After the Funeral - Agatha Christie [16]
Mr. Entwhistle listened to the saga of Miss Gilchrist’s aunt with deaf ears. He was very much disturbed.
He said at last, when Miss Gilchrist had twittered into silence:
“I suppose Mrs. Lansquenet didn’t take all this too seriously?”
“Oh no, Mr. Entwhistle, she quite understood.”
Mr. Entwhistle found that remark disturbing too, though not quite in the sense in which Miss Gilchrist had used it.
Had Cora Lansquenet understood? Not then, perhaps, but later. Had she understood only too well?
Mr. Entwhistle knew that there had been no senility about Richard Abernethie. Richard had been in full possession of his faculties. He was not the man to have persecution mania in any form. He was, as he always had been, a hardheaded businessman—and his illness made no difference in that respect.
It seemed extraordinary that he should have spoken to his sister in the terms that he had. But perhaps Cora, with her odd childlike shrewdness, had read between the lines, and had crossed the t’s and dotted the i’s of what Richard Abernethie had actually said.
In most ways, thought Mr. Entwhistle, Cora had been a complete fool. She had no judgement, no balance, and a crude childish point of view, but she had also the child’s uncanny knack of sometimes hitting the nail on the head in a way that seemed quite startling.
Mr. Entwhistle left it at that. Miss Gilchrist, he thought, knew no more than she had told him. He asked whether she knew if Cora Lansquenet had left a will. Miss Gilchrist replied promptly that Mrs. Lansquenet’s will was at the Bank.
With that and after making certain further arrangements he took his leave. He insisted on Miss Gilchrist’s accepting a small sum in cash to defray present expenses and told her he would communicate with her again, and in the meantime he would be grateful if she would stay on at the cottage while she was looking about for a new post. That would be, Miss Gilchrist said, a great convenience and really she was not at all nervous.
He was unable to escape without being shown round the cottage by Miss Gilchrist, and introduced to various pictures by the late Pierre Lansquenet which were crowded into the small dining room and which made Mr. Entwhistle flinch—they were mostly nudes executed with a singular lack of draughtsmanship but with much fidelity to detail. He was also made to admire various small oil sketches of picturesque fishing ports done by Cora herself.
“Polperro,” said Miss Gilchrist proudly. “We were there last year and Mrs. Lansquenet was delighted with its picturesqueness.”
Mr. Entwhistle, viewing Polperro from the southwest, from the northwest, and presumably from the several other points of the compass, agreed that Mrs. Lansquenet had certainly been enthusiastic.
“Mrs. Lansquenet promised to leave me her sketches,” said Miss Gilchrist wistfully. “I admired them so much. One can really see the waves breaking in this one, can’t one? Even if she forgot, I might perhaps have just one as a souvenir, do you think?”
“I’m sure that could be arranged,” said Mr. Entwhistle graciously.
He made a few further arrangements and then left to interview the Bank Manager and to have a further consultation with Inspector Morton.
Five
I
“Worn out, that’s what you are,” said Miss Entwhistle in the indignant and bullying tones adopted by devoted sisters towards brothers for whom they keep house. “You shouldn’t do it, at your age. What’s it all got to do with you, I’d like to know? You’ve