Evil Under the Sun - Agatha Christie [63]
He sighed.
“Seems a pity when a man’s got two perfectly good motives for murder, that he can be proved to have had nothing to do with it!”
Weston smiled.
“Cheer up, Colgate. There’s still a chance we may distinguish ourselves. There’s the blackmail angle still and there’s the batty parson, but, personally, I think the dope solution is far the most likely.” He added: “And if it was one of the dope gang who put her out we’ll have been instrumental in helping Scotland Yard to solve the dope problem. In fact, take it all round, one way or another, we’ve done pretty well.”
An unwilling smile showed on Colgate’s face.
He said:
“Well, that’s the lot, sir. By the way, I checked up on the writer of that letter we found in her room. The one signed J.N. Nothing doing. He’s in China safe enough. Same chap as Miss Brewster was telling us about. Bit of a young scallywag. I’ve checked up on the rest of Mrs. Marshall’s friends. No leads there. Everything there is to get, we’ve got, sir.”
Weston said:
“So now it’s up to us.” He paused and then added: “Seen anything of our Belgian colleague? Does he know all you’ve told me?”
Colgate said with a grin:
“He’s a queer little cuss, isn’t he? D’you know what he asked me day before yesterday? He wanted particulars of any cases of strangulation in the last three years.”
Colonel Weston sat up.
“He did, did he? Now I wonder—” he paused a minute. “When did you say the Reverend Stephen Lane went into that mental home?”
“A year ago last Easter, sir.”
Colonel Weston was thinking deeply. He said:
“There was a case—body of a young woman found somewhere near Bagshot. Going to meet her husband somewhere and never turned up. And there was what the papers called the Lonely Copse Mystery. Both in Surrey if I remember rightly.”
His eyes met those of his Inspector. Colgate said:
“Surrey? My word, sir, it fits, doesn’t it? I wonder….”
II
Hercule Poirot sat on the turf on the summit of the island.
A little to his left was the beginning of the steel ladder that led down to Pixy Cove. There were several rough boulders near the head of the ladder, he noted, forming easy concealment for anyone who proposed to descend to the beach below. Of the beach itself little could be seen from the top owing to the overhang of the cliff.
Hercule Poirot nodded his head gravely.
The pieces of his jig-saw were fitting into position.
Mentally he went over those pieces, considering each as a detached item.
A morning on the bathing beach some few days before Arlena Marshall’s death.
One, two, three, four, five separate remarks uttered on that morning.
The evening of a bridge game. He, Patrick Redfern and Rosamund Darnley had been at the table. Christine had wandered out while dummy and had overheard a certain conversation. Who else had been in the lounge at that time? Who had been absent?
The evening before the crime. The conversation he had had with Christine on the cliff and the scene he had witnessed on his way back to the hotel.
Gabrielle No. 8.
A pair of scissors.
A broken pipe stem.
A bottle thrown from a window.
A green calendar.
A packet of candles.
A mirror and a typewriter.
A skein of magenta wool.
A girl’s wristwatch.
Bathwater rushing down the waste pipe.
Each of these unrelated facts must fit into its appointed place. There must be no loose ends.
And then, with each concrete fact fitted into position, on to the next stop: his own belief in the presence of evil on the island.
Evil…
He looked down at a typewritten paper in his hands.
Nellie Parsons—found strangled in a lonely copse near Chobham. No clue to her murderer ever discovered.
Nellie Parsons?
Alice Corrigan.
He read very carefully the details of Alice Corrigan’s death.
III
To Hercule Poirot, sitting on the ledge overlooking the sea, came Inspector Colgate.
Poirot liked Inspector Colgate. He liked his rugged face, his shrewd eyes, and his slow unhurried manner.
Inspector Colgate sat down. He said, glancing down at the typewritten sheets in Poirot’s hand:
“Done anything with those cases, sir?”