Elephants Can Remember - Agatha Christie [36]
‘And General Ravenscroft?’
‘He was a very nice gentleman and I never heard or knew of any scandal about him and I don’t think there was any. People say things, but then they want to say something when there’s been a tragedy of any kind. It seems to me perhaps as he might have had a blow on the head in Malaya or something like that. I had an uncle or a great-uncle, you know, who fell off his horse there once. Hit it on a cannon or something and he was very queer afterwards. All right for about six months and then they had to put him into an asylum because he wanted to take his wife’s life the whole time. He said she was persecuting him and following him and that she was a spy for another nation. Ah, there’s no saying what things happen or can happen in families.’
‘Anyway, you don’t think there was any truth in some of the stories about them that I have happened to hear of, bad feeling between them so that one of them shot the other and then shot himself or herself.’
‘Oh no, I don’t.’
‘Were her children at home at the time?’
‘No. Miss – er – oh what was her name now, Rosie? No. Penelope?’
‘Celia,’ said Mrs Oliver. ‘She’s my goddaughter.’
‘Oh, of course she is. Yes, I know that now. I remember you coming and taking her out once. She was a high-spirited girl, rather bad-tempered in some ways, but she was very fond of her father and mother, I think. No, she was away at a school in Switzerland when it happened, I’m glad to say, because it would have been a terrible shock to her if she’d been at home and the one who saw them.’
‘And there was a boy, too, wasn’t there?’
‘Oh yes. Master Edward. His father was a bit worried about him, I think. He looked as though he disliked his father.’
‘Oh, there’s nothing in that. Boys go through that stage. Was he very devoted to his mother?’
‘Well, she fussed over him a bit too much, I think, which he found tiresome. You know, they don’t like a mother fussing over them, telling them to wear thicker vests or put an extra pullover on. His father, he didn’t like the way he wore his hair. It was – well they weren’t wearing hair like the way they are nowadays, but they were beginning to, if you know what I mean.’
‘But the boy wasn’t at home at the time of the tragedy?’
‘No.’
‘I suppose it was a shock to him?’
‘Well, it must have been. Of course, I wasn’t going to the house any more at that time so I didn’t hear so much. If you ask me, I didn’t like that gardener. What was his name now – Fred, I think. Fred Wizell. Some name like that. Seems to me if he’d done a bit of – well, a bit of cheating or something like that and the General had found him out and was going to sack him, I wouldn’t put it past him.’
‘To shoot the husband and wife?’
‘Well, I’d have thought it more likely he’d just have shot the General. If he shot the General and the wife came along, then he’d have had to shoot her too. You read things like that in books.’
‘Yes,’ said Mrs Oliver thoughtfully, ‘one does read all sorts of things in books.’
‘There was the tutor. I didn’t like him much.’
‘What tutor?’
‘Well, there was a tutor for the boy earlier. You know, he couldn’t pass an exam and things at the earlier school he was at – prep school or something. So they had a tutor for him. He was there for about a year, I think. Lady Ravenscroft liked him very much. She was musical, you know, and so was this tutor. Mr Edmunds, I think his name was. Rather a namby-pamby sort of young man, I thought myself, and it’s my opinion that General Ravenscroft didn’t care for him much.’
‘But Lady Ravenscroft did.’
‘Oh, they had a lot in common, I think. And I think she was the one really that chose him rather more than the General. Mind you, he had very nice manners and spoke to everyone nicely and all that –’
‘And did – what’s-his-name?’
‘Edward? Oh yes, he liked him all right, I think. Almost