before Mr. Satterthwaite could say any more, Egg rejoined them.

  “You’ve been a long time, darling,” said her mother.

  “I was talking to Sir Charles, my sweet. He’s all alone in his glory.” She turned reproachfully to Mr. Satterthwaite. “You didn’t tell me the house party had flitted.”

  “They went back yesterday—all but Sir Bartholomew Strange. He was staying till tomorrow, but he was recalled to London by an urgent telegram this morning. One of his patients was in a critical condition.”

  “It’s a pity,” said Egg. “Because I meant to study the house party. I might have got a clue.”

  “A clue to what, darling?”

  “Mr. Satterthwaite knows. Oh, well, it doesn’t matter. Oliver’s still here. We’ll rope him in. He’s got brains when he likes.”

  When Mr. Satterthwaite arrived back at Crow’s Nest he found his host sitting on the terrace overlooking the sea.

  “Hullo, Satterthwaite. Been having tea with the Lytton Gores?”

  “Yes. You don’t mind?”

  “Of course not. Egg telephoned…Odd sort of girl, Egg….”

  “Attractive,” said Mr. Satterthwaite.

  “H’m, yes, I suppose she is.”

  He got up and walked a few aimless steps.

  “I wish to God,” he said suddenly and bitterly, “that I’d never come to this cursed place.”

  Five

  FLIGHT FROM A LADY

  Mr. Satterthwaite thought to himself: “He’s got it badly.”

  He felt a sudden pity for his host. At the age of fifty-two, Charles Cartwright, the gay debonair breaker of hearts, had fallen in love. And, as he himself realized, his case was doomed to disappointment. Youth turns to youth.

  “Girls don’t wear their hearts on their sleeves,” thought Mr. Satterthwaite. “Egg makes a great parade of her feeling for Sir Charles. She wouldn’t if it really meant anything. Young Manders is the one.”

  Mr. Sat
terthwaite was usually fairly shrewd in his assumptions.

  Still, there was probably one factor that he did not take into account, because he was unaware of it himself. That was the enhanced value placed by age on youth. To Mr. Satterthwaite, an elderly man, the fact that Egg might prefer a middle-aged man to a young one was frankly incredible. Youth was to him so much the most magical of all gifts.

  He felt strengthened in his beliefs when Egg rang up after dinner and demanded permission to bring Oliver along and “have a consultation.”

  Certainly a handsome lad, with his dark, heavy-lidded eyes and easy grace of movement. He had, it seemed, permitted himself to be brought—a tribute to Egg’s energy; but his general attitude was lazily sceptical.

  “Can’t you talk her out of it, sir?” he said to Sir Charles. “It’s this appallingly healthy bucolic life she leads that makes her so energetic. You know, Egg, you really are detestably hearty. And your tastes are childish—crime—sensation—and all that bunk.”

  “You’re a sceptic, Manders?”

  “Well, sir, really. That dear old bleating fellow. It’s fantastic to think of anything else but natural causes.”

  “I expect you’re right,” said Sir Charles.

  Mr. Satterthwaite glanced at him. What part was Charles Cartwright playing tonight. Not the ex-Naval man—not the international detective. No, some new and unfamiliar rôle.

  It came as a shock to Mr. Satterthwaite when he realized what that rôle was. Sir Charles was playing second fiddle. Second fiddle to Oliver Manders.

  He sat back with his head in shadow watching those two, Egg and Oliver, as they disputed—Egg hotly, Oliver languidly.

  Sir Charles looked older than usual—old and tired.

  More than once Egg appealed to him—hotly and confidently—but his response was lacking.

  It was eleven o’clock when they left. Sir Charles went out on the terrace with them and offered the loan of an electric torch to help them down the stony path.

  But there was no need of a torch. It was a beautiful moonlit night. They set off together, their voices growing fainter as they descended.