Mrs McGinty's Dead

by Agatha Christie

  ‘Hallo, are you playing with the sugar cutter?’

  ‘Is that what it is? A sugar cutter?’

  ‘Yes. A sugar cutter—or a sugar hammer—I don’t know what exactly is the right term. It’s rather fun, isn’t it? So childish with the little bird on top.’

  Poirot turned the implement carefully in his hands. Made of much ornamented brass, it was shaped like an adze, heavy, with a sharp cutting edge. It was studded here and there with coloured stones, pale blue and red. On top of it was a frivolous little bird with turquoise eyes.

  ‘Lovely thing for killing anyone, wouldn’t it be?’ said Maureen conversationally.

  She took it from him and aimed a murderous blow at a point in space.

  ‘Frightfully easy,’ she said. ‘What’s that bit in the Idylls of the King? “ ‘Mark’s way,’ he said, and clove him to the brain.” I should think you could cleave anyone to the brain with this all right, don’t you?’

  Poirot looked at her. Her freckled face was serene and cheerful.

  She said:

  ‘I’ve told Johnnie what’s coming to him if I get fed up with him. I call it the wife’s best friend!’

  She laughed, put the sugar hammer down and turned towards the door.

  ‘What did I come in here for?’ she mused. ‘I can’t remember…Bother! I’d better go and see if that pudding needs more water in the saucepan.’

  Poirot’s voice stopped her before she got to the door.

  ‘You brought this back with you from India, perhaps?’

  ‘Oh no,’ said Maureen. ‘I got it at the B. and B. at Christmas.’

  ‘B. and B.?’ Poirot was puzzled.

  ‘Bring and Buy,’ explained Maureen glibly. ‘At the Vicarage. You bring things you don’t want, and you buy something. Something not too frightful if you can find it. Of course there’s practically never anything you really want. I got this and that coffee pot. I like the coffee pot’s nose and I liked the little bird on the hammer.’

  The coffee pot was a small one of beaten copper. It had a big curving spout that struck a familiar note to Poirot.

  ‘I think they come from Baghdad,’ said Maureen. ‘At least I think that’s what the Wetherbys said. Or it may have been Persia.’

  ‘It was from the Wetherbys’ house, then, that these came?’

  ‘Yes. They’ve got a most frightful lot of junk. I must go. That pudding.’

  She went out. The door banged. Poirot picked up the sugar cutter again and took it to the window.

  On the cutting edge were faint, very faint, discolorations.

  Poirot nodded his head.

  He hesitated for a moment, then he carried the sugar hammer out of the room and up to his bedroom. There he packed it carefully in a box, did the whole thing up neatly in paper and string, and going downstairs again, left the house.

  He did not think that anyone would notice the disappearance of the sugar cutter. It was not a tidy household.

  III

  At Laburnums, collaboration was pursuing its difficult course.

  ‘But I really don’t feel it’s right making him a vegetarian, darling,’ Robin was objecting. ‘Too faddy. And definitely not glamorous.’

  ‘I can’t help it,’ said Mrs Oliver obstinately. ‘He’s always been a vegetarian. He takes round a little machine for grating raw carrots and turnips.’

  ‘But, Ariadne, precious, why?’

  ‘How do I know?’ said Mrs Oliver crossly. ‘How do I know why I ever thought of the revolting man? I must have been mad! Why a Finn when I know nothing about Finland? Why a vegetarian? Why all the idiotic manerisms he’s got? These things just happen. You try something—and people seem to like it—and then you go on—and before you know where you are, you’ve got someone like that maddening Sven Hjerson tied to you for life. And people even write and say how fond you must be of him. Fond of him? If I met that bony, gangling, vegetable-eating Finn in real life, I’d do a better murder than any I’ve ever invented.’

  Robin Upward gazed at her with reverence.

  ‘You know, Ariadne, that might be rather a marvellous idea. A real Sven Hjerson—and you murder him. You might make a Swan Song book of it—to be published after your death.’

  ‘No fear!’ said Mrs Oliver. ‘What about the money? Any money to be made out of murders I want now.’

  ‘Yes. Yes. There I couldn’t agree with you more.’

  The harassed playwright strode up and down.

  ‘This Ingrid creature is getting rather tiresome,’ he said. ‘And after the cellar scene which is really going to be marvellous, I don’t quite see how we’re going to prevent the next scene from being rather an anti-climax.’

  Mrs Oliver was silent. Scenes, she felt, were Robin Upward’s headache.

  Robin shot a dissatisfied glance at her.

  That morning, in one of her frequent changes of mood, Mrs Oliver had disliked her windswept coiffure. With a brush dipped in water she had plastered her grey locks close to her skull. With her high forehead, her massive glasses, and her stern air, she was reminding Robin more and more of a school teacher who had awed his early youth. He found it more and more difficult to address her as darling, and even flinched at ‘Ariadne’.

  He said fretfully:

  ‘You know, I don’t feel a bit in the mood today. All that gin yesterday, perhaps. Let’s scrap work and go into the question of casting. If we can get Denis Callory, of course it will be too marvellous, but he’s tied up in films at the moment. And Jean Bellews for Ingrid would be just right—and she wants to play it which is so nice. Eric—as I say, I’ve had a brainwave for Eric. We’ll go over to the Little Rep tonight, shall we? And you’ll tell me what you think of Cecil for the part.’

  Mrs Oliver agreed hopefully to this project and Robin went off to telephone.

  ‘There,’ he said returning. ‘That’s all fixed.’

  IV

  The fine morning had not lived up to its promise. Clouds had gathered and the day was oppressive with a threat of rain. As Poirot walked through the dense shrubberies to the front door of Hunter’s Close, he decided that he would not like to live in this hollow valley at the foot of the hill. The house itself was closed in by trees and its walls suffocated in ivy. It needed, he thought, the woodman’s axe.

  (The axe? The sugar cutter?)

  He rang the bell and after getting no response, rang it again.

  It was Deirdre Henderson who opened the door to him. She seemed surprised.

  ‘Oh,’ she said, ‘it’s you.’

  ‘May I come in and speak to you?’

  ‘I—well, yes, I suppose so.’

  She led him into the small dark sitting-room where he had waited before. On the mantelpiece he recognized the big brother of the small coffee pot on Maureen’s shelf. Its vast hooked nose seemed to dominate the small Western room with a hint of Eastern ferocity.

  ‘I’m afraid,’ said Deirdre in an apologetic tone, ‘that we’re rather upset today. Our help, the German girl—she’s going. She’s only been here a month. Actually it seems she just took this post to get over to this country because there was someone she wanted to marry. And now they’ve fixed it up, and she’s going straight off tonight.’

  Poirot clicked his tongue.

  ‘Most inconsiderate.’

  ‘It is, isn’t it? My stepfather says it isn’t legal. But even if it isn’t legal, if she just goes off and gets married, I don’t see what one can do about it. We shouldn’t even have known she was going if I hadn’t found her packing her clothes. She would just have walked out of the house without a word.’

  ‘It is, alas, not an age of consideration.’

  ‘No,’ said Deirdre dully. ‘I suppose it’s not.’

  She rubbed her forehead with the back of her hand.

  ‘I’m tired,’ she said. ‘I’m very tired.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Poirot gently. ‘I think you may be very tired.’

  ‘What was it you wanted, M. Poirot?’

 
; ‘I wanted to ask you about a sugar hammer.’

  ‘A sugar hammer?’

  Her face was blank, uncomprehending.

  ‘An instrument of brass, with a bird on it, and inlaid with blue and red and green stones.’ Poirot enunciated the description carefully.

  ‘Oh yes, I know.’

  Her voice showed no interest or animation.

  ‘I understand it came from this house?’

  ‘Yes. My mother bought it in the bazaar at Baghdad. It’s one of the things we took to the Vicarage sale.’

  ‘The Bring and Buy sale, that is right?’

  ‘Yes. We have a lot of them here. It’s difficult to get people to give money, but there’s usually something you can rake up and send.’

  ‘So it was here, in this house, until Christmas, and then you sent it to the Bring and Buy sale? Is that right?’

  Deirdre frowned.

  ‘Not the Christmas Bring and Buy. It was the one before. The Harvest Festival one.’

  ‘The Harvest Festival—that would be—when? October? September?’

  ‘The end of September.’

  It was very quiet in the little room. Poirot looked at the girl and she looked back at him. Her face was mild, expressionless, uninterested. Behind the blank wall of her apathy, he tried to guess what was going on. Nothing, perhaps. Perhaps she was, as she had said, just tired…

  He said, quietly, urgently:

  ‘You are quite sure it was the Harvest Festival Sale? Not the Christmas one?’

  ‘Quite sure.’

  Her eyes were steady, unblinking.

  Hercule Poirot waited. He continued to wait…

  But what he was waiting for did not come.

  He said formally:

  ‘I must not keep you any longer, mademoiselle.’

  She went with him to the front door.

  Presently he was walking down the drive again.

  Two divergent statements—statements that could not possibly be reconciled.

  Who was right? Maureen Summerhayes or Deirdre Henderson?

  If the sugar cutter had been used as he believed it had been used, the point was vital. The Harvest Festival had been the end of September. Between then and Christmas, on November 22nd, Mrs McGinty had been killed. Whose property had the sugar cutter been at the time?

  He went to the post office. Mrs Sweetiman was always helpful and she did her best. She’d been to both sales, she said. She always went. You picked up many a nice bit there. She helped, too, to arrange things beforehand. Though most people brought things with them and didn’t send them beforehand.

  A brass hammer, rather like an axe, with coloured stones and a little bird? No, she couldn’t rightly remember. There was such a lot of things, and so much confusion and some things snatched up at once. Well, perhaps she did remember something like that—priced at five shillings it had been, and with a copper coffee pot, but the pot had got a hole in the bottom—you couldn’t use it, only for ornament. But she couldn’t remember when it was—some time ago. Might have been Christmas, might have been before. She hadn’t been noticing…

  She accepted Poirot’s parcel. Registered? Yes.

  She copied down the address; he noticed just a sharp flicker of interest in her keen black eyes as she handed him the receipt.

  Hercule Poirot walked slowly up the hill, wondering to himself.

  Of the two, Maureen Summerhayes, scatter-brained, cheerful, inaccurate, was the more likely to be wrong. Harvest or Christmas, it would be all one to her.

  Deirdre Henderson, slow, awkward, was far more likely to be accurate in her identification of times and dates.

  Yet there remained that irking question.

  Why, after his questions, hadn’t she asked him why he wanted to know? Surely a natural, an almost inevitable, question?

  But Deirdre Henderson hadn’t asked it.

  Chapter 15

  I

  ‘Someone rang you up,’ called Maureen from the kitchen as Poirot entered the house.

  ‘Rang me up? Who was that?’

  He was slightly surprised.

  ‘Don’t know, but I jotted the number down on my ration book.’

  ‘Thank you, Madame.’

  He went into the dining-room and over to the desk. Amongst the litter of papers he found the ration book lying near the telephone and the words—Kilchester 350.

  Raising the receiver of the telephone, he dialled the number.

  Immediately a woman’s voice said:

  ‘Breather and Scuttle.’

  Poirot made a quick guess.

  ‘Can I speak to Miss Maude Williams?’

  There was a moment’s interval and then a contralto voice said:

  ‘Miss Williams speaking.’

  ‘This is Hercule Poirot. I think you rang me.’

  ‘Yes—yes, I did. It’s about the property you were asking me about the other day.’

  ‘The property?’ For a moment Poirot was puzzled. Then he realized that Maude’s conversation was being overheard. Probably she had telephoned him before when she was alone in the office.

  ‘I understand you, I think. It is the affair of James Bentley and Mrs McGinty’s murder.’

  ‘That’s right. Can we do anything in the matter for you?’

  ‘You want to help. You are not private where you are?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘I understand. Listen carefully. You really want to help James Bentley?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Would you resign your present post?’

  There was no hesitation.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Would you be willing to take a domestic post? Possibly with not very congenial people?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Could you get away at once? By tomorrow, for instance?’

  ‘Oh yes, M. Poirot. I think that could be managed.’

  ‘You understand what I want you to do. You would be a domestic help—to live in. You can cook?’

  A faint amusement tinged the voice.

  ‘Very well.’

  ‘Bon Dieu, what a rarity! Now listen, I am coming into Kilchester at once. I will meet you in the same café where I met you before, at lunch time.’

  ‘Yes, certainly.’

  Poirot rang off.

  ‘An admirable young woman,’ he reflected. ‘Quick-witted, knows her own mind—perhaps, even, she can cook…’

  With some difficulty he disinterred the local telephone directory from under a treatise on pigkeeping and looked up the Wetherbys’ number.

  The voice that answered him was that of Mrs Wetherby.

  ‘’Allo?’ Allo? It is M. Poirot—you remember, Madame—’

  ‘I don’t think I—’

  ‘M. Hercule Poirot.’

  ‘Oh yes—of course—do forgive me. Rather a domestic upset today—’

  ‘It is for that reason exactly I rang you up. I am desolated to learn of your difficulties.’

  ‘So ungrateful—these foreign girls. Her fare paid over here, and everything. I do so hate ingratitude.’

  ‘Yes, yes. I do indeed sympathize. It is monstrous—that is why I hasten to tell you that I have, perhaps, a solution. By the merest chance I know of a young woman wanting a domestic post. Not, I fear, fully trained.’

  ‘Oh, there’s no such thing as training nowadays. Will she cook—so many of them won’t cook.’

  ‘Yes—yes—she cooks. Shall I then send her to you—at least on trial? Her name is Maude Williams.’

  ‘Oh, please do, M. Poirot. Its most kind of you. Anything would be better than nothing. My husband is so particular and gets gets so annoyed with dear Deirdre when the household doesn’t go smoothly. One can’t expect men to understand how difficult everything is nowadays—I—’

  There was an interruption. Mrs Wetherby spoke to someone entering the room, and though she had placed her hand over the receiver Poirot could hear her slightly muffled words.

  ‘It’s that little detective man—knows
of someone to come in to replace Frieda. No, not foreign—English, thank goodness. Very kind of him, really, he seems quite concerned about me. Oh, darling, don’t make objections. What does it matter? You know the absurd way Roger goes on. Well, I think it’s very kind—and I don’t suppose she’s too awful.’

  The asides over, Mrs Wetherby spoke with the utmost graciousness.

  ‘Thank you very much, M. Poirot. We are most grateful.’

  Poirot replaced the receiver and glanced at his watch.

  He went to the kitchen.

  ‘Madame, I shall not be in to lunch. I have to go to Kilchester.’

  ‘Thank goodness,’ said Maureen. ‘I didn’t get to that pudding in time. It had boiled dry. I think it’s really all right—just a little scorched perhaps. In case it tasted rather nasty I thought I would open a bottle of those raspberries I put up last summer. They seem to have a bit of mould on top but they say nowadays that that doesn’t matter. It’s really rather good for you—practically penicillin.’

  Poirot left the house, glad that scorched pudding and near-penicillin were not to be his portion today. Better—far better—eat macaroni and custard and plums at the Blue Cat than the improvisations of Maureen Summerhayes.

  II

  At Laburnums a little friction had arisen.

  ‘Of course, Robin, you never seem to remember anything when you are working on a play.’

  Robin was contrite.

  ‘Madre, I am most terribly sorry. I’d forgotten all about it’s being Janet’s night out.’

  ‘It doesn’t matter at all,’ said Mrs Upward coldly.

  ‘Of course it matters. I’ll ring up the Rep and tell them we’ll go tomorrow night instead.’

  ‘You’ll do nothing of the sort. You’ve arranged to go tonight and you’ll go.’

  ‘But really—’

  ‘That’s settled.’

  ‘Shall I ask Janet to go out another night?’

  ‘Certainly not. She hates to have her plans disarranged.’

  ‘I’m sure she wouldn’t really mind. Not if I put it to her—’

  ‘You’ll do nothing of the sort, Robin. Please don’t go upsetting Janet. And don’t go on about it. I don’t care to feel I’m a tiresome old woman spoiling other people’s pleasure.’