‘That’s as may be,’ said Mrs Sweetiman, ‘but murder’s murder, and what you saw you saw, and you can’t get away from it.’
Edna sniffed.
‘And what you did ought to do—’
Mrs Sweetiman broke off and attended to Mrs Wetherby, who had come in for some knitting pins and another ounce of wool.
‘Haven’t seen you about for some time, ma’am,’ said Mrs Sweetiman brightly.
‘No, I’ve been very far from well lately,’ said Mrs Wetherby. ‘My heart, you know.’ She sighed deeply. ‘I have to lie up a great deal.’
‘I heard as you’ve got some help at last,’ said Mrs Sweetiman. ‘You’ll want dark needles for this light wool.’
‘Yes. Quite capable as far as she goes, and cooks not at all badly. But her manners! And her appearance! Dyed hair and the most unsuitable tight jumpers.’
‘Ah,’ said Mrs Sweetiman. ‘Girls aren’t trained proper to service nowadays. My mother, she started at thirteen and she got up at a quarter to five every morning. Head housemaid she was when she finished, and three maids under her. And she trained them proper, too. But there’s none of that nowadays—girls aren’t trained nowadays, they’re just educated, like Edna.’
Both women looked at Edna, who leant against the post office counter, sniffing and sucking a peppermint, and looking particularly vacant. As an example of education, she hardly did the educational system credit.
‘Terrible about Mrs Upward, wasn’t it?’ continued Mrs Sweetiman conversationally, as Mrs Wetherby sorted through various coloured needles.
‘Dreadful,’ said Mrs Wetherby. ‘They hardly dared tell me. And when they did, I had the most frightful palpitations. I’m so sensitive.’
‘Shock to all of us, it was,’ said Mrs Sweetiman. ‘As for young Mr Upward, he took on something terrible. Had her hands full with him, the authoress lady did, until the doctor came and gave him a seddytiff or something. He’s gone up to Long Meadows now as a paying guest, felt he couldn’t stay in the cottage—and I don’t know as I blame him. Janet Groom, she’s gone home to her niece and the police have got the key. The lady what writes the murder books has gone back to London, but she’ll come down for the inquest.’
Mrs Sweetiman imparted all this information with relish. She prided herself on being well informed. Mrs Wetherby, whose desire for knitting needles had perhaps been prompted by a desire to know what was going on, paid for her purchase.
‘It’s most upsetting,’ she said. ‘It makes the whole village so dangerous. There must be a maniac about. When I think that my own dear daughter was out that night, that she herself might have been attacked, perhaps killed.’ Mrs Wetherby closed both eyes and swayed on her feet. Mrs Sweetiman watched her with interest, but without alarm. Mrs Wetherby opened her eyes again, and said with dignity:
‘This place should be patrolled. No young people should go about after dark. And all doors should be locked and bolted. You know that up at Long Meadows, Mrs Summerhayes never locks any of her doors. Not even at night. She leaves the back door and the drawing-room window open so that the dogs and cats can get in and out. I myself consider that is absolute madness, but she says they’ve always done it and that if burglars want to get in, they always can.’
‘Reckon there wouldn’t be much for a burglar to take up at Long Meadows,’ said Mrs Sweetiman.
Mrs Wetherby shook her head sadly and departed with her purchase.
Mrs Sweetiman and Edna resumed their argument.
‘It’s no good your setting yourself up to know best,’ said Mrs Sweetiman. ‘Right’s right and murder’s murder. Tell the truth and shame the devil. That’s what I say.’
‘Dad would skin me alive, he would, for sure,’ said Edna.
‘I’d talk to your Dad,’ said Mrs Sweetiman.
‘I couldn’t ever,’ said Edna.
‘Mrs Upward’s dead,’ said Mrs Sweetiman. ‘And you saw something the police don’t know about. You’re employed in the post office, aren’t you? You’re a Government servant. You’ve got to do your duty. You’ve got to go along to Bert Hayling—’
Edna’s sobs burst out anew.
‘Not to Bert, I couldn’t. However could I go to Bert? It’d be all over the place.’
Mrs Sweetiman said rather hesitantly:
‘There’s that foreign gentleman—’
‘Not a foreigner, I couldn’t. Not a foreigner.’
‘No, maybe you’re right there.’
A car drew up outside the post office with a squealing of brakes.
Mrs Sweetiman’s face lit up.
‘That’s Major Summerhayes, that is. You tell it all to him and he’ll advise you what to do.’
‘I couldn’t ever,’ said Edna, but with less conviction.
Johnnie Summerhayes came into the post office, staggering under the burden of three cardboard boxes.
‘Good morning, Mrs Sweetiman,’ he said cheerfully. ‘Hope these aren’t overweight?’
Mrs Sweetiman attended to the parcels in her official capacity. As Summerhayes was licking the stamps, she spoke.
‘Excuse me, sir, I’d like your advice about something.’
‘Yes, Mrs Sweetiman?’
‘Seeing as you belong here, sir, and will know best what to do.’
Summerhayes nodded. He was always curiously touched by the lingering feudal spirit of English villages. The villagers knew little of him personally, but because his father and his grandfather and many great-great-grandfathers had lived at Long Meadows, they regarded it as natural that he should advise and direct them when asked so to do.
‘It’s about Edna here,’ said Mrs Sweetiman.
Edna sniffed.
Johnnie Summerhayes looked at Edna doubtfully. Never, he thought, had he seen a more unprepossessing girl. Exactly like a skinned rabbit. Seemed half-witted too. Surely she couldn’t be in what was known officially as ‘trouble’. But no, Mrs Sweetiman would not have come to him for advice in that case.
‘Well,’ he said kindly, ‘what’s the difficulty?’
‘It’s about the murder, sir. The night of the murder. Edna saw something.’
Johnnie Summerhayes transferred his quick dark gaze from Edna to Mrs Sweetiman and back again to Edna.
‘What did you see, Edna?’ he said.
Edna began to sob. Mrs Sweetiman took over.
‘Of course we’ve been hearing this and that. Some’s rumour and some’s true. But it’s said definite as that there were a lady there that night who drank coffee with Mrs Upward. That’s so, isn’t it, sir?’
‘Yes, I believe so.’
‘I know as that’s true, because we had it from Bert Hayling.’
Albert Hayling was the local constable whom Summerhayes knew well. A slow-speaking man with a sense of his own importance.
‘I see,’ said Summerhayes.
‘But they don’t know, do they, who the lady is? Well, Edna here saw her.’
Johnnie Summerhayes looked at Edna. He pursed his lips as though to whistle.
‘You saw her, did you, Edna? Going in—or coming out?’
‘Going in,’ said Edna. A faint sense of importance loosened her tongue. ‘Across the road I was, under the trees. Just by the turn of the lane where it’s dark. I saw her. She went in at the gate and up to the door and she stood there a bit, and then—and then she went in.’
Johnnie Summerhayes’ brow cleared.
‘That’s all right,’ he said. ‘It was Miss Henderson. The police know all about that. She went and told them.’
Edna shook her head.
‘It wasn’t Miss Henderson,’ she said.
‘It wasn’t—then who was it?’
‘I dunno. I didn’t see her face. Had her back to me, she had, going up the path and standing there. But it wasn’t Miss Henderson.’
‘But how do you know it wasn’t Miss Henderson if you didn’t see her face?’
‘Because she had fair hair. Miss Henderson’s is dark.’
Johnnie Summerhayes looked disbelieving.
‘It was a very dark night. You’d hardly be able to see the colour of anyone’s hair.’
‘But I did, though. That light was on over the porch. Left like that, it was, because Mr Robin and the detective lady had gone out together to the theatre. And she was standing right under it. A dark coat she had on, and no hat, and her hair was shining fair as could be. I saw it.’
Johnnie gave a slow whistle. His eyes were serious now.
‘What time was it?’ he asked.
Edna sniffed.
‘I don’t rightly know.’
‘You know about what time,’ said Mrs Sweetiman.
‘It wasn’t nine o’clock. I’d have heard the church. And it was after half-past eight.’
‘Between half-past eight and nine. How long did she stop?’
‘I dunno, sir. Because I didn’t wait no longer. And I didn’t hear nothing. No groans or cries or nothing like that.’
Edna sounded slightly aggrieved.
But there would have been no groans and no cries. Johnnie Summerhayes knew that. He said gravely:
‘Well, there’s only one thing to be done. The police have got to hear about this.’
Edna burst into long sniffling sobs.
‘Dad’ll skin me alive,’ she whimpered. ‘He will, for sure.’
She cast an imploring look at Mrs Sweetiman and bolted into the back room. Mrs Sweetiman took over with competence.
‘It’s like this, sir,’ she said in answer to Summerhayes’ inquiring glance. ‘Edna’s been behaving very foolish like. Very strict her Dad is, maybe a bit over strict, but it’s hard to say what’s best nowadays. There’s a nice young fellow over to Cullavon and he and Edna have been going together nice and steady, and her Dad was quite pleased about it, but Reg he’s on the slow side, and you know what girls are. Edna’s taken up lately with Charlie Masters.’
‘Masters? One of Farmer Cole’s men, isn’t he?’
‘That’s right, sir. Farm labourer. And a married man with two children. Always after the girls, he is, and a bad fellow in every way. Edna hasn’t got any sense, and her Dad, he put a stop to it. Quite right. So, you see, Edna was going into Cullavon that night to go to the pictures with Reg—at least that’s what she told her Dad. But really she went out to meet this Masters. Waited for him, she did, at the turn of the lane where it seems they used to meet. Well, he didn’t come. Maybe his wife kept him at home, or maybe he’s after another girl, but there it is. Edna waited but at last she gave up. But it’s awkward for her, as you can see, explaining what she was doing there, when she ought to have taken the bus into Cullavon.’
Johnnie Summerhayes nodded. Suppressing an irrelevant feeling of wonder that the unprepossessing Edna could have sufficient sex appeal to attract the attention of two men, he dealt with the practical aspect of the situation.
‘She doesn’t want to go to Bert Hayling about it,’ he said with quick comprehension.
‘That’s right, sir.’
Summerhayes reflected rapidly.
‘I’m afraid the police have got to know,’ he said gently.
‘That’s what I told her, sir,’ said Mrs Sweetiman.
‘But they will probably be quite tactful about—er—the circumstances. Possibly she mayn’t have to give evidence. And what she tells them, they’ll keep to themselves. I could ring up Spence and ask him to come over here—no, better still, I’ll take young Edna into Kilchester with me in my car. If she goes to the police station there, nobody here need know anything about it. I’ll just ring them up first and warn them we’re coming.’
And so, after a brief telephone call, the sniffing Edna, buttoned firmly into her coat and encouraged by a pat on the back from Mrs Sweetiman, stepped into the station wagon and was driven rapidly away in the direction of Kilchester.
Chapter 20
Hercule Poirot was in Superintendent Spence’s office in Kilchester. He was leaning back in a chair, his eyes closed and the tips of his fingers just touching each other in front of him.
The superintendent received some reports, gave instructions to a sergeant, and finally looked across at the other man.
‘Getting a brainwave, M. Poirot?’ he demanded.
‘I reflect,’ said Poirot. ‘I review.’
‘I forgot to ask you. Did you get anything useful from James Bentley when you saw him?’
Poirot shook his head. He frowned.
It was indeed of James Bentley he had been thinking.
It was annoying, thought Poirot with exasperation, that on a case such as this where he had offered his services without reward, solely out of friendship and respect for an upright police officer, that the victim of circumstances should so lack any romantic appeal. A lovely young girl, now, bewildered and innocent, or a fine upstanding young man, also bewildered, but whose ‘head is bloody but unbowed,’ thought Poirot, who had been reading a good deal of English poetry in an anthology lately. Instead, he had James Bentley, a pathological case if there ever was one, a self-centred creature who had never thought much of anyone but himself. A man ungrateful for the efforts that were being made to save him—almost, one might say, uninterested in them.
Really, thought Poirot, one might as well let him be hanged since he does not seem to care…
No, he would not go quite as far as that.
Superintendent Spence’s voice broke into these reflections.
‘Our interview,’ said Poirot, ‘was, if I might say so, singularly unproductive. Anything useful that Bentley might have remembered he did not remember—what he did remember is so vague and uncertain that one cannot build upon it. But at any rate it seems fairly certain that Mrs McGinty was excited by the article in the Sunday Comet and spoke about it to Bentley with special reference to “someone connected with the case,” living in Broadhinny.’
‘With which case?’ asked Superintendent Spence sharply.
‘Our friend could not be sure,’ said Poirot. ‘He said, rather doubtfully, the Craig case—but the Craig case being the only one he had ever heard of, it would, presumably, be the only one he could remember. But the “someone” was a woman. He even quoted Mrs McGinty’s words. Someone who had “not so much to be proud of if all’s known.”’
‘Proud?’
‘Mais oui,’ Poirot nodded his appreciation. ‘A suggestive word, is it not?’
‘No clue as to who the proud lady was?’
‘Bentley suggested Mrs Upward—but as far as I can see for no real reason!’
Spence shook his head.
‘Probably because she was a proud masterful sort of woman—outstandingly so, I should say. But it couldn’t have been Mrs Upward, because Mrs Upward’s dead, and dead for the same reason as Mrs McGinty died—because she recognized a photograph.’
Poirot said sadly: ‘I warned her.’
Spence murmured irritably:
‘Lily Gamboll! So far as age goes, there are only two possibilities, Mrs Rendell and Mrs Carpenter. I don’t count the Henderson girl—she’s got a background.’
‘And the others have not?’
Spence sighed.
‘You know what things are nowadays. The war stirred up everyone and everything. The approved school where Lily Gamboll was, and all its records, were destroyed by a direct hit. Then take people. It’s the hardest thing in the world to check on people. Take Broadhinny—the only people in Broadhinny we know anything about are the Summerhayes family, who have been there for three hundred years, and Guy Carpenter, who’s one of the engineering Carpenters. All the others are—what shall I say—fluid? Dr Rendell’s on the Medical Register and we know where he trained and where he’s practised, but we don’t know his home background. His wife came from near Dublin. Eve Selkirk, as she was before she married Guy Carpenter, was a pretty young war widow. Anyone can be a pretty young war widow. Take the Wetherbys—they seem to have floated round the world, here, there and everywhere. Why? Is there a reason? Did he embezzle from a bank? Or did
they occasion a scandal? I don’t say we can’t dig up about people. We can—but it takes time. The people themselves won’t help you.’
‘Because they have something to conceal—but it need not be murder,’ said Poirot.
‘Exactly. It may be trouble with the law, or it may be a humble origin, or it may be common or garden scandal. But whatever it is, they’ve taken a lot of pains to cover up—and that makes it difficult to uncover.’
‘But not impossible.’
‘Oh no. Not impossible. It just takes time. As I say, if Lily Gamboll is in Broadhinny, she’s either Eve Carpenter or Shelagh Rendell. I’ve questioned them—just routine—that’s the way I put it. They say they were both at home—alone. Mrs Carpenter was the wide-eyed innocent, Mrs Rendell was nervous—but then she’s a nervous type, you can’t go by that.’
‘Yes,’ said Poirot thoughtfully. ‘She is a nervous type.’
He was thinking of Mrs Rendell in the garden at Long Meadows. Mrs Rendell had received an anonymous letter, or so she said. He wondered, as he had wondered before, about that statement.
Spence went on:
‘And we have to be careful—because even if one of them is guilty, the other is innocent.’
‘And Guy Carpenter is a prospective Member of Parliament and an important local figure.’
‘That wouldn’t help him if he was guilty of murder or accessory to it,’ said Spence grimly.
‘I know that. But you have, have you not, to be sure?’
‘That’s right. Anyway, you’ll agree, won’t you, that it lies between the two of them?’
Poirot sighed.
‘No—no—I would not say that. There are other possibilities.’
‘Such as?’
Poirot was silent for a moment, then he said in a different, almost casual tone of voice:
‘Why do people keep photographs?’
‘Why? Goodness knows! Why do people keep all sorts of things—junk—trash, bits and pieces. They do—that’s all there is to it!’
‘Up to a point I agree with you. Some people keep things. Some people throw everything away as soon as they have done with it. That, yes, it is a matter of temperament. But I speak now especially of photographs. Why do people keep, in particular, photographs?’
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