Spider's Web

by Agatha Christie

  The Inspector injected a certain amount of charm into his voice as he responded. ‘I do apologize, Mrs Hailsham-Brown,’ he said, ‘but it really is extremely odd, you know.’

  ‘Why? What do you mean?’ Clarissa asked, as she replaced the document in the drawer.

  ‘Well, it so happens,’ the Inspector replied, ‘that a lady and a gentleman were down in this area with orders to view this house, and the lady happened to lose a very valuable brooch somewhere in the vicinity. She called in at the police station to give particulars, and she happened to mention this house. She said the owners were asking an absurd price. She thought eighteen guineas a week for a house out in the country and miles from anywhere was ridiculous. I thought so too.’

  ‘Yes, that is extraordinary, very extraordinary,’ Clarissa agreed, with a friendly smile. ‘I understand why you were sceptical. But perhaps now you’ll believe some of the other things I said.’

  ‘I’m not doubting your final story, Mrs Hailsham-Brown,’ the Inspector assured her. ‘We usually know the truth when we hear it. I knew, too, that there would have to be some serious reason for those three gentlemen to cook up this harebrained scheme of concealment.’

  ‘You mustn’t blame them too much, Inspector,’ Clarissa pleaded. ‘It was my fault. I went on and on at them.’

  All too aware of her charm, the Inspector replied, ‘Ah, I’ve no doubt you did. But what I still don’t understand is, who telephoned the police in the first place and reported the murder?’

  ‘Yes, that is extraordinary!’ said Clarissa, sounding startled. ‘I’d completely forgotten that.’

  ‘It clearly wasn’t you,’ the Inspector pointed out, ‘and it wouldn’t have been any of the three gentlemen–’

  Clarissa shook her head. ‘Could it have been Elgin?’ she wondered. ‘Or perhaps Miss Peake?’

  ‘I don’t think it could possibly have been Miss Peake,’ said the Inspector. ‘She clearly didn’t know Costello’s body was there.’

  ‘I wonder if that’s so,’ said Clarissa thoughtfully.

  ‘After all, when the body was discovered, she had hysterics,’ the Inspector reminded her.

  ‘Oh, that’s nothing. Anyone can have hysterics,’ Clarissa remarked incautiously. The Inspector shot her a suspicious glance, at which she felt it expedient to give him as innocent a smile as she could manage.

  ‘Anyway, Miss Peake doesn’t live in the house,’ the Inspector observed. ‘She has her own cottage in the grounds.’

  ‘But she could have been in the house,’ said Clarissa. ‘You know, she has keys to all the doors.’

  The Inspector shook his head. ‘No, it looks to me more like Elgin who must have called us,’ he said.

  Clarissa moved closer to him, and flashed him a somewhat anxious smile. ‘You’re not going to send me to prison, are you?’ she asked. ‘Uncle Roly said he was sure you wouldn’t.’

  The Inspector gave her an austere look. ‘It’s a good thing you changed your story in time, and told us the truth, madam,’ he advised her sternly. ‘But, if I may say so, Mrs Hailsham-Brown, I think you should get in touch with your solicitor as soon as possible and give him all the relevant facts. In the meantime, I’ll get your statement typed out and read over to you, and perhaps you will be good enough to sign it.’

  Clarissa was about to reply when the hall door opened and Sir Rowland entered. ‘I couldn’t keep away any longer,’ he explained. ‘Is it all right now, Inspector? Do you understand what our dilemma was?’

  Clarissa went across to her guardian before he could say any more. ‘Roly, darling,’ she greeted him, taking his hand. ‘I’ve made a statement, and the police–or rather Mr Jones here–is going to type it out. Then I’ve got to sign it, and I’ve told them everything.’

  The Inspector went over to confer with the Constable, and Clarissa continued speaking quietly to Sir Rowland. ‘I told them how I thought it was a burglar,’ she said with emphasis, ‘and hit him on the head–’

  When Sir Rowland looked at her in alarm and opened his mouth to speak, she quickly covered his mouth with her hands so that he could not get the words out. She continued hurriedly, ‘Then I told them how it turned out to be Oliver Costello, and how I got in a terrible flap and rang you, and how I begged and begged and at last you all gave in. I see now how wrong of me it was–’

  The Inspector turned back to them, and Clarissa removed her hand from Sir Rowland’s mouth just in time. ‘But when it happened,’ she was saying, ‘I was just scared stiff, and I thought it would be cosier for everybody–me, Henry and even Miranda–if Oliver was found in Marsden Wood.’

  Sir Rowland looked aghast. ‘Clarissa! What on earth have you been saying?’ he gasped.

  ‘Mrs Hailsham-Brown has made a very full statement, sir,’ the Inspector said complacently.

  Recovering himself somewhat, Sir Rowland replied drily, ‘So it seems.’

  ‘It’s the best thing to do,’ said Clarissa. ‘In fact, it was the only thing to do. The Inspector made me see that. And I’m truly sorry to have told all those silly lies.’

  ‘It will lead to far less trouble in the end,’ the Inspector assured her. ‘Now, Mrs Hailsham-Brown,’ he went on, ‘I shan’t ask you to go into the recess while the body is still there, but I’d like you to show me exactly where the man was standing when you came through that way into this room.’

  ‘Oh–yes–well–he was–’ Clarissa began hesitantly. She went across to the desk. ‘No,’ she continued, ‘I remember now. He was standing here like this.’ She stood at one end of the desk, and leaned over it.

  ‘Be ready to open the panel when I give you the word, Jones,’ said the Inspector, motioning to the Constable, who rose and put his hand on the panel switch.

  ‘I see,’ the Inspector said to Clarissa. ‘That’s where he was standing. And then the door opened and you came out. All right, I don’t want you to have to look in there at the body now, so just stand in front of the panel when it opens. Now–Jones.’

  The Constable activated the switch, and the panel opened. The recess was empty except for a small piece of paper on the floor which Constable Jones retrieved, while the Inspector looked accusingly at Clarissa and Sir Rowland.

  The Constable read out what was on the slip of paper. ‘Sucks to you!’ As the Inspector snatched the paper from him, Clarissa and Sir Rowland looked at each other in astonishment.

  A loud ring from the front-door bell broke the silence.

  Chapter 19

  A few moments later Elgin came into the drawing-room to announce that the Divisional Surgeon had arrived. The Inspector and Constable Jones immediately accompanied the butler to the front door, where the Inspector had the unenviable task of confessing to the Divisional Surgeon that, as it turned out, there was at present no body to examine.

  ‘Really, Inspector Lord,’ the Divisional Surgeon said irritably. ‘Do you realize how infuriating it is to have brought me all this way on a wild-goose chase?’

  ‘But I assure you, Doctor,’ the Inspector attempted to explain, ‘we did have a body.’

  ‘The Inspector’s right, Doctor,’ Constable Jones added his voice. ‘We certainly did have a body. It just happens to have disappeared.’

  The sound of their voices had brought Hugo and Jeremy out from the dining-room on the other side of the hall. They could not refrain from making unhelpful comments. ‘I can’t think how you policemen ever get anything done–losing bodies indeed,’ Hugo expostulated, while Jeremy exclaimed, ‘I don’t understand why a guard wasn’t put on the body.’

  ‘Well, whatever has happened, if there’s no body for me to examine, I’m not wasting any more time here,’ the Divisional Surgeon snapped at the Inspector. ‘I can assure you that you’ll hear more about this, Inspector Lord.’

  ‘Yes, Doctor. I’ve no doubt of that. Goodnight, Doctor,’ the Inspector replied wearily.

  The Divisional Surgeon left, slamming the front door behind him, and the Inspector turned to Elgin, who f
orestalled him by saying quickly, ‘I know nothing about it, I assure you, sir, nothing at all.’

  Meanwhile, in the drawing-room, Clarissa and Sir Rowland were enjoying overhearing the discomfiture of the police officers. ‘Rather a bad moment for the police reinforcements to arrive,’ Sir Rowland chuckled. ‘The Divisional Surgeon seems very annoyed at finding no corpse to examine.’

  Clarissa giggled. ‘But who can have spirited it away?’ she asked. ‘Do you think Jeremy managed it somehow?’

  ‘I don’t see how he could have done,’ Sir Rowland replied. ‘They didn’t let anyone back into the library, and the door from the library to the hall was locked. Pippa’s “Sucks to you” was the last straw.’

  Clarissa laughed, and Sir Rowland continued, ‘Still, it shows us one thing. Costello had managed to open the secret drawer.’ He paused, and his manner changed. ‘Clarissa,’ he said in a serious tone, ‘why on earth didn’t you tell the truth to the Inspector when I begged you to?’

  ‘I did,’ Clarissa protested, ‘except for the part about Pippa. But he just didn’t believe me.’

  ‘But, for Heaven’s sake, why did you have to stuff him with all that nonsense?’ Sir Rowland insisted on knowing.

  ‘Well,’ Clarissa replied with a helpless gesture, ‘it seemed to me the most likely thing he would believe. And,’ she ended triumphantly, ‘he does believe me now.’

  ‘And a nice mess you’re in as a result,’ Sir Rowland pointed out. ‘You’ll be up on a charge of manslaughter, for all you know.’

  ‘I shall claim it was self-defence,’ Clarissa said confidently.

  Before Sir Rowland had a chance to reply, Hugo and Jeremy entered from the hall, and Hugo walked over to the bridge table, grumbling. ‘Wretched police, pushing us around here and there. Now it seems they’ve gone and lost the body.’

  Jeremy closed the door behind him, then went over to the stool and took a sandwich. ‘Damn peculiar, I call it,’ he announced.

  ‘It’s fantastic,’ said Clarissa. ‘The whole thing’s fantastic. The body’s gone, and we still don’t know who rang up the police in the first place and said there’d been a murder here.’

  ‘Well, that was Elgin, surely,’ Jeremy suggested, as he sat on an arm of the sofa and began to eat his sandwich.

  ‘No, no,’ Hugo disagreed. ‘I’d say it was that Peake woman.’

  ‘But why?’ Clarissa asked. ‘Why would either of them do that, and not tell us? It doesn’t make sense.’

  Miss Peake put her head in at the hall door and looked around with a conspiratorial air. ‘Hello, is the coast clear?’ she asked. Closing the door, she strode confidently into the room. ‘No bobbies about? They seem to be swarming all over the place.’

  ‘They’re busy searching the house and grounds now,’ Sir Rowland informed her.

  ‘What for?’ asked Miss Peake.

  ‘The body,’ Sir Rowland replied. ‘It’s gone.’

  Miss Peake gave her usual hearty laugh. ‘What a lark!’ she boomed. ‘The disappearing body, eh?’

  Hugo sat at the bridge table. Looking around the room, he observed to no one in particular, ‘It’s a nightmare. The whole thing’s a damn nightmare.’

  ‘Quite like the movies, eh, Mrs Hailsham-Brown?’ Miss Peake suggested with another hoot of laughter.

  Sir Rowland smiled at the gardener. ‘I hope you are feeling better now, Miss Peake?’ he asked her courteously.

  ‘Oh, I’m all right,’ she replied. ‘I’m pretty tough really, you know. I was just a bit bowled over by opening that door and finding a corpse. Turned me up for the moment, I must admit.’

  ‘I wondered, perhaps,’ said Clarissa quietly, ‘if you already knew it was there.’

  The gardener stared at her. ‘Who? Me?’

  ‘Yes. You.’

  Again seeming to be addressing the entire universe, Hugo said, ‘It doesn’t make sense. Why take the body away? We all know there is a body. We know his identity and everything. No point in it. Why not leave the wretched thing where it was?’

  ‘Oh, I wouldn’t say there was no point in it, Mr Birch,’ Miss Peake corrected Hugo, leaning across the bridge table to address him. ‘You’ve got to have a body, you know. Habeas corpus and all that. Remember? You’ve got to have a body before you can bring a charge of murder against anybody.’ She turned around to Clarissa. ‘So don’t you worry, Mrs Hailsham-Brown,’ she assured her. ‘Everything’s going to be all right.’

  Clarissa stared at her. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I’ve kept my ears open this evening,’ the gardener told her. ‘I haven’t spent all my time lying on the bed in the spare room.’ She looked around at everyone. ‘I never liked that man Elgin, or his wife,’ she continued. ‘Listening at doors, and running to the police with stories about blackmail.’

  ‘So you heard that?’ Clarissa asked, wonderingly.

  ‘What I always say is, stand by your own sex,’ Miss Peake declared. She looked at Hugo. ‘Men!’ she snorted. ‘I don’t hold with them.’ She sat down next to Clarissa on the sofa. ‘If they can’t find the body, my dear,’ she explained, ‘they can’t bring a charge against you. And what I say is, if that brute was blackmailing you, you did quite right to crack him over the head and good riddance.’

  ‘But I didn’t–’ Clarissa began faintly, only to be interrupted by Miss Peake.

  ‘I heard you tell that Inspector all about it,’ the gardener informed her. ‘And if it wasn’t for that eavesdropping skulking fellow Elgin, your story would sound quite all right. Perfectly believable.’

  ‘Which story do you mean?’ Clarissa wondered aloud.

  ‘About mistaking him for a burglar. It’s the blackmail angle that puts a different complexion on it all. So I thought there was only one thing to do,’ the gardener continued. ‘Get rid of the body and let the police chase their tails looking for it.’

  Sir Rowland took a few steps backward, staggering in disbelief, as Miss Peake looked complacently around the room. ‘Pretty smart work, even if I do say so myself,’ she boasted.

  Jeremy rose, fascinated. ‘Do you mean to say that it was you who moved the body?’ he asked, incredulously.

  Everyone was now staring at Miss Peake. ‘We’re all friends here, aren’t we?’ she asked, looking around at them. ‘So I may as well spill the beans. Yes,’ she admitted, ‘I moved the body.’ She tapped her pocket. ‘And I locked the door. I’ve got keys to all the doors in this house, so that was no problem.’

  Open-mouthed, Clarissa gazed at her in wonderment. ‘But how? Where–where did you put the body?’ she gasped.

  Miss Peake leaned forward and spoke in a conspiratorial whisper. ‘The bed in the spare room. You know, that big four-poster. Right across the head of the bed, under the bolster. Then I remade the bed and lay down on top of it.’

  Sir Rowland, flabbergasted, sat down at the bridge table.

  ‘But how did you get the body up to the spare room?’ Clarissa asked. ‘You couldn’t manage it all by yourself.’

  ‘You’d be surprised,’ said Miss Peake jovially. ‘Good old fireman’s lift. Slung it over my shoulder.’ With a gesture, she demonstrated how it was done.

  ‘But what if you had met someone on the stairs?’ Sir Rowland asked her.

  ‘Ah, but I didn’t,’ replied Miss Peake. ‘The police were in here with Mrs Hailsham-Brown. You three chaps were being kept in the dining-room by then. So I grabbed my chance, and of course grabbed the body too, took it through the hall, locked the library door again, and carried it up the stairs to the spare room.’

  ‘Well, upon my soul!’ Sir Rowland gasped.

  Clarissa got to her feet. ‘But he can’t stay under the bolster for ever,’ she pointed out.

  Miss Peake turned to her. ‘No, not for ever, of course, Mrs Hailsham-Brown,’ she admitted. ‘But he’ll be all right for twenty-four hours. By that time, the police will have finished with the house and grounds. They’ll be searching further afield.’

  She looked
around at her enthralled audience. ‘Now, I’ve been thinking about how to get rid of him,’ she went on. ‘I happened to dig out a nice deep trench in the garden this morning–for the sweet peas. Well, we’ll bury the body there and plant a nice double row of sweet peas all along it.’

  Completely at a loss for words, Clarissa collapsed onto the sofa.

  ‘I’m afraid, Miss Peake,’ said Sir Rowland, ‘grave-digging is no longer a matter for private enterprise.’

  The gardener laughed merrily at this. ‘Oh, you men!’ she exclaimed, wagging her finger at Sir Rowland. ‘Always such sticklers for propriety. We women have got more common sense.’ She turned to address Clarissa. ‘We can even take murder in our stride. Eh, Mrs Hailsham-Brown?’

  Hugo suddenly leapt to his feet. ‘This is absurd!’ he shouted. ‘Clarissa didn’t kill him. I don’t believe a word of it.’

  ‘Well, if she didn’t kill him,’ Miss Peake asked breezily, ‘who did?’

  At that moment, Pippa entered the room from the hall, wearing a dressing-gown, walking in a very sleepy manner, yawning, and carrying a glass dish containing chocolate mousse with a teaspoon in it. Everyone turned and looked at her.

  Chapter 20

  Startled, Clarissa jumped to her feet. ‘Pippa!’ she cried. ‘What are you doing out of bed?’

  ‘I woke up, so I came down,’ said Pippa between yawns.

  Clarissa led her to the sofa. ‘I’m so frightfully hungry,’ Pippa complained, yawning again. She sat, then looked up at Clarissa and said, reproachfully, ‘You said you’d bring this up to me.’

  Clarissa took the dish of chocolate mousse from Pippa, placed it on the stool, and then sat on the sofa next to the child. ‘I thought you were still asleep, Pippa,’ she explained.

  ‘I was asleep,’ Pippa told her, with another enormous yawn. ‘Then I thought a policeman came in and looked at me. I’d been having an awful dream, and then I half woke up. Then I was hungry, so I thought I’d come down.’