At Bertram's Hotel - Agatha Christie [64]
“Well,” said Father, addressing Elvira in his most kindly and fatherlike manner, “well, and how are you feeling now?”
“I’m quite all right,” said Elvira.
“Good. I’d like you to answer a few questions if you feel up to it; because, you see, time is usually the essence of these things. You were shot at twice and a man was killed. We want as many clues as we can get to the person who killed him.”
“I’ll tell you everything I can, but it all came so suddenly. And you can’t see anything in a fog. I’ve no idea myself who it could have been—or even what he looked like. That’s what was so frightening.”
“You said this was the second time somebody had tried to kill you. Does that mean there was an attempt on your life before?”
“Did I say that? I can’t remember.” Her eyes moved uneasily. “I don’t think I said that.”
“Oh, but you did, you know,” said Father.
“I expect I was just being—hysterical.”
“No,” said Father, “I don’t think you were. I think you meant just what you said.”
“I might have been imagining things,” said Elvira. Her eyes shifted again.
Bess Sedgwick moved. She said quietly:
“You’d better tell him, Elvira.”
Elvira shot a quick, uneasy look at her mother.
“You needn’t worry,” said Father, reassuringly. “We know quite well in the police force that girls don’t tell their mothers or their guardians everything. We don’t take those things too seriously, but we’ve got to know about them, because, you see, it all helps.”
Bess Sedgwick said:
“Was it in Italy?”
“Yes,” said Elvira.
Father said: “That’s where you’ve been at school, isn’t it, or a finishing place or whatever they call it nowadays?”
“Yes. I was at Contessa Martinelli’s. There were about eighteen or twenty of us.”
“And you thought that somebody tried to kill you. How was that?”
“Well, a big box of chocolates and sweets and things came for me. There was a card with it written in Italian in a flowery hand. The sort of thing they say, you know, ‘To the bellissima Signorina.’ Something like that. And my friends and I—well—we laughed about it a bit, and wondered who’d sent it.”
“Did it come by post?”
“No. No, it couldn’t have come by post. It was just there in my room. Someone must have put it there.”
“I see. Bribed one of the servants, I suppose. I am to take it that you didn’t let the Contessa whoever-it-was in on this?”
A faint smile appeared on Elvira’s face. “No. No. We certainly didn’t. Anyway we opened the box and they were lovely chocolates. Different kinds, you know, but there were some violet creams. That’s the sort of chocolate that has a crystallized violet on top. My favourite. So of course I ate one or two of those first. And then afterwards, in the night, I felt terribly ill. I didn’t think it was the chocolates, I just thought it was something perhaps that I’d eaten at dinner.”
“Anybody else ill?”
“No. Only me. Well, I was very sick and all that, but I felt all right by the end of the next day. Then a day or two later I ate another of the same chocolates, and the same thing happened. So I talked to Bridget about it. Bridget was my special friend. And we looked at the chocolates, and we found that the violet creams had got a sort of hole in the bottom that had been filled up again, so we thought that someone had put some poison in and they’d only put it in the violet creams so that I would be the one who ate them.”
“Nobody else was ill?”
“No.”
“So presumably nobody else ate the violet creams?”
“No. I don’t think they could have. You see, it was my present and they knew I liked the violet ones, so they’d leave them for me.”
“The chap took a risk, whoever he was,” said Father. “The whole place might have been poisoned.”
“It’s absurd,” said Lady Sedgwick sharply. “Utterly absurd! I never heard of anything so crude.”
Chief-Inspector Davy made a slight gesture with his hand. “Please,” he said, then he went on to Elvira: “Now I find that very interesting, Miss Blake. And you still didn’t tell the Contessa?”
“Oh no, we didn’t. She’d have