After the Funeral - Agatha Christie [38]
“Sleep here, you mean?”
“Yes. Is there any difficulty?”
“Oh no, Mrs. Banks, of course not. I’ll put fresh sheets on my bed, and I can doss down here on the couch quite well.”
“But there’s Aunt Cora’s room, isn’t there? I can sleep in that.”
“You—you wouldn’t mind?”
“You mean because she was murdered there? Oh no, I wouldn’t mind. I’m very tough, Miss Gilchrist. It’s been—I mean—It’s all right again?”
Miss Gilchrist understood the question.
“Oh yes, Mrs. Banks. All the blankets sent away to the cleaners and Mrs. Panter and I scrubbed the whole room out thoroughly. And there are plenty of spare blankets. But come up and see for yourself.”
She led the way upstairs and Susan followed her.
The room where Cora Lansquenet had died was clean and fresh and curiously devoid of any sinister atmosphere. Like the sitting room it contained a mixture of modern utility and elaborately painted furniture. It represented Cora’s cheerful tasteless personality. Over the mantelpiece an oil painting showed a buxom young woman about to enter her bath.
Susan gave a slight shudder as she looked at it and Miss Gilchrist said:
“That was painted by Mrs. Lansquenet’s husband. There are a lot more of his pictures in the dining room downstairs.”
“How terrible.”
“Well, I don’t care very much for that style of painting myself—but Mrs. Lansquenet was very proud of her husband as an artist and thought that his work was sadly unappreciated.”
“Where are Aunt Cora’s own pictures?”
“In my room. Would you like to see them?”
Miss Gilchrist displayed her treasures proudly.
Susan remarked that Aunt Cora seemed to have been fond of seacoast resorts.
“Oh yes. You see, she lived for many years with Mr. Lansquenet at a small fishing village in Brittany. Fishing boats are always so picturesque, are they not?”
“Obviously,” Susan murmured. A whole series of picture postcards could, she thought, have been made from Cora Lansquenet’s paintings which were faithful to detail and very highly coloured. They gave rise to the suspicion that they might actually have been painted from picture postcards.
But when she hazarded this opinion Miss Gilchrist was indignant. Mrs. Lansquenet always painted from Nature! Indeed, once she had had a touch of the sun from reluctance to leave a subject when the light was just right.
“Mrs. Lansquenet was a real artist,” said Miss Gilchrist reproachfully.
She glanced at her watch and Susan said quickly:
“Yes, we ought to start for the inquest. Is it far? Shall I get the car?”
It was only five minutes’ walk, Miss Gilchrist assured her. So they set out together on foot. Mr. Entwhistle, who had come down by train, met them and shepherded them into the Village Hall.
There seemed to be a large number of strangers present. The inquest was not sensational. There was evidence of the identification of the deceased. Medical evidence as to the nature of the wounds that had killed her. There were no signs of a struggle. Deceased was probably under a narcotic at the time she was attacked and would have been taken quite unawares. Death was unlikely to have occurred later than four thirty. Between two and four thirty was the nearest approximation. Miss Gilchrist testified to finding the body. A police constable and Inspector Morton gave their evidence. The Coroner summed up briefly. The jury made no bones about the verdict. “Murder by some person or persons unknown.”
It was over. They came out again into the sunlight. Half a dozen cameras clicked. Mr. Entwhistle shepherded Susan and Miss Gilchrist into the King’s Arms, where he had taken the precaution to arrange for lunch to be served in a private room behind the bar.
“Not a very good lunch,” he said apologetically.
But the lunch was not at all bad. Miss Gilchrist sniffed a little and murmured that “it was all so dreadful,” but cheered up and tackled the Irish stew with appetite after Mr. Entwhistle had insisted on her drinking a glass of sherry. He said to Susan:
“I’d no idea you were coming down today, Susan.