Ordeal by Innocence

by Agatha Christie

  "But I was the local doctor who was called in to the children, though she was inclined to think I was a bit casual over them. I told her to let 'em eat a few blueberries from the hedges. I told her it wouldn't hurt them to get their feet wet and have an occasional cold in the head, and that there's nothing much wrong with a child who's got a temperature of 99. No need to fuss till over 100. Those children were pampered and spoon-fed and fussed over and loved and in many ways it didn't do them any good."

  "You mean," said Calgary, "it didn't do Jacko good?"

  "Well, I wasn't really only thinking of Jacko. Jacko to my mind was a liability from the start. The modern label for him is 'a crazy mixed-up kid.' It's just as good as any other label. The Argyles did their best for him, they did everything that could have been done. I've seen a good many Jackos in my lifetime. Later in life, when the boy has gone hopelessly wrong, the parents say, 'If only I'd been stricter with him when he was young,' or else they say, 'I was too harsh, if only I'd been kinder.' I don't think myself it amounts to a penn'orth of difference. There are those who go wrong because they've had an unhappy home and essentially feel unloved. And again there are those who go wrong because at the least stress they're going to go wrong anyway. I put Jacko down as one of the latter."

  "So you weren't surprised," said Calgary, "when he was arrested for murder?"

  "Frankly, yes, I was surprised. Not because the idea of murder would have been particularly repugnant to Jacko. He was the sort of young man who is conscienceless. But the kind of murder he'd done did surprise me. Oh, I know he had a violent temper and all that. As a child he often hurled himself on another child or hit him with some heavy toy or bit of wood. But it was usually a child smaller than himself, and it was usually not so much blind rage as the wish to hurt or get hold of something that he himself wanted. The kind of murder I'd have expected Jacko to do, if he did one, was the type where a couple of boys go out on a raid; then, when the police come after them, the Jackos say 'Biff him on the head, bud. Let him have it. Shoot him down.' They're willing for murder, ready to incite to murder, but they've not got the nerve to do murder themselves with their own hands. That's what I should have said. Now it seems," added the doctor, "I would have been right."

  Calgary stared down at the carpet, a worn carpet with hardly any of its pattern remaining.

  "I didn't know," he said, "what I was up against. I didn't realise what it was going to mean to the others. I didn't see that it might - that it must -"

  The doctor was nodding gently.

  "Yes," he said. "It looks that way, doesn't it? It looks as though you've got to put it right there amongst them."

  "I think," said Calgary, "that that's really what I came to talk to you about. There doesn't seem, on the face of it, any real motive for any of them to have killed her."

  "Not on the face of it," agreed the doctor. "But if you go a little behind the face of it - oh, yes, I think there's plenty of reason why someone might have wanted to kill her."

  "Why?" asked Calgary.

  "You feel it's really your business, do you?"

  "I think so. I can't help feeling so."

  "Perhaps I should feel the same in your place... I don't know. Well, what I'd say is that none of them really belonged to themselves. Not so long as their mother -I'll call her that for convenience - was alive. She had a good hold of them still, you know, all of them."

  "In what way?"

  "Financially she'd provided for them. Provided for them handsomely. There was a large income. It was divided between them in such proportions as the Trustees thought fit. But although Mrs. Argyle herself was not one of the Trustees, nevertheless her wishes, so long as she was alive, were operative." He paused a minute and then went on.

  "It's interesting in a way, how they all tried to escape. How they fought not to conform to the pattern that she'd arranged for them. Because she did arrange a pattern, and a very good pattern. She wanted to give them a good home, a good education, a good allowance and a good start in the professions that she chose for them. She wanted to treat them exactly as though they were hers and Leo Argyle's own children. Only of course they weren't hers and Leo Argyle's own children. They had entirely different instincts, feelings, aptitudes and demands. Young Micky now works as a car salesman. Hester more or less ran away from home to go on the stage. She fell in love with a very undesirable type and was absolutely no good as an actress. She had to come home. She had to admit - and she didn't like admitting - that her mother had been right. Mary Durrant insisted on marrying a man during the war whom her mother warned her not to marry. He was a brave and intelligent young man but an absolute fool when it came to business matters. Then he got polio. He was brought as a convalescent to Sunny Point. Mrs. Argyle was putting pressure on them to live there permanently. The husband was quite willing. Mary Durrant was holding out desperately against it. She wanted her home and her husband to herself. But she'd have given in, no doubt, if her mother hadn't died.

  "Micky, the other boy, has always been a young man with a chip on his shoulder; he resented bitterly being abandoned by his own mother. He resented it as a child and he never got over it. I think, at heart, he always hated his adopted mother.

  "Then there's the Swedish masseuse woman. She didn't like Mrs. Argyle. She was fond of the children and she's fond of Leo. She accepted many benefits from Mrs. Argyle and probably tried to be grateful but couldn't manage it. Still, I hardly think that her feelings of dislike could cause her to hit her benefactor on the head with a poker. After all, she could leave at any moment she liked. As for Leo Argyle -"

  "Yes. What about him?"

  "He's going to marry again," said Dr. MacMaster, "and good luck to him. A very nice young woman. Warm-hearted, kind, good company and very much in love with him. Has been for a long time. What did she feel about Mrs. Argyle? You can probably guess just as well as I can. Naturally, Mrs. Argyle's death simplified things a good deal. Leo Argyle's not the type of man to have an affair with his secretary with his wife in the same house. I don't really think he'd have left his wife, either."

  Calgary said slowly: "I saw them both; I talked to them. I can't really believe that either of them -"

  "I know," said MacMaster. "One can't believe, can one? And yet - one of that household did it, you know."

  "You really think so?"

  "I don't see what else there is to think. The police are fairly sure that it wasn't the work of an outsider, and the police are probably right."

  "But which of them?" said Calgary.

  MacMaster shrugged his shoulders. "One simply doesn't know."

  "You've no idea yourself from your knowledge of them all?"

  "Shouldn't tell you if I had," said MacMaster. "After all, what have I got to go on? Unless there's some factor that I've missed none of them seems a likely murderer to me. And yet -1 can't rule any one of them out as a possibility. No," he added slowly, "my view is that we shall never know. The police will make inquiries and all that sort of thing. They'll do their best, but to get evidence after this time and with so little to go upon -"

  He shook his head. "No, I don't think that the truth will ever be known. There are cases like that, you know. One reads about them. Fifty - a hundred years ago, cases where one of three or four or five people must have done it but there wasn't enough evidence and no one's ever been able to say."

  "Do you think it's going to be like that here?" "Well," said Dr. MacMaster, "yes, I do..."

  Again he cast a shrewd look at Calgary. "And that's what's so terrible, isn't it?" he said.

  "Terrible," said Calgary, "because of the innocent. That's what she said to me." "Who? Who said what to you?"

  "The girl - Hester. She said I didn't understand that it was the innocent who mattered. It's what you've just been saying to me. That we shall never know -"

  "- who is innocent?" The doctor finished for him. "Yes, if we could only know the truth. Even if it doesn't come to an arrest or trial or conviction. Just to know. B
ecause otherwise -"

  He paused.

  "Yes?" said Calgary.

  "Work it out for yourself," said Dr. MacMaster. "No -1 don't need to say that -you already have."

  He went on: "It reminds me, you know, of the Bravo Case - nearly a hundred years ago now, I suppose, but books are still being written about it; making out a perfectly good case for his wife having done it, or Mrs. Cox having done it, or Dr. Gully - or even for Charles Bravo having taken the poison in spite of the Coroner's verdict. All quite plausible theories - but no one now can ever know the truth. And so Florence Bravo, abandoned by her family, died alone of drink, and Mrs. Cox, ostracised, and with three little boys, lived to be an old woman with most of the people she knew believing her to be a murderess, and Dr. Gully was ruined professionally and socially.

  "Someone was guilty - and got away with it. But the others were innocent - and didn't get away with anything."

  "That mustn't happen here," said Calgary. It mustn't!"

  Chapter 8

  Hester Argyle was looking at herself in the glass. There was little vanity in her gaze. It was more an anxious questioning with behind it the humility of one who has never really been sure of herself. She pushed up her hair from her forehead, pulled it to one side and frowned at the result. Then, as a face appeared behind hers in the mirror, she started, flinched and swung round apprehensively.

  "Ah," said Kirsten Lindstrom, "you are afraid!" "What do you mean, afraid, Kirsty?"

  "You are afraid of me. You think that I come up behind you quietly and that perhaps I shall strike you down."

  "Oh, Kirsty, don't be so foolish. Of course I wouldn't think anything like that."

  "But you did think it," said the other. "And you are right, too, to think such things. To look at the shadows, to start when you see something that you do not quite understand. Because there is something here in this house to be afraid of. We know that now."

  "At any rate, Kirsty darling," said Hester, "I needn't be afraid of you."

  "How do you know?" said Kirsten Lindstrom. "Did I not read in the paper a short while back of a woman who had lived with another woman for years, and then one day suddenly she kills her. Suffocates her. Tries to scratch her eyes out. And why? Because, she tells the police very gently, for some time she has seen that the devil is inhabiting the woman. She has seen the devil looking out of the other woman's eyes and she knows that she must be strong and brave and kill the devil?"

  "Oh, well, I remember that," said Hester. "But that woman was mad."

  "Ah," said Kirsten. "But she did not know herself that she was mad. And she did not seem mad to those round her, because no one knew what was going on in her poor, twisted mind. And so I say to you, you do not know what is going on in my mind. Perhaps I am mad. Perhaps I looked one day at your mother and thought that she was Anti-Christ and that I would kill her."

  "But, Kirsty, that's nonsense! Absolute nonsense."

  Kirsten Lindstrom sighed and sat down.

  "Yes," she admitted, "it is nonsense. I was very fond of your mother. She was good to me, always. But what I am trying to say to you, Hester, and what you have got to understand and believe, is that you cannot say 'nonsense' to anything or anyone. You cannot trust me or anybody else."

  Hester turned round and looked at the other woman. "I really believe you're serious," she said.

  "I am very serious," said Kirsten. "We must all be serious and we must bring things out into the open. It is no good pretending that nothing has happened. That man who came here. I wish he had not come, but he did, and now he has made it, I understand, quite plain that Jacko was not a murderer. Very well then, someone else is a murderer, and that someone else must be one of us."

  "No, Kirsty, no. It could have been someone who -" "Who what?"

  "Well, who wanted to steal something, or who had a grudge against Mother for some reason in the past."

  "You think your mother would let that someone in?"

  "She might," said Hester. "You know what she was like. If somebody came with a hard luck story, if someone came to tell her about some child that was being neglected or ill-treated. Don't you think Mother would have let that person in and taken them to her room and listened to what they had to say?"

  "It seems to me very unlikely," said Kirsten. "At least it seems to me unlikely that your mother would sit down at a table and let that person pick up a poker and hit her on the back of the head. No, she was at her ease, confident, with someone she knew in the room."

  "I wish you wouldn't, Kirsty," cried Hester. "Oh, I wish you wouldn't. You're bringing it so near, so close."

  "Because it is near, it is close. No, I will not say any more now, but I have warned you that though you think you know someone well, though you may think you trust them, you cannot be sure. So be on your guard. Be on your guard against me and against Mary and against your father and against Gwenda Vaughan."

  "How can I go on living here and suspecting everybody?"

  "If you will take my advice it will be better for you to leave this house."

  "I can't just now."

  "Why not? Because of the young doctor?"

  "I don't know what you mean, Kirsty." Colour flamed up in Hester's cheeks.

  "I mean Dr. Craig. He is a very nice young man. A sufficiently good doctor, amiable, conscientious. You could do worse. But all the same I think it would be better if you left here and went away."

  "The whole thing's nonsense," Hester cried angrily, "nonsense, nonsense, nonsense.

  "Oh, how I wish Dr. Calgary had never come here."

  "So do I," said Kirsten, "with all my heart."

  II

  Leo Argyle signed the last of the letters which Gwenda Vaughan placed in front of him.

  "Is that the last?" he asked.

  "Yes."

  "We've not done too badly today."

  After a minute or two when Gwenda had stamped and stacked the letters, she asked: "Isn't it about time that you - took that trip abroad?"

  "Trip abroad?"

  Leo Argyle sounded very vague. Gwenda said: "Yes. Don't you remember you were going to Rome and to Siena."

  "Oh, yes, yes, so I was."

  "You were going to see those documents from the archives that Cardinal Massilini wrote to you about."

  "Yes, I remember."

  "Would you like me to make the reservations by air, or would you rather go by train?"

  As though coming back from a long way away, Leo looked at her and smiled faintly.

  "You seem very anxious to get rid of me, Gwenda," he said. "Oh no, darling, oh no."

  She came quickly across and knelt down by his side. "I never want you to leave me, never. But - but I think - oh, I think it would be better if you went away from here after - after..."

  "After last week?" said Leo. "After Dr. Calgary's visit?"

  "I wish he hadn't come here," said Gwenda. "I wish things could have been left as they were."

  "With Jacko unjustly condemned for something he didn't do?"

  "He might have done it," said Gwenda. "He might have done it any time, and it's a pure accident, I think, that he didn't do it."

  "It's odd," said Leo, thoughtfully. "I never really could believe he did do it. I mean, of course, I had to give in to the evidence - but it seemed to me so unlikely."

  "Why? He always had a terrible temper, didn't he?"

  "Yes. Oh, yes. He attacked other children. Usually children rather smaller than himself. I never really felt that he would have attacked Rachel."

  "Why not?"

  "Because he was afraid of her," said Leo. "She had great authority, you know. Jacko felt it just like everybody else."

  "But don't you think," said Gwenda, "that that was just why -1 mean -" She paused.

  Leo looked at her questioningly. Something in his glance made the colour come up into her cheeks. She turned away, went over to the fire and knelt down in front of it with her hands to the blaze. "Yes," she thought to herself, "Rachel had authority a
ll right. So pleased with herself, so sure of herself, so much the queen bee bossing us all. Isn't that enough to make one want to take a poker, to make one want to strike her down, to silence her once and for all? Rachel was always right, Rachel always knew best, Rachel always got her own way."

  She got up abruptly.

  "Leo," she said. "Couldn't we - couldn't we be married quite soon instead of waiting until March?"

  Leo looked at her. He was silent for a moment, and then he said: "No, Gwenda, no. I don't think it would be a good plan."