The Clocks

by Agatha Christie

  “No. She had shopping to do. We met at the Chinese place in Market Street at one o’clock.”

  “I see.”

  Hardcastle looked down his notes. Edna Brent had died between 12:30 and one o’clock.

  “Don’t you want to know what we had for lunch?”

  “Keep your hair on. I just wanted the exact time. For the record.”

  “I see. It’s like that.”

  There was a pause. Hardcastle said, endeavouring to ease the strain:

  “If you’re not doing anything this evening—”

  The other interrupted.

  “I’m off. Just packing up. I found a message waiting for me. I’ve got to go abroad.”

  “When will you be back?”

  “That’s anybody’s guess. A week at least—perhaps longer—possibly never!”

  “Bad luck—or isn’t it?”

  “I’m not sure,” said Colin, and rang off.

  Eighteen

  I

  Hardcastle arrived at No. 19, Wilbraham Crescent just as Miss Pebmarsh was coming out of the house.

  “Excuse me a minute, Miss Pebmarsh.”

  “Oh. Is it—Detective Inspector Hardcastle?”

  “Yes. Can I have a word with you?”

  “I don’t want to be late at the Institute. Will it take long?”

  “I assure you only three or four minutes.”

  She went into the house and he followed.

  “You’ve heard what happened this afternoon?” he said.

  “Has anything happened?”

  “I thought you might have heard. A girl was killed in the telephone box just down the road.”

  “Killed? When?”

  “Two hours and three quarters ago.” He looked at the grandfather clock.

  “I’ve heard nothing about it. Nothing,” said Miss Pebmarsh. A kind of anger sounded momentarily in her voice. It was as though her disability had been brought home to her in some particularly wounding way. “A girl—killed! What girl?”

  “Her name is Edna Brent and she worked at the Cavendish Secretarial Bureau.”

  “Another girl from there! Had she been sent for like this girl, Sheila what’s-her-name was?”

  “I don’t think so,” said the inspector. “She did not come to see you here, at your house?”

  “Here? No. Certainly not.”

  “Would you have been in if she had come here?”

  “I’m not sure. What time did you say?”

  “Approximately twelve thirty or a little later.”

  “Yes,” said Miss Pebmarsh. “I would have been home by then.”

  “Where did you go after the inquest?”

  “I came straight back here.” She paused and then asked, “Why did you think this girl might have come to see me?”

  “Well, she had been at the inquest this morning and she had seen you there, and she must have had some reason for coming to Wilbraham Crescent. As far as we know, she was not acquainted with anyone in this road.”

  “But why should she come to see me just because she had seen me at the inquest?”

  “Well—” the inspector smiled a little, then hastily tried to put the smile in his voice as he realized that Miss Pebmarsh could not appreciate its disarming quality. “One never knows with these girls. She might just have wanted an autograph. Something like that.”

  “An autograph!” Miss Pebmarsh sounded scornful. Then she said, “Yes … Yes, I suppose you’re right. That sort of thing does happen.” Then she shook her head briskly. “I can only assure you, Inspector Hardcastle, that it did not happen today. Nobody has been here since I came back from the inquest.”

  “Well, thank you, Miss Pebmarsh. We thought we had better check up on every possibility.”

  “How old was she?” asked Miss Pebmarsh.

  “I believe she was nineteen.”

  “Nineteen? Very young.” Her voice changed slightly. “Very young … Poor child. Who would want to kill a girl of that age?”

  “It happens,” said Hardcastle.

  “Was she pretty—attractive—sexy?”

  “No,” said Hardcastle. “She would have liked to be, I think, but she was not.”

  “Then that was not the reason,” said Miss Pebmarsh. She shook her head again. “I’m sorry. More sorry than I can say, Inspector Hardcastle, that I can’t help you.”

  He went out, impressed as he always was impressed, by Miss Pebmarsh’s personality.

  II

  Miss Waterhouse was also at home. She was also true to type, opening the door with a suddenness which displayed a desire to trap someone doing what they should not do.

  “Oh, it’s you!” she said. “Really, I’ve told your people all I know.”

  “I’m sure you’ve replied to all the questions that were asked you,” said Hardcastle, “but they can’t all be asked at once, you know. We have to go into a few more details.”

  “I don’t see why. The whole thing was a most terrible shock,” said Miss Waterhouse, looking at him in a censorious way as though it had been all his doing. “Come in, come in. You can’t stand on the mat all day. Come in and sit down and ask me any questions you want to, though really what questions there can be, I cannot see. As I told you, I went out to make a telephone call. I opened the door of the box and there was the girl. Never had such a shock in my life. I hurried down and got the police constable. And after that, in case you want to know, I came back here and I gave myself a medicinal dose of brandy. Medicinal,” said Miss Waterhouse fiercely.

  “Very wise of you, madam,” said Inspector Hardcastle.

  “And that’s that,” said Miss Waterhouse with finality.

  “I wanted to ask you if you were quite sure you had never seen this girl before?”

  “May have seen her a dozen times,” said Miss Waterhouse, “but not to remember. I mean, she may have served me in Woolworth’s, or sat next to me in a bus, or sold me tickets in a cinema.”

  “She was a shorthand typist at the Cavendish Bureau.”

  “I don’t think I’ve ever had occasion to use a shorthand typist. Perhaps she worked in my brother’s office at Gainsford and Swettenham. Is that what you’re driving at?”

  “Oh, no,” said Inspector Hardcastle, “there appears to be no connection of that kind. But I just wondered if she’d come to see you this morning before being killed.”

  “Come to see me? No, of course not. Why should she?”

  “Well, that we wouldn’t know,” said Inspector Hardcastle, “but you would say, would you, that anyone who saw her coming in at your gate this morning was mistaken?” He looked at her with innocent eyes.

  “Somebody saw her coming in at my gate? Nonsense,” said Miss Waterhouse. She hesitated. “At least—”

  “Yes?” said Hardcastle, alert though he did not show it.

  “Well, I suppose she may have pushed a leaflet or something through the door … There was a leaflet there at lunchtime. Something about a meeting for nuclear disarmament, I think. There’s always something every day. I suppose conceivably she might have come and pushed something through the letter box; but you can’t blame me for that, can you?”

  “Of course not. Now as to your telephone call—you say your own telephone was out of order. According to the exchange, that was not so.”

  “Exchanges will say anything! I dialled and got a most peculiar noise, not the engaged signal, so I went out to the call box.”

  Hardcastle got up.

  “I’m sorry, Miss Waterhouse, for bothering you in this way, but there is some idea that this girl did come to call on someone in the crescent and that she went to a house not very far from here.”

  “And so you have to inquire all along the crescent,” said Miss Waterhouse. “I should think the most likely thing is that she went to the house next door—Miss Pebmarsh’s, I mean.”

  “Why should you consider that the most likely?”

  “You said she was a shorthand typist and came from the Cavendish Burea
u. Surely, if I remember rightly, it was said that Miss Pebmarsh asked for a shorthand typist to come to her house the other day when that man was killed.”

  “It was said so, yes, but she denied it.”

  “Well, if you ask me,” said Miss Waterhouse, “not that anyone ever listens to what I say until it’s too late, I should say that she’d gone a little batty. Miss Pebmarsh, I mean. I think, perhaps, that she does ring up bureaux and ask for shorthand typists to come. Then, perhaps, she forgets all about it.”

  “But you don’t think that she would do murder?”

  “I never suggested murder or anything of that kind. I know a man was killed in her house, but I’m not for a moment suggesting that Miss Pebmarsh had anything to do with it. No. I just thought that she might have one of those curious fixations like people do. I knew a woman once who was always ringing up a confectioner’s and ordering a dozen meringues. She didn’t want them, and when they came she said she hadn’t ordered them. That sort of thing.”

  “Of course, anything is possible,” said Hardcastle. He said good-bye to Miss Waterhouse and left.

  He thought she’d hardly done herself justice by her last suggestion. On the other hand, if she believed that the girl had been seen entering her house, and that that had in fact been the case, then the suggestion that the girl had gone to No. 19 was quite an adroit one under the circumstances.

  Hardcastle glanced at his watch and decided that he had still time to tackle the Cavendish Secretarial Bureau. It had, he knew, been reopened at two o’clock this afternoon. He might get some help from the girls there. And he would find Sheila Webb there too.

  III

  One of the girls rose at once as he entered the office.

  “It’s Detective Inspector Hardcastle, isn’t it?” she said. “Miss Martindale is expecting you.”

  She ushered him into the inner office. Miss Martindale did not wait a moment before attacking him.

  “It’s disgraceful, Inspector Hardcastle, absolutely disgraceful! You must get to the bottom of this. You must get to the bottom of it at once. No dilly-dallying about. The police are supposed to give protection and that is what we need here at this office. Protection. I want protection for my girls and I mean to get it.”

  “I’m sure, Miss Martindale, that—”

  “Are you going to deny that two of my girls, two of them, have been victimized? There is clearly some irresponsible person about who has got some kind of—what do they call it nowadays—a fixture or a complex—about shorthand typists or secretarial bureaux. They are deliberately martyrizing this institute. First Sheila Webb was summoned by a heartless trick to find a dead body—the kind of thing that might send a nervous girl off her head—and now this. A perfectly nice harmless girl murdered in a telephone box. You must get to the bottom of it, Inspector.”

  “There’s nothing I want more than to get to the bottom of it, Miss Martindale. I’ve come to see if you can give me any help.”

  “Help! What help can I give you? Do you think if I had any help, I wouldn’t have rushed to you with it before now? You’ve got to find who killed that poor girl, Edna, and who played that heartless trick on Sheila. I’m strict with my girls, Inspector, I keep them up to their work and I won’t allow them to be late or slipshod. But I don’t stand for their being victimized or murdered. I intend to defend them, and I intend to see that people who are paid by the State to defend them do their work.” She glared at him and looked rather like a tigress in human form.

  “Give us time, Miss Martindale,” he said.

  “Time? Just because that silly child is dead, I suppose you think you’ve all the time in the world. The next thing that happens will be one of the other girls is murdered.”

  “I don’t think you need fear that, Miss Martindale.”

  “I don’t suppose you thought this girl was going to be killed when you got up this morning, Inspector. If so, you’d have taken a few precautions, I suppose, to look after her. And when one of my girls gets killed or is put in some terribly compromising position, you’ll be equally surprised. The whole thing is extraordinary, crazy! You must admit yourself it’s a crazy setup. That is, if the things one reads in the paper were true. All those clocks for instance. They weren’t mentioned this morning at the inquest, I noticed.”

  “As little as possible was mentioned this morning, Miss Martindale. It was only an adjourned inquest, you know.”

  “All I say is,” said Miss Martindale, glaring at him again, “you must do something about it.”

  “And there’s nothing you can tell me, no hint Edna might have given to you? She didn’t appear worried by anything, she didn’t consult you?”

  “I don’t suppose she’d have consulted me if she was worried,” said Miss Martindale. “But what had she to be worried about?”

  That was exactly the question that Inspector Hardcastle would have liked to have answered for him, but he could see that it was not likely that he would get the answer from Miss Martindale. Instead he said:

  “I’d like to talk to as many of your girls here as I can. I can see that it is not likely that Edna Brent would have confided any fears or worries to you, but she might have spoken of them to her fellow employees.”

  “That’s possible enough, I expect,” said Miss Martindale. “They spend their time gossiping—these girls. The moment they hear my step in the passage outside all the typewriters begin to rattle. But what have they been doing just before? Talking. Chat, chat, chitter-chat!” Calming down a little, she said, “There are only three of them in the office at present. Would you like to speak to them while you’re here? The others are out on assignments. I can give you their names and their home addresses, if you like.”

  “Thank you, Miss Martindale.”

  “I expect you’d like to speak to them alone,” said Miss Martindale. “They wouldn’t talk as freely if I was standing there looking on. They’d have to admit, you see, that they had been gossiping and wasting their time.”

  She got up from her seat and opened the door into the outer office.

  “Girls,” she said, “Detective Inspector Hardcastle wants to talk things over with you. You can stop work for the moment. Try and tell him anything you know that can help him to find out who killed Edna Brent.”

  She went back into her own private office and shut the door firmly. Three startled girlish faces looked at the inspector. He summed them up quickly and superficially, but sufficiently to make up his mind as to the quality of the material with which he was about to deal. A fair solid-looking girl with spectacles. Dependable, he thought, but not particularly bright. A rather rakish-looking brunette with the kind of hairdo that suggested she’d been out in a blizzard lately. Eyes that noticed things here, perhaps, but probably highly unreliable in her recollection of events. Everything would be suitably touched up. The third was a born giggler who would, he was sure, agree with whatever anyone else said.

  He spoke quietly, informally.

  “I suppose you’ve all heard what has happened to Edna Brent who worked here?”

  Three heads nodded violently.

  “By the way, how did you hear?”

  They looked at each other as if trying to decide who should be spokesman. By common consent it appeared to be the fair girl, whose name, it seemed, was Janet.

  “Edna didn’t come to work at two o’clock, as she should have done,” she explained.

  “And Sandy Cat was very annoyed,” began the dark-haired girl, Maureen, and then stopped herself. “Miss Martindale, I mean.”

  The third girl giggled. “Sandy Cat is just what we call her,” she explained.

  “And not a bad name,” the inspector thought.

  “She’s a perfect terror when she likes,” said Maureen. “Fairly jumps on you. She asked if Edna had said anything to us about not coming back to the office this afternoon, and that she ought to have at least sent an excuse.”

  The fair girl said: “I told Miss Martindale that she’d been at the inques
t with the rest of us, but that we hadn’t seen her afterwards and didn’t know where she’d gone.”

  “That was true, was it?” asked Hardcastle. “You’ve no idea where she did go when she left the inquest.”

  “I suggested she should come and have some lunch with me,” said Maureen, “but she seemed to have something on her mind. She said she wasn’t sure that she’d bother to have any lunch. Just buy something and eat it in the office.”

  “So she meant, then, to come back to the office?”

  “Oh, yes, of course. We all knew we’d got to do that.”

  “Have any of you noticed anything different about Edna Brent these last few days? Did she seem to you worried at all, as though she had something on her mind? Did she tell you anything to that effect? If there is anything at all you know, I must beg of you to tell me.”

  They looked at each other but not in a conspiratorial manner. It seemed to be merely vague conjecture.

  “She was always worried about something,” said Maureen. “She gets things muddled up, and makes mistakes. She was a bit slow in the uptake.”

  “Things always seemed to happen to Edna,” said the giggler. “Remember when that stiletto heel of hers came off the other day? Just the sort of thing that would happen to Edna.”

  “I remember,” said Hardcastle.

  He remembered how the girl had stood looking down ruefully at the shoe in her hand.

  “You know, I had a feeling something awful had happened this afternoon when Edna didn’t get here at two o’clock,” said Janet. She nodded with a solemn face.

  Hardcastle looked at her with some dislike. He always disliked people who were wise after the event. He was quite sure that the girl in question had thought nothing of the kind. Far more likely, he thought to himself, that she had said, “Edna will catch it from Sandy Cat when she does come in.”

  “When did you hear what had happened?” he asked again.

  They looked at each other. The giggler flushed guiltily. Her eyes shot sideways to the door into Miss Martindale’s private office.

  “Well, I—er—I just slipped out for a minute,” she said. “I wanted some pastries to take home and I knew they’d all be gone by the time we left. And when I got to the shop—it’s on the corner and they know me quite well there—the woman said, ‘She worked at your place, didn’t she, ducks?’ and I said, ‘Who do you mean?’ And then she said, ‘This girl they’ve just found dead in a telephone box.’ Oh, it gave me ever such a turn! So I came rushing back and I told the others and in the end we all said we’d have to tell Miss Martindale about it, and just at that moment she came bouncing out of her office and said to us, ‘Now what are you doing? Not a single typewriter going.’”