4_50 From Paddington - Agatha Christie [49]
“No, indeed. You mean, because of her name? But they all call themselves names like that, these girls. She was not important, she did not dance well, she was not particularly good-looking. Elle était assez bien, c’est tout. She danced well enough for the corps de ballet—but no solos.”
“Was she French?”
“Perhaps. She had a French passport. But she told me once that she had an English husband.”
“She told you that she had an English husband? Alive—or dead?”
Madame Joilet shrugged her shoulders.
“Dead, or he had left her. How should I know which? These girls—there is always some trouble with men—”
“When did you last see her?”
“I take my company to London for six weeks. We play at Tor-quay, at Bournemouth, at Eastbourne, at somewhere else I forget and at Hammersmith. Then we come back to France, but Anna—she does not come. She sends a message only that she leaves the company, that she goes to live with her husband’s family—some nonsense of that kind. I did not think it is true, myself. I think it more likely that she has met a man, you understand.”
Inspector Craddock nodded. He perceived that that was what Madame Joilet would invariably think.
“And it is no loss to me. I do not care. I can get girls just as good and better to come and dance, so I shrug the shoulders and do not think of it anymore. Why should I? They are all the same, these girls, mad about men.”
“What date was this?”
“When we return to France? It was—yes—the Sunday before Christmas. And Anna she leaves two—or is it three—days before that? I cannot remember exactly… But the end of the week at Hammersmith we have to dance without her—and it means rearranging things… It was very naughty of her—but these girls—the moment they meet a man they are all the same. Only I say to everybody. ‘Zut, I do not take her back, that one!’”
“Very annoying for you.”
“Ah! Me—I do not care. No doubt she passes the Christmas holiday with some man she has picked up. It is not my affair. I can find other girls—girls who will leap at the chance of dancing in the Ballet Maritski and who can dance as well—or better than Anna.”
Madame Joilet paused and then asked with a sudden gleam of interest:
“Why do you want to find her? Has she come into money?”
“On the contrary,” said Inspector Craddock politely. “We think she may have been murdered.”
Madame Joilet relapsed into indifference.
“Ca se peut! It happens. Ah, well! She was a good Catholic. She went to Mass on Sundays, and no doubt to confession.”
“Did she ever speak to you, Madame, of a son?”
“A son? Do you mean she had a child? That, now, I should consider most unlikely. These girls, all—all of them know a useful address to which to go. M. Dessin knows that as well as I do.”
“She may have had a child before she adopted a stage life,” said Craddock. “During the war, for instance.”
“Ah! dans la guerre. That is always possible. But if so, I know nothing about it.”
“Who amongst the other girls were her closest friends?”
“I can give you two or three names—but she was not very intimate with anyone.”
They could get nothing else useful from Madame Joilet.
Shown the compact, she said Anna had one of that kind, but so had most of the other girls. Anna had perhaps bought a fur coat in London—she did not know. “Me, I occupy myself with the rehearsals, with the stage lighting, with all the difficulties of my business. I have not time to notice what my artists wear.”
After Madame Joilet, they interviewed the girls whose names she had given them. One or two of them had known Anna fairly well, but they all said that she had not been one to talk much about herself, and that when she did, it was, so one girl said, mostly lies.
“She liked to pretend things—stories about having been the mistress of a Grand Duke—or of a great English financier—or how she worked for the Resistance in the war. Even a story about being a film star in Hollywood.”
Another girl said:
“I think that really she had had a very tame bourgeois existence. She liked to be in ballet because she thought it was romantic, but she was not a good dancer. You understand