Hickory Dickory Dock - Agatha Christie [31]
“Not your idea of a joke?”
“It never occurred to me it was meant to be funny. Surely, Inspector, the thefts were purely psychological?”
“You definitely consider that Celia Austin was a kleptomaniac?”
“But surely there can’t be any other explanation, Inspector?”
“Perhaps you don’t know as much about kleptomaniacs as I do, Mr. Chapman.”
“Well, I really can’t think of any other explanation.”
“You don’t think it’s possible that someone might have put Miss Austin up to all this as a means of—say—arousing Mr. McNabb’s interest in her?”
Nigel’s eyes glistened with appreciative malice.
“Now that really is a most diverting explanation, Inspector,” he said. “You know, when I think of it, it’s perfectly possible and of course old Colin would swallow it, line, hook and sinker.” Nigel savoured this with much glee for a second or two. Then he shook his head sadly.
“But Celia wouldn’t have played,” he said. “She was soppy about him.”
“You’ve no theory of your own, Mr. Chapman, about the things that have been going on in this house? About, for instance, the spilling of ink over Miss Johnston’s papers?”
“If you’re thinking I did it, Inspector Sharpe, that’s quite untrue. Of course, it looks like me because of the green ink, but if you ask me, that was just spite.”
“What was spite?”
“Using my ink. Somebody deliberately used my ink to make it look like me. There’s a lot of spite about here, Inspector.”
The Inspector looked at him sharply.
“Now what exactly do you mean by a lot of spite about?”
But Nigel immediately drew back into his shell and became noncommittal.
“I didn’t mean anything really—just that when a lot of people are cooped up together, they get rather petty.”
The next person on Inspector Sharpe’s list was Leonard Bateson. Len Bateson was even less at his ease than Nigel, though it showed in a different way. He was suspicious and truculent.
“All right!” he burst out, after the first routine inquiries were concluded. “I poured out Celia’s coffee and gave it to her. So what?”
“You gave her her after-dinner coffee—is that what you’re saying, Mr. Bateson?”
“Yes. At least I filled the cup up from the urn and put it down beside her and you can believe it or not, but there was no morphia in it.”
“You saw her drink it?”
“No, I didn’t actually see her drink it. We were all moving around and I got into an argument with someone just after that. I didn’t notice when she drank it. There were other people round her.”
“I see. In fact, what you are saying is that anybody could have dropped morphia into her coffee cup?”
“You try and put anything in anyone’s cup! Everybody would see you.”
“Not necessarily,” said Sharpe.
Len burst out aggressively:
“What the hell do you think I want to poison the kid for? I’ve nothing against her.”
“I’ve not suggested that you did want to poison her.”
“She took the stuff herself. She must have taken it herself. There’s no other explanation.”
“We might think so, if it weren’t for that faked suicide note.”
“Faked my hat! She wrote it, didn’t she?”
“She wrote it as part of a letter, early that morning.”
“Well—she could have torn a bit out and used it as a suicide note.”
“Come now, Mr. Bateson. If you wanted to write a suicide note you’d write one. You wouldn’t take a letter you’d written to somebody else and carefully tear out one particular phrase.”
“I might do. People do all sorts of funny things.”
“In that case, where is the rest of the letter?”
“How should I know? That’s your business, not mine.”
“I’m making it my business. You’d be well advised, Mr. Bateson, to answer my questions civilly.”
“Well, what do you want to know? I didn’t kill the girl, and I’d no motive for killing her.”
“You liked her?”
Len said less aggressively:
“I liked her very much. She was a nice kid. A bit dumb, but nice.”
“You believed her when she owned up to having committed the thefts which had been worrying everyone for some time past?”
“Well, I believed her, of course, since she said so. But I must say it seemed odd.”
“You didn’t think it was a likely thing for her to do?”
“Well,