Short Stories

by Agatha Christie

  The picture excited Mr Satterthwaite for two reasons, the first was that he recognised, or thought that he recognised, the face of the man in the picture. It bore a distinct resemblance to a certain Mr Quin, an acquaintance whom Mr Satterthwaite had encountered once or twice under somewhat mystifying circumstances.

  "Surely I can't be mistaken," he murmured. "If it is so - what does it mean?"

  For it had been Mr Satterthwaite's experience that every appearance of Mr Quin had some distinct significance attaching to it.

  There was, as already mentioned, a second reason for Mr Satterthwaite's interest. He recognised the scene of the picture.

  "The Terrace Room at Charnley," said Mr Satterthwaite. "Curious and very interesting."

  He looked with more attention at the picture, wondering what exactly had been in the artist's mind. One Harlequin dead on the floor, another Harlequin looking through the window - or was it the same Harlequin? He moved slowly along the walls gazing at other pictures with unseeing eyes, with his mind always busy on the same subject.

  He was excited. Life, which had seemed a little drab this morning, was drab no longer. He knew quite certainly that he was on the threshold of exciting and interesting events. He crossed to the table where sat Mr Cobb, a dignitary of the Harchester Galleries, whom he had known for many years.

  "I have a fancy for buying no. 39," he said, "if it is not already sold."

  Mr Cobb consulted a ledger.

  "The pick of the bunch," he murmured, "quite a little gem, isn't it?

  No, it is not sold." he quoted a price. "It is a good investment, Mr Satterthwaite. You will have to pay three times as much for it this time next year."

  "That is always said on these occasions," said Mr Satterthwaite, smiling.

  "Well, and haven't I been right?" demanded Mr Cobb. "I don't believe if you were to sell your collection, Mr Satterthwaite, that a single picture would fetch less than you gave for it."

  "I will buy this picture," said Mr Satterthwaite. "I will give you a cheque now."

  "You won't regret it. We believe in Bristow."

  "He is a young man?"

  "Twenty-seven or eight, I should say."

  "I should like to meet him," said Mr Satterthwaite. "Perhaps he will come and dine with me one night?"

  "I can give you his address. I am sure he would leap at the chance.

  Your name stands for a good deal in the artistic world."

  "You flatter me," said Mr Satterthwaite, and was going on when Mr Cobb interrupted.

  "There he is now. I will introduce you to him right away." He rose from behind his table. Mr Satterthwaite accompanied him to where a big, clumsy young man was leaning against the wall surveying the world at large from behind the barricade of a ferocious scowl.

  Mr Cobb made the necessary introductions and Mr Satterthwaite made a formal and gracious little speech.

  "I have just had the pleasure of acquiring one of your pictures - The Dead Harlequin."

  "Oh! Well, you won't lose by it," said Mr Bristow ungraciously. "It's a bit of damned good work, although I say it."

  "I can see that," said Mr Satterthwaite. "Your work interests me very much, Mr Bristow. It is extraordinarily mature for so young a man. I wonder if you would give me the pleasure of dining with me one night? Are you engaged this evening?"

  "As a matter of fact, I am not," said Mr Bristow, still with no overdone appearance of graciousness.

  "Then shall we say eight o'clock?" said Mr Satterthwaite. "Here is my card with the address on it."

  "Oh, all right," said Mr Bristow. "Thanks," he added as a somewhat obvious afterthought.

  "A young man who has a poor opinion of himself and is afraid that the world should share it."

  Such was Mr Satterthwaite's summing up as he stepped out into the sunshine of Bond Street, and Mr Satterthwaite's judgment of his fellow men was seldom far astray.

  Frank Bristow arrived about five minutes past eight to find his host and a third guest awaiting him. The other guest was introduced as a Colonel Monckton. They went in to dinner almost immediately. There was a fourth place laid at the oval mahogany table and Mr Satterthwaite uttered a word of explanation.

  "I half expected my friend, Mr Quin, might drop in," he said. "I wonder if you have ever met him. Mr Harley Quin?"

  "I never meet people," growled Bristow. Colonel Monckton stared at the artist with the detached interest he might have accorded to a new species of jelly fish. Mr Satterthwaite exerted himself to keep the ball of conversation rolling amicably.

  "I took a special interest in that picture of yours because I thought I recognised the scene of it as being the Terrace Room at Charnley.

  Was I right?" As the artist nodded, he went on. "That is very interesting. I have stayed at Charnley several times myself in the past. Perhaps you know some of the family?"

  "No, I don't!" said Bristow. "That sort of family wouldn't care to know me. I went there in a charabanc."

  "Dear me," said Colonel Monckton for the sake of saying something.

  "In a charabanc! Dear me."

  Frank Bristow scowled at him. "Why not?" he demanded ferociously.

  Poor Colonel Monckton was taken aback. He looked reproachfully at Mr Satterthwaite as though to say, "These primitive forms of life may be interesting to you as a naturalist, but why drag me in?"

  "Oh, beastly things, charabancs!" he said. "They jolt you so going over the bumps."

  "If you can't afford a Rolls Royce you have got to go in charabancs," said Bristow fiercely.

  Colonel Monckton stared at him. Mr Satterthwaite thought, "Unless I can manage to put this young man at his ease we are going to have a very distressing evening."

  "Charnley always fascinated me," he said. "I have been there only once since the tragedy. A grim house - and a ghostly one."

  "That's true," said Bristow.

  "There are actually two authentic ghosts," said Monckton. "They say that Charles I walks up and down the terrace with his head under his arm - I have forgotten why, I'm sure. Then there is the Weeping Lady with the Silver Ewer, who is always seen after one of the Charnleys dies."

  "Tosh," said Bristow scornfully.

  "They have certainly been a very ill-fated family," said Mr Satterthwaite hurriedly. "Four holders of the title have died a violent death and the late Lord Charnley committed suicide."

  "A ghastly business," said Monckton gravely. "I was there when it happened."

  "Let me see, that must be fourteen years ago," said Mr Satterthwaite, "the house has been shut up ever since."

  "I don't wonder at that," said Monckton. "It must have been a terrible shock for a young girl. They had been married a month, just home from their honeymoon. Big fancy dress ball to celebrate their homecoming. Just as the guests were starting to arrive Charnley locked himself into the Oak Parlour and shot himself. That sort of thing isn't done. I beg your pardon?"

  He turned his head sharply to the left and looked across at Mr Satterthwaite with an apologetic laugh.

  "I am beginning to get the jimjams, Satterthwaite. I thought for a moment there was someone sitting in that empty chair and that he said something to me.

  "Yes," he went on after a minute or two, "it was a pretty ghastly shock to Alix Charnley. She was one of the prettiest girls you could see anywhere and cram full of what people call the joy of living, and now they say she is like a ghost herself. Not that I have seen her for years. I believe she lives abroad most of the time."

  "And the boy?"

  "The boy is at Eton. What he will do when he comes of age I don't know. I don't think, somehow, that he will reopen the old place."

  "It would make a good People's Pleasure Park," said Bristow.

  Colonel Monckton looked at him with cold abhorrence.

  "No, no, you don't really mean that," said Mr Satterthwaite. "You wouldn't have painted that picture if you did. Tradition and atmosphere are intangible things. They take centuries to build up and if you destroyed them you
couldn't rebuild them again in twentyfour hours."

  He rose. "Let us go into the smoking-room. I have some photographs there of Charnley which I should like to show you."

  One of Mr Satterthwaite's hobbies was amateur photography. He was also the proud author of a book, "Homes of My Friends." The friends in question were all rather exalted and the book itself showed Mr Satterthwaite forth in rather a more snobbish light than was really fair to him.

  "That is a photograph I took of the Terrace Room last year," he said.

  He handed it to Bristow. "You see it is taken at almost the same angle as is shown in your picture. That is rather a wonderful rug - it is a pity that photographs can't show colouring."

  "I remember it," said Bristow, "a marvellous bit of colour. It glowed like a flame. All the same it looked a bit incongruous there. The wrong size for that big room with its black and white squares. There is no rug anywhere else in the room. It spoils the whole effect - it was like a gigantic blood stain."

  "Perhaps that gave you your idea for your picture?" said Mr Satterthwaite.

  "Perhaps it did," said Bristow thoughtfully. "On the face, of it, one would naturally stage a tragedy in the little panelled room leading out of it."

  "The Oak Parlour," said Monckton. "Yes, that is the haunted room right enough. There is a Priests hiding hole there - a movable panel by the fireplace. Tradition has it that Charles I was concealed there once. There were two deaths from duelling in that room. And it was there, as I say, that Reggie Charnley shot himself."

  He took the photograph from Bristow's hand. "Why, that is the Bokhara rug," he said, "worth a couple of thousand pounds, I believe. When I was there it was in the Oak Parlour - the right place for it. It looks silly on that great expanse of marble flags."

  Mr Satterthwaite was looking at the empty chair which he had drawn up beside his. Then he said thoughtfully, "I wonder when it was moved?"

  "It must have been recently. Why, I remember having a conversation about it on the very day of the tragedy. Charnley was saying it really ought to be kept under glass." Mr Satterthwaite shook his head. "The house was shut up immediately after the tragedy and everything was left exactly as it was."

  Bristow broke in with a question. He had laid aside his aggressive manner. "Why did Lord Charnley shoot himself?" he asked.

  Colonel Monckton shifted uncomfortably in his chair. "No one ever knew," he said vaguely.

  "I suppose," said Mr Satterthwaite slowly, "that it was suicide."

  The Colonel looked at him in blank astonishment.

  "Suicide," he said, "why, of course it was suicide. My dear fellow, I was there in the house myself."

  Mr Satterthwaite looked towards the empty chair at his side and, smiling to himself as though at some hidden joke the others could not see, he said quietly, "Sometimes one sees things more clearly years afterwards than one could possibly at the time."

  "Nonsense," spluttered Monckton, "arrant nonsense! How can you possibly see things better when they are vague in your memory instead of clear and sharp?"

  But Mr Satterthwaite was reinforced from an unexpected quarter.

  "I know what you mean," said the artist. "I should say that possibly you were right. It is a question of proportion, isn't it? And more than proportion probably. Relativity and all that sort of thing."

  "If you ask me," said the Colonel, "all this Einstein business is a lot of dashed nonsense. So are spiritualists and the spook of one's grandmother!" He glared round fiercely. "Of course it was suicide," he went on. "Didn't I practically see the thing happen with my own eyes?"

  "Tell us about it," said Mr Satterthwaite, "so that we shall see it with our eyes also."

  With a somewhat mollified grunt the Colonel settled himself more comfortably in his chair.

  "The whole thing was extraordinarily unexpected," he began.

  "Charnley had been his usual normal self. There was a big party staying in the house for this ball. No one could ever have guessed he would go and shoot himself just as the guests began arriving."

  "It would have been better taste if he had waited until they had gone," said Mr Satterthwaite.

  "Of course it would. Damned bad taste - to do a thing like that."

  "Uncharacteristic," said Mr Satterthwaite.

  "Yes," admitted Monckton, "it wasn't like Charnley."

  "And yet it was suicide?"

  "Of course it was suicide. Why, there were three or four of us there at the top of the stairs. Myself, the Ostrander girl, Algie Darcy - oh, and one or two others. Charnley passed along the hall below and went into the Oak Parlour. The Ostrander girl said there was a ghastly look on his face and his eyes were staring - but, of course, that is nonsense - she couldn't even see his face from where we were - but he did walk in a hunched way, as if he had the weight of the world on his shoulders. One of the girls called to him - she was somebody's governess, I think, whom Lady Charnley had included in the party out of kindness. She was looking for him with a message.

  She called out 'Lord Charnley, Lady Charnley wants to know -' He paid no attention and went into the Oak Parlour and slammed the door and we heard the key turn in the lock. Then, one minute after, we heard the shot.

  "We rushed down to the hall. There is another door from the Oak Parlour leading into the Terrace Room. We tried that but it was locked, too. In the end we had to break the door down. Charnley was lying on the floor - dead - with a pistol close beside his right hand.

  Now, what could that have been but suicide? Accident? Don't tell me.

  There is only one other possibility - murder - and you can't have murder without a murderer. You admit that, I suppose."

  "The murderer might have escaped," suggested Mr Satterthwaite.

  "That is impossible. If you have a bit of paper and a pencil I will draw you a plan of the place. There are two doors into the Oak Parlour, one into the hall and one into the Terrace Room. Both these doors were locked in the inside and the keys were in the locks."

  "The window?"

  "Shut, and the shutters fastened across it."

  There was a pause.

  "So that is that," said Colonel Monckton triumphantly.

  "It certainly seems to be," said Mr Satterthwaite sadly.

  "Mind you," said the Colonel, "although I was laughing just now at the spiritualists, I don't mind admitting that there was a deuced rummy atmosphere about the place - about that room in particular.

  There are several bullet holes in the panels of the walls, the results of the duels that took place in that room, and there is a queer stain on the floor, that always comes back though they have replaced the wood several times. I suppose there will be another blood stain on the floor now - poor Charnley's blood."

  "Was there much blood?" asked Mr Satterthwaite.

  "Very little - curiously little - so the doctor said."

  "Where did he shoot himself, through the head?"

  "No, through the heart."

  "That is not the easy way to do it," said Bristow. "Frightfully difficult to know where one's heart is. I should never do it that way myself."

  Mr Satterthwaite shook his head. He was vaguely dissatisfied. He had hoped to get at something - he hardly knew what. Colonel Monckton went on.

  "It is a spooky place, Charnley. Of course, I didn't see anything."

  "You didn't see the Weeping Lady with the Silver Ewer?"

  "No, I did not, sir," said the Colonel emphatically. "But I expect every servant in the place swore they did."

  "Superstition was the curse of the Middle Ages," said Bristow.

  "There are still traces of it here and there, but thank goodness, we are getting free from it."

  "Superstition," mused Mr Satterthwaite, his eyes turned again to the empty chair. "Sometimes, don't you think, it might be useful?"

  Bristow stared at him.

  "Useful, that's a queer word."

  "Well, I hope you are convinced now, Satterthwaite," said the Colonel "Oh, quite," said Mr Satterthwai
te. "On the face of it, it seems odd so purposeless for a newly-married man, young, rich, happy, celebrating his home-coming - curious - but I agree there is no getting away from the facts." He repeated softly, "The facts," and frowned.

  "I suppose the interesting thing is none of us will ever know," said Monckton, "the story behind it all. Of course there were rumours - all sorts of rumours. You know the kind of things people say."

  "But no one knew anything," said Mr Satterthwaite thoughtfully.

  "It's not a best seller mystery, is it?" remarked Bristow. "No one gained by the man's death."

  "No one except an unborn child," said Mr Satterthwaite.

  Monckton gave a sharp chuckle. "Rather a blow to poor Hugo Charnley," he observed. "As soon as it was known that there was going to be a child he had the graceful task of sitting tight and waiting to see if it would be a girl or boy. Rather an anxious wait for his creditors, too. In the end a boy it was and a disappointment for the lot of them."

  "Was the widow very disconsolate?" asked Bristow.

  "Poor child," said Monckton, "I shall never forget her. She didn't cry or break down or anything. She was like something frozen. As I say, she shut up the house shortly afterwards and, as far as I know, it has never been reopened since."

  "So we are left in the dark as to motive," said Bristow with a slight laugh. "Another man or another woman, it must have been one or the other, eh?"

  "It seems like it," said Mr Satterthwaite.

  "And the betting is strongly on another woman," continued Bristow, "since the fair widow has not married again. I hate women," he added dispassionately.

  Mr Satterthwaite smiled a little and Frank Bristow saw the smile and pounced upon it.

  "You may smile," he said, "but I do. They upset everything. They interfere. They get between you and your work. They - I only once met a woman who was - well, interesting."

  "I thought there would be one," said Mr Satterthwaite.

  "Not in the way you mean. I - I just met her casually. As a matter of fact - it was in a train. After all," he added defiantly, "why shouldn't one meet people in trains?"