Hallowe'en Party - Agatha Christie [51]
‘You could have written them in your ordinary handwriting,’ said Mr Fullerton, ‘and put a note at the end saying “per secretary” or per initials if you liked.’
‘She did not want me to do that. She wanted it to be thought that she wrote the letters herself.’
And that, Mr Fullerton thought, could be true enough. It was very like Louise Llewellyn-Smythe. She was always passionately resentful of the fact that she could no longer do the things she used to do, that she could no longer walk far or go up hills quickly or perform certain actions with her hands, her right hand especially. She wanted to be able to say ‘I’m perfectly well, perfectly all right and there’s nothing I can’t do if I set my mind to it.’ Yes, what Olga was telling him now was perfectly true, and because it was true it was one of the reasons why the codicil appended to the last Will properly drawn out and signed by Louise Llewellyn-Smythe had been accepted at first without suspicion. It was in his own office, Mr Fullerton reflected, that suspicions had arisen because both he and his younger partner knew Mrs Llewellyn-Smythe’s handwriting very well. It was young Cole who had first said,
‘You know, I really can’t believe that Louise Llewellyn-Smythe wrote that codicil. I know she had arthritis lately but look at these specimens of her own writing that I’ve brought along from amongst her papers to show you. There’s something wrong about that codicil.
Mr Fullerton had agreed that there was something wrong about it. He had said they would take expert opinion on this handwriting question. The answer had been quite definite. Separate opinions had not varied. The handwriting of the codicil was definitely not that of Louise Llewellyn-Smythe. If Olga had been less greedy, Mr Fullerton thought, if she had been content to write a codicil beginning as this one had done—‘Because of her great care and attention to me and the affection and kindness she has shown me, I leave–’ That was how it had begun, that was how it could have begun, and if it gone on to specify a good round sum of money left to the devoted au pair girl, the relations might have considered it over-done, but they would have accepted it without questioning. But to cut out the relations altogether, the nephew who had been his aunt’s residuary legatee in the last four wills she had made during a period of nearly twenty years, to leave everything to the stranger Olga Seminoff—that was not in Louise Llewellyn-Smythe’s character. In fact, a plea of undue influence could upset such a document anyway. No. She had been greedy, this hot, passionate child. Possibly Mrs Llewellyn-Smythe had told her that some money would be left to her because of her kindness, because of her attention, because of a fondness the old lady was beginning to feel for this girl who fulfilled all her whims, who did whatever she asked her. And that had opened up a vista for Olga. She would have everything. The old lady should leave everything to her, and she would have all the money. All the money and the house and the clothes and the jewels. Everything. A greedy girl. And now retribution had caught up with her.
And Mr Fullerton, against his will, against his legal instincts and against a good deal more, felt sorry for her. Very sorry for her. She had known suffering since she was a child, had known the rigours of a police state, had lost her parents, lost a brother and a sister and known injustice and fear, and it had developed in her a trait that she had no doubt been born with but which she had never been able so far to indulge. It had developed a childish passionate greed.
‘Everyone is against me,’ said Olga. ‘Everyone. You are all against me. You are not fair because I am a foreigner, because I do not belong to this country, because I do not know what to say, what to do. What can I do? Why do you not tell me what I can do?’
‘Because