Elephants Can Remember - Agatha Christie [35]
‘Well, I don’t know that exactly.’
‘Somebody told me she’d taken to wearing a wig.’
‘Oh, she’d got several wigs,’ said Mrs Buckle, smiling slightly. ‘Very smart ones and very expensive. You know, from time to time she’d send one back to the place she’d got it from in London, and they’d re-dress it for her again and send it. There were all kinds. You know, there was one with auburn hair, and one with little grey curls all over her head. Really, she looked very nice in that one. And two – well, not so attractive really but useful for – you know – windy days when you wanted something to put on when it might be raining. Thought a lot about her appearance, you know and spent a lot of her money on clothes.’
‘What do you think was the cause of the tragedy?’ said Mrs Oliver. ‘You see, not being anywhere near here and not seeing any of my friends at that time because I was in America, I missed hearing anything about it and, well, one doesn’t like to ask questions or write letters about things of that kind. I suppose there must have been some cause. I mean, it was General Ravenscroft’s own revolver that was used, I understand.’
‘Oh yes, he had two of those in the house because he said that no house was safe without. Perhaps he was right there, you know. Not that they’d had any trouble beforehand as far as I know. One afternoon a rather nasty sort of fellow came along to the door. Didn’t like the look of him, I didn’t. Wanted to see the General. Said he’d been in the General’s regiment when he was a young fellow. The General asked him a few questions and I think thought as how he didn’t – well, thought he wasn’t very reliable. So he sent him off.’
‘You think then that it was someone outside that did it?’
‘Well, I think it must have been because I can’t see any other thing. Mind you, I didn’t like the man who came and did the gardening for them very much. He hadn’t got a very good reputation and I gather he’d had a few jail sentences earlier in his life. But of course the General took up his references and he wanted to give him a chance.’
‘So you think the gardener might have killed them?’
‘Well, I – I always thought that. But then I’m probably wrong. But it doesn’t seem to me – I mean, the people who said there was some scandalous story or something about either her or him and that either he’d shot her or she’d shot him, that’s all nonsense, I’d say. No, it was some outsider. One of these people that – well, it’s not as bad as it is nowadays because that, you must remember, was before people began getting all this violence idea. But look at what you read in the papers every day now. Young men, practically only boys still, taking a lot of drugs and going wild and rushing about, shooting a lot of people for nothing at all, asking a girl in a pub to have a drink with them and then they see her home and next day her body’s found in a ditch. Stealing children out of prams from their mothers, taking a girl to a dance and murdering her or strangling her on the way back. If anything, you feel as anyone can do anything. And anyway, there’s that nice couple, the General and his wife, out for a nice walk in the evening, and there they were, both shot through the head.’
‘Was it through the head?’
‘Well, I don’t remember exactly now and of course I never saw anything myself. But anyway, just went for a walk as they often did.’
‘And they’d not been on bad terms with each other?’
‘Well, they had words now and again, but who doesn’t?’
‘No boyfriend or girlfriend?’
‘Well, if you can use that term of people of that age, oh, I mean there was a bit of talk here and there, but it was all nonsense. Nothing to it at all. People always want to say something of that kind.’
‘Perhaps one of them was – ill.’
‘Well, Lady Ravenscroft had been up to London once or twice consulting a doctor about something and I rather think she was going into hospital, or planning to go into hospital for an operation of some kind though she never told me exactly what it was. But I think they managed to put her right – she was in this hospital for a short time.