The Pale Horse

by Agatha Christie

  “And then?”

  “Everything else is conjectural,” said Lejeune. “Say it was a paying racket, and someone didn’t want it to stop paying. Someone knew Mrs. Davis was dying and that she’d sent for the priest. The rest follows.”

  “I wonder now,” said Corrigan, studying the paper again. “Why do you think there’s an interrogation mark after the last two names?”

  “It could be that Father Gorman wasn’t sure he’d remembered those two names correctly.”

  “It might have been Mulligan instead of Corrigan,” agreed the doctor with a grin. “That’s likely enough. But I’d say that with a name like Delafontaine, either you’d remember it or you wouldn’t—if you know what I mean. It’s odd that there isn’t a single address—” He read down the list again.

  “Parkinson—lots of Parkinsons. Sandford, not uncommon— Hesketh-Dubois—that’s a bit of a mouthful. Can’t be many of them.”

  On a sudden impulse he leaned forward and took the telephone directory from the desk.

  “E to L. Let’s see. Hesketh, Mrs. A… John and Co., Plumbers… Sir Isidore. Ah! here we are! Hesketh-Dubois, Lady, Forty-nine, Ellesmere Square, S.W.1. What say we just ring her up?”

  “Saying what?”

  “Inspiration will come,” said Doctor Corrigan airily.

  “Go ahead,” said Lejeune.

  “What?” Corrigan stared at him.

  “I said go ahead,” Lejeune spoke airily. “Don’t look so taken aback.” He himself picked up the receiver. “Give me an outside line.” He looked at Corrigan. “Number?”

  “Grosvenor 64578.”

  Lejeune repeated it, then handed the receiver over to Corrigan.

  “Enjoy yourself,” he said.

  Faintly puzzled, Corrigan looked at him as he waited. The ringing tone continued for some time before anyone answered. Then, interspersed with heavy breathing, a woman’s voice said:

  “Grosvenor 64578.”

  “Is that Lady Hesketh-Dubois’s house?”

  “Well—well, yes— I mean—”

  Doctor Corrigan ignored these uncertainties.

  “Can I speak to her, please?”

  “No, that you can’t do! Lady Hesketh-Dubois died last April.”

  “Oh!” Startled, Dr. Corrigan ignored the “Who is it speaking, please?” and gently replaced the receiver.

  He looked coldly at Inspector Lejeune.

  “So that’s why you were so ready to let me ring up.”

  Lejeune smiled maliciously.

  “We don’t really neglect the obvious,” he pointed out.

  “Last April,” said Corrigan thoughtfully. “Five months ago. Five months since blackmail or whatever it was has failed to worry her. She didn’t commit suicide, or anything like that?”

  “No. She died of a tumour on the brain.”

  “So now we start again,” said Corrigan, looking down at the list.

  Lejeune sighed.

  “We don’t really know that list had anything to do with it,” he pointed out. “It may have been just an ordinary coshing on a foggy night—and precious little hope of finding who did it unless we have a piece of luck….”

  Dr. Corrigan said:

  “Do you mind if I continue to concentrate on this list?”

  “Go ahead. I wish you all the luck in the world.”

  “Meaning I’m not likely to get anywhere if you haven’t! Don’t be too sure. I shall concentrate on Corrigan. Mr. or Mrs. or Miss Corrigan—with a big interrogation mark.”

  Three

  I

  “Well, really, Mr. Lejeune, I don’t see what more I can tell you! I told it all before to your sergeant. I don’t know who Mrs. Davis was, or where she came from. She’d been with me about six months. She paid her rent regular, and she seemed a nice quiet respectable person, and what more you expect me to say I’m sure I don’t know.”

  Mrs. Coppins paused for breath and looked at Lejeune with some displeasure. He gave her the gentle melancholy smile which he knew by experience was not without its effect.

  “Not that I wouldn’t be willing to help if I could,” she amended.

  “Thank you. That’s what we need—help. Women know—they feel instinctively—so much more than a man can know.”

  It was a good gambit, and it worked.

  “Ah,” said Mrs. Coppins. “I wish Coppins could hear you. So hoity-toity and offhand he always was. ‘Saying you know things when you haven’t got anything to go on!’ he’d say and snort. And nine times out of ten I was right.”

  “That’s why I’d like to hear what ideas you have about Mrs. Davis. Was she—an unhappy woman, do you think?”

  “Now as to that—no, I wouldn’t say so. Businesslike. That’s what she always seemed. Methodical. As though she’d got her life planned and was acting accordingly. She had a job, I understand, with one of these consumer research associations. Going around and asking people what soap powder they used, or flour, and what they spend on their weekly budget and how it’s divided up. Of course I’ve always felt that sort of thing is snooping really—and why the Government or anyone else wants to know beats me! All you hear at the end of it is only what everybody has known perfectly well all along—but there, there’s a craze for that sort of thing nowadays. And if you’ve got to have it, I should say that poor Mrs. Davis would do the job very nicely. A pleasant manner, not nosy, just businesslike and matter-of-fact.”

  “You don’t know the actual name of the firm or association that employed her?”

  “No, I don’t, I’m afraid.”

  “Did she ever mention relatives—?”

  “No. I gathered she was a widow and had lost her husband many years ago. A bit of an invalid he’d been, but she never talked much about him.”

  “She didn’t mention where she came from—what part of the country?”

  “I don’t think she was a Londoner. Came from somewhere up north, I should say.”

  “You didn’t feel there was anything—well, mysterious about her?”

  Lejeune felt a doubt as he spoke. If she was a suggestible woman—But Mrs. Coppins did not take advantage of the opportunity offered to her.

  “Well, I can’t say really that I did. Certainly not from anything she ever said. The only thing that perhaps might have made me wonder was her suitcase. Good quality it was, but not new. And the initials on it had been painted over. J.D.—Jessie Davis. But originally it had been J. something else. H., I think. But it might have been an A. Still, I didn’t think anything of that at the time. You can often pick up a good piece of luggage secondhand ever so cheap, and then it’s natural to get the initials altered. She hadn’t a lot of stuff—only the one case.”

  Lejeune knew that. The dead woman had had curiously few personal possessions. No letters had been kept, no photographs. She had had apparently no insurance card, no bankbook, no chequebook. Her clothes were of good everyday serviceable quality, nearly new.

  “She seemed quite happy?” he asked.

  “I suppose so.”

  He pounced on the faint doubtful tone in her voice.

  “You only suppose so?”

  “Well, it’s not the kind of thing you think about, is it? I should say she was nicely off, with a good job, and quite satisfied with her life. She wasn’t the bubbling over sort. But of course, when she got ill—”

  “Yes, when she got ill?” he prompted her.

  “Vexed, she was at first. When she went down with ’flu, I mean. It would put all her schedule out, she said. Missing appointments and all that. But ’flu’s ’flu, and you can’t ignore it when it’s there. So she stopped in bed, and made herself tea on the gas ring, and took aspirin. I said why not have the doctor and she said no point in it. Nothing to do for ’flu but stay in bed and keep warm and I’d better not come near her to catch it. I did a bit of cooking for her when she got better. Hot soup and toast. And a rice pudding now and again. It got her down, of course, ’flu does—but not more than what’s usual, I’d say.
It’s after the fever goes down that you get the depression—and she got that like everyone does. She sat there, by the gas fire, I remember, and said to me, ‘I wish one didn’t have so much time to think. I don’t like having time to think. It gets me down.’”

  Lejeune continued to look deeply attentive and Mrs. Coppins warmed to her theme.

  “Lent her some magazines, I did. But she didn’t seem able to keep her mind on reading. Said once, I remember, ‘If things aren’t all they should be, it’s better not to know about it, don’t you agree?’ and I said, ‘That’s right, dearie.’ And she said, ‘I don’t know—I’ve never really been sure.’ And I said that was all right, then. And she said, “Everything I’ve done has always been perfectly straightforward and aboveboard. I’ve nothing to reproach myself with.’ And I said, ‘Of course you haven’t, dear.’ But I did just wonder in my own mind whether in the firm that employed her there mightn’t have been some funny business with the accounts maybe, and she’d got wind of it—but had felt it wasn’t really her business.”

  “Possible,” agreed Lejeune.

  “Anyway, she got well again—or nearly so, and went back to work. I told her it was too soon. Give yourself another day or two, I said. And there, how right I was! Come back the second evening, she did, and I could see at once she’d got a high fever. Couldn’t hardly climb the stairs. You must have the doctor, I says, but no, she wouldn’t. Worse and worse she got, all that day, her eyes glassy, and her cheeks like fire, and her breathing terrible. And the next day in the evening she said to me, hardly able to get the words out: ‘A priest. I must have a priest. And quickly…or it will be too late.’ But it wasn’t our vicar she wanted. It had to be a Roman Catholic priest. I never knew she was a Roman, never any crucifix about or anything like that.”

  But there had been a crucifix, tucked away at the bottom of the suitcase. Lejeune did not mention it. He sat listening.

  “I saw young Mike in the street and I sent him for that Father Gorman at St. Dominic’s. And I rang for the doctor, and the hospital on my own account, not saying nothing to her.”

  “You took the priest up to her when he came?”

  “Yes, I did. And left them together.”

  “Did either of them say anything?”

  “Well now, I can’t exactly remember. I was talking myself, saying here was the priest and now she’d be all right, trying to cheer her up, but I do call to mind now as I closed the door I heard her say something about wickedness. Yes—and something, too, about a horse—horse racing, maybe. I like a half crown on myself occasionally—but there’s a lot of crookedness goes on in racing, so they say.”

  “Wickedness,” said Lejeune. He was struck by the word.

  “Have to confess their sins, don’t they, Romans, before they die? So I suppose that was it.”

  Lejeune did not doubt that that was it, but his imagination was stirred by the word used. Wickedness….

  Something rather special in wickedness, he thought, if the priest who knew about it was followed and clubbed to death….

  II

  There was nothing to be learnt from the other three lodgers in the house. Two of them, a bank clerk and an elderly man who worked in a shoe shop, had been there for some years. The third was a girl of twenty-two who had come there recently and had a job in a nearby department store. All three of them barely knew Mrs. Davis by sight.

  The woman who had reported having seen Father Gorman in the street that evening had no useful information to give. She was a Catholic who attended St. Dominic’s and she knew Father Gorman by sight. She had seen him turn out of Benthall Street and go into Tony’s Place about ten minutes to eight. That was all.

  Mr. Osborne, the proprietor of the chemist’s shop on the corner of Barton Street, had a better contribution to make.

  He was a small, middle-aged man, with a bald domed head, a round ingenuous face, and glasses.

  “Good evening, Chief Inspector. Come behind, will you?” He held up the flap of an old-fashioned counter. Lejeune passed behind and through a dispensing alcove where a young man in a white overall was making up bottles of medicine with the swiftness of a professional conjurer, and so through an archway into a tiny room with a couple of easy chairs, a table and a desk. Mr. Osborne pulled the curtain of the archway behind him in a secretive manner and sat down in one chair, motioning to Lejeune to take the other. He leaned forward, his eyes glinting in pleasurable excitement.

  “It just happens that I may be able to assist you. It wasn’t a busy evening—nothing much to do, the weather being unfavourable. My young lady was behind the counter. We keep open until eight on Thursdays always. The fog was coming on and there weren’t many people about. I’d gone to the door to look at the weather, thinking to myself that the fog was coming up fast. The weather forecast had said it would. I stood there for a bit—nothing going on inside that my young lady couldn’t deal with—face creams and bath salts and all that. Then I saw Father Gorman coming along on the other side of the street. I know him quite well by sight, of course. A shocking thing, this murder, attacking a man so well thought of as he is. ‘There’s Father Gorman,’ I said to myself. He was going in the direction of West Street, it’s the next turn on the left before the railway, as you know. A little way behind him there was another man. It wouldn’t have entered my head to notice or think anything of that, but quite suddenly this second man came to a stop—quite abruptly, just when he was level with my door. I wondered why he’d stopped—and then I noticed that Father Gorman, a little way ahead, was slowing down. He didn’t quite stop. It was as though he was thinking of something so hard that he almost forgot he was walking. Then he started on again, and this other man started to walk, too—rather fast. I thought—inasmuch as I thought at all, that perhaps it was someone who knew Father Gorman and wanted to catch him up and speak to him.”

  “But in actual fact he could simply have been following him?”

  “That’s what I’m sure he was doing now—not that I thought anything of it at the time. What with the fog coming up, I lost sight of them both almost at once.”

  “Can you describe this man at all?”

  Lejeune’s voice was not confident. He was prepared for the usual nondescript characteristics. But Mr. Osborne was made of different mettle to Tony of Tony’s Place.

  “Well, yes, I think so,” he said with complacency. “He was a tall man—”

  “Tall? How tall?”

  “Well—five eleven to six feet, at least, I’d say. Though he might have seemed taller than he was because he was very thin. Sloping shoulders he had, and a definite Adam’s apple. Grew his hair rather long under his Homburg. A great beak of a nose. Very noticeable. Naturally I couldn’t say as to the colour of his eyes. I saw him in profile as you’ll appreciate. Perhaps fifty as to age. I’m going by the walk. A youngish man moves quite differently.”

  Lejeune made a mental survey of the distance across the street, then back again to Mr. Osborne, and wondered. He wondered very much….

  A description such as that given by the chemist could mean one of two things. It could spring from an unusually vivid imagination—he had known many examples of that kind, mostly from women. They built up a fancy portrait of what they thought a murderer ought to look like. Such fancy portraits, however, usually contained some decidedly spurious details—such as rolling eyes, beetle brows, apelike jaws, snarling ferocity. The description given by Mr. Osborne sounded like the description of a real person. In that case it was possible that here was the witness in a million—a man who observed accurately and in detail—and who would be quite unshakable as to what he had seen.

  Again Lejeune considered the distance across the street. His eyes rested thoughtfully on the chemist.

  He asked: “Do you think you would recognise this man if you saw him again?”

  “Oh, yes.” Mr. Osborne was supremely confident. “I never forget a face. It’s one of my hobbies. I’ve always said that if one of these wife murderers came i
nto my place and bought a nice little package of arsenic, I’d be able to swear to him at the trial. I’ve always had my hopes that something like that would happen one day.”

  “But it hasn’t happened yet?”

  Mr. Osborne admitted sadly that it hadn’t.

  “And not likely to now,” he added wistfully. “I’m selling this business. Getting a very nice price for it, and retiring to Bournemouth.”

  “It looks a nice place you’ve got here.”

  “It’s got class,” said Mr. Osborne, a note of pride in his voice. “Nearly a hundred years we’ve been established here. My grandfather and my father before me. A good old-fashioned family business. Not that I saw it that way as a boy. Stuffy, I thought it. Like many a lad, I was bitten by the stage. Felt sure I could act. My father didn’t try to stop me. ‘See what you can make of it, my boy,’ he said. ‘You’ll find you’re no Sir Henry Irving.’ And how right he was! Very wise man, my father. Eighteen months or so in repertory and back I came into the business. Took a pride in it, I did. We’ve always kept good solid stuff. Old-fashioned. But quality. But nowadays”—he shook his head sadly—“disappointing for a pharmaceutist. All this toilet stuff. You’ve got to keep it. Half the profits come from all that muck. Powder and lipstick and face creams; and hair shampoos and fancy sponge bags. I don’t touch the stuff myself. I have a young lady behind the counter who attends to all that. No, it’s not what it used to be, having a chemist’s establishment. However, I’ve a good sum put by, and I’m getting a very good price, and I’ve made a down payment on a very nice little bungalow near Bournemouth.”

  He added:

  “Retire whilst you can still enjoy life. That’s my motto. I’ve got plenty of hobbies. Butterflies, for instance. And a bit of bird watching now and then. And gardening—plenty of good books on how to start a garden. And there’s travel. I might go on one of these cruises—see foreign parts before it’s too late.”