At Bertram's Hotel - Agatha Christie [63]
III
In the lounge of Bertram’s Hotel, Miss Gorringe had looked up sharply from the desk.
One or two of the visitors had looked up also. The older and deafer did not look up.
Henry, about to lower a glass of old brandy to a table, stopped poised with it still in his hand.
Miss Marple sat forward, clutching the arms of her chair. A retired admiral said derisively:
“Accident! Cars collided in the fog, I expect.”
The swing doors from the street were pushed open. Through them came what seemed like an outsize policeman, looking a good deal larger than life.
He was supporting a girl in a pale fur coat. She seemed hardly able to walk. The policeman looked round for help with some embarrassment.
Miss Gorringe came out from behind the desk, prepared to cope. But at that moment the lift came down. A tall figure emerged, and the girl shook herself free from the policeman’s support, and ran frantically across the lounge.
“Mother,” she cried. “Oh Mother, Mother…” and threw herself, sobbing, into Bess Sedgwick’s arms.
Chapter Twenty-one
Chief-Inspector Davy settled himself back in his chair and looked at the two women sitting opposite him. It was past midnight. Police officials had come and gone. There had been doctors, fingerprint men, an ambulance to remove the body; and now everything had narrowed to this one room dedicated for the purposes of the law by Bertram’s Hotel. Chief-Inspector Davy sat one side of the table. Bess Sedgwick and Elvira sat the other side. Against the wall a policeman sat unobtrusively writing. Detective-Sergeant Wadell sat near the door.
Father looked thoughtfully at the two women facing him. Mother and daughter. There was, he noted, a strong superficial likeness between them. He could understand how for one moment in the fog he had taken Elvira Blake for Bess Sedgwick. But now, looking at them, he was more struck by the points of difference than the points of resemblance. They were not really alike save in colouring, yet the impression persisted that here he had a positive and a negative version of the same personality. Everything about Bess Sedgwick was positive. Her vitality, her energy, her magnetic attraction. He admired Lady Sedgwick. He always had admired her. He had admired her courage and had always been excited over her exploits; had said, reading his Sunday papers: “She’ll never get away with that,” and invariably she had got away with it! He had not thought it possible that she would reach journey’s end and she had reached journey’s end. He admired particularly the indestructible quality of her. She had had one air crash, several car crashes, had been thrown badly twice from her horse, but at the end of it here she was. Vibrant, alive, a personality one could not ignore for a moment. He took off his hat to her mentally. Some day, of course, she would come a cropper. You could only bear a charmed life for so long. His eyes went from mother to daughter. He wondered. He wondered very much.
In Elvira Blake, he thought, everything had been driven inward. Bess Sedgwick had got through life by imposing her will on it. Elvira, he guessed, had a different way of getting through life. She submitted, he thought. She obeyed. She smiled in compliance and behind that, he thought, she slipped away through your fingers. “Sly,” he said to himself, appraising that fact. “That’s the only way she can manage, I expect. She can never brazen things out or impose herself. That’s why, I expect, the people who’ve looked after her have never had the least idea of what she might be up to.”
He wondered what she had been doing slipping along the street to Bertram’s Hotel on a late foggy evening. He was going to ask her presently. He thought it highly probable that the answer he would get would not be the true one. “That’s the way,” he thought, “that the poor child defends herself.” Had she come here to meet her mother or to find her mother? It was perfectly possible, but he didn’t think so. Not for a moment. Instead he thought of the big sports car tucked away round the corner—the car with the number plate