Hallowe'en Party - Agatha Christie [65]
‘A codicil to the Will?’ suggested Mrs Oliver.
‘Yes, that’s right. That’s what I’m meaning. Mrs Llewellyn-Smythe, you see, made one of these cod—codicils and she left all her money to the foreign girl what looked after her. And it was a surprise, that, because she’d got relations living here, and she’d come here anyway to live near them. She was very devoted to them, Mr Drake, in particular. And it struck people as pretty queer, really. And then the lawyers, you see, they began saying things. They said as Mrs Llewellyn-Smythe hadn’t written the codicil at all. That the foreign pair girl had done it, seeing as she got all the money left to her. And they said as they were going to law about it. That Mrs Drake was going to counterset the Will—if that is the right word.’
‘The lawyers were going to contest the Will. Yes, I believe I did hear something about that,’ said Mrs Oliver encouragingly. ‘And you know something about it, perhaps?’
‘I didn’t mean no harm,’ said Mrs Leaman. A slight whine came into her voice, a whine with which Mrs Oliver had been acquainted several times in the past.
Mrs Leaman, she thought, was presumably an unreliable woman in some ways, a snooper perhaps, a listener at doors.
‘I didn’t say nothing at the time,’ said Mrs Leaman, ‘because you see I didn’t rightly know. But you see I thought it was queer and I’ll admit to a lady like you, who knows what these things are, that I did want to know the truth about it. I’d worked for Mrs Llewellyn-Smythe for some time, I had, and one wants to know how things happened.’
‘Quite,’ said Mrs Oliver.
‘If I thought I’d done what I oughtn’t to have done, well, of course, I’d have owned up to it. But I didn’t think as I’d done anything really wrong, you see. Not at the time, if you understand,’ she added.
‘Oh yes,’ said Mrs Oliver, ‘I’m sure I shall understand. Go on. It was about this codicil.’
‘Yes, you see one day Mrs Llewellyn-Smythe—she hadn’t felt too good that day and so she asked us to come in. Me that was, and young Jim who helps down in the garden and brings the sticks in and the coals, and things like that. So we went into her room, where she was, and she’d got papers before her there on the desk. And she turns to this foreign girl—Miss Olga we all called her—and said “You go out of the room now, dear, because you mustn’t be mixed up in this part of it,” or something like that. So Miss Olga, she goes out of the room and Mrs Llewellyn-Smythe, she tells us to come close and she says “This is my Will, this is.” She got a bit of blotting paper over the top part of it but the bottom of it’s quite clear. She said “I’m writing something here on this piece of paper and I want you to be a witness of what I’ve written and of my signature at the end of it.” So she starts writing along the page. Scratchy pen she always used, she wouldn’t use Biros or anything like that. And she writes two or three lines of writing and then she signed her name, and then she says to me, “Now, Mrs Leaman, you write your name there. Your name and your address” and then she says to Jim “And now you write your name underneath there, and your address too. There. That’ll do. Now you’ve seen me write that and you’ve seen my signature and you’ve written your names, both of you, to say that’s that.” And then she says “That’s all. Thank you very much.” So we goes out of the room. Well, I didn’t think nothing more of it at the time, but I wondered a bit. And it happened as I turns my head just as I was going out of the room. You see the door doesn’t always latch properly. You have to give it a pull, to make it click. And so I was doing that—I wasn’t really looking, if you know what I mean–’
‘I know what you mean,’ said Mrs Oliver, in a non-committal voice.
‘And so I sees Mrs Llewellyn-Smythe pull herself up from the chair—she’d got arthritis and had pain moving about sometimes—and go over to the bookcase and she pulled out a book and she puts that piece of paper she’d just signed—in an envelope it was—in one of the books. A big tall book it was in the bottom shelf.