Dead Man's Folly - Agatha Christie [47]
‘Damn the bloody letters to hell,’ said Sir George, and pushed aside his coffee-cup.
He picked up the letters by his plate and more or less threw them at her.
‘Answer them any way you like! I can’t be bothered.’ He went on more or less to himself, in an injured tone, ‘Doesn’t seem to be anything I can do…Don’t even know if that police chap’s any good. Very soft spoken and all that.’
‘The police are, I believe,’ said Miss Brewis, ‘very efficient. They have ample facilities for tracing the whereabouts of missing persons.’
‘They take days sometimes,’ said Sir George, ‘to find some miserable kid who’s run off and hidden himself in a haystack.’
‘I don’t think Lady Stubbs is likely to be in a haystack, Sir George.’
‘If only I could do something,’ repeated the unhappy husband. ‘I think, you know, I’ll put an advertisement in the papers. Take it down, Amanda, will you?’ He paused a moment in thought. ‘Hattie. Please come home. Desperate about you. George. All the papers, Amanda.’
Miss Brewis said acidly:
‘Lady Stubbs doesn’t often read the papers, Sir George. She’s no interest at all in current affairs or what’s going on in the world.’ She added, rather cattily, but Sir George was not in the mood to appreciate cattiness, ‘Of course you could put an advertisement in Vogue. That might catch her eye.’
Sir George said simply:
‘Anywhere you think but get on with it.’
He got up and walked towards the door. With his hand on the handle he paused and came back a few steps. He spoke directly to Poirot.
‘Look here, Poirot,’ he said, ‘you don’t think she’s dead, do you?’
Poirot fixed his eyes on his coffee-cup as he replied:
‘I should say it is far too soon, Sir George, to assume anything of that kind. There is no reason as yet to entertain such an idea.’
‘So you do think so,’ said Sir George, heavily. ‘Well,’ he added defiantly, ‘I don’t! I say she’s quite all right.’ He nodded his head several times with increasing defiance, and went out banging the door behind him.
Poirot buttered a piece of toast thoughtfully. In cases where there was any suspicion of a wife being murdered, he always automatically suspected the husband. (Similarly, with a husband’s demise, he suspected the wife.) But in this case he did not suspect Sir George of having done away with Lady Stubbs. From his brief observation of them he was quite convinced that Sir George was devoted to his wife. Moreover, as far as his excellent memory served him (and it served him pretty well), Sir George had been present on the lawn the entire afternoon until he himself had left with Mrs Oliver to discover the body. He had been there on the lawn when they had returned with the news. No, it was not Sir George who was responsible for Hattie’s death. That is, if Hattie were dead. After all, Poirot told himself, there was no reason to believe so as yet. What he had just said to Sir George was true enough. But in his own mind the conviction was unalterable. The pattern, he thought, was the pattern of murder – a double murder.
Miss Brewis interrupted his thoughts by speaking with almost tearful venom.
‘Men are such fools,’ she said, ‘such absolute fools! They’re quite shrewd in most ways, and then they go marrying entirely the wrong sort of woman.’
Poirot was always willing to let people talk. The more people who talked to him, and the more they said, the better. There was nearly always a grain of wheat among the chaff.
‘You think it has been an unfortunate marriage?’ he demanded.
‘Disastrous – quite disastrous.’
‘You mean – that they were not happy together?’
‘She’d a thoroughly bad influence over him in every way.’
‘Now I find that very interesting. What kind of a bad influence?’
‘Making him run to and fro at her beck and call, getting expensive presents out of him – far more jewels than one woman could wear. And furs. She’s got two mink coats and a Russian ermine. What could any woman want with two mink coats, I’d like to know?’
Poirot shook his head.
‘That I would not know,’ he said.
‘Sly,’ continued Miss Brewis. ‘Deceitful! Always