Listerdale Mystery - Agatha Christie [60]
He thrust a newspaper paragraph under her nose. Dorothy read:
NEW ADVERTISING STUNT
A clever new advertising dodge is being adopted by the All-English Fivepenny Fair who intend to challenge the famous Woolworths. Baskets of fruit were sold yesterday and will be on sale every Sunday. Out of every fifty baskets, one will contain an imitation necklace in different coloured stones. These necklaces are really wonderful value for the money. Great excitement and merriment was caused by them yesterday and EAT MORE FRUIT will have a great vogue next Sunday. We congratulate the Fivepenny Fair on their resource and wish them all good luck in their campaign of Buy British Goods.
‘Well–’ said Dorothy.
And after a pause: ‘Well!’
‘Yes,’ said Edward. ‘I felt the same.’
A passing man thrust a paper into his hand.
‘Take one, brother,’ he said.
‘The price of a virtuous woman is far above rubies.’
‘There!’ said Edward. ‘I hope that cheers you up.’
‘I don’t know,’ said Dorothy doubtfully. ‘I don’t exactly want to look like a good woman.’
‘You don’t,’ said Edward. ‘That’s why the man gave me that paper. With those rubies round your neck you don’t look one little bit like a good woman.’
Dorothy laughed.
‘You’re rather a dear, Ted,’ she said. ‘Come on, let’s go to the pictures.’
Mr Eastwood’s Adventure
Mr Eastwood looked at the ceiling. Then he looked down at the floor. From the floor his gaze travelled slowly up the right-hand wall. Then, with a sudden stern effort, he focused his gaze once more upon the typewriter before him.
The virgin white of the sheet of paper was defaced by a title written in capital letters.
‘THE MYSTERY OF THE SECOND CUCUMBER’
so it ran. A pleasing title. Anthony Eastwood felt that anyone reading that title would be at once intrigued and arrested by it. ‘The Mystery of the Second Cucumber,’ they would say. ‘What can that be about? A cucumber? The second cucumber? I must certainly read that story.’ And they would be thrilled and charmed by the consummate ease with which this master of detective fiction had woven an exciting plot round this simple vegetable.
That was all very well. Anthony Eastwood knew as well as anyone what the story ought to be like–the bother was that somehow or other he couldn’t get on with it. The two essentials for a story were a title and a plot–the rest was mere spade-work, sometimes the title led to a plot all by itself, as it were, and then all was plain sailing–but in this case the title continued to adorn the top of the page, and not the vestige of a plot was forthcoming.
Again Anthony Eastwood’s gaze sought inspiration from the ceiling, the floor, and the wallpaper, and still nothing materialized.
‘I shall call the heroine Sonia,’ said Anthony, to urge himself on. ‘Sonia or possibly Dolores–she shall have a skin of ivory pallor–the kind that’s not due to ill-health, and eyes like fathomless pools. The hero shall be called George, or possibly John–something short and British. Then the gardener–I suppose there will have to be a gardener, we’ve got to drag that beastly cucumber in somehow or other–the gardener might be Scottish, and amusingly pessimistic about the early frost.’
This method sometimes worked, but it didn’t seem to be going to this morning. Although Anthony could see Sonia and George and the comic gardener quite clearly, they didn’t show any willingness to be active and do things.
‘I could make it a banana, of course,’ thought Anthony desperately. ‘Or a lettuce, or a brussels sprout–brussels sprout, now, how about that? Really a cryptogram for Brussels–stolen bearer bonds–sinister Belgian Baron.’
For a moment a gleam of light seemed to show, but it died down again. The Belgian Baron wouldn’t materialize, and Anthony suddenly remembered that early frosts and cucumbers were incompatible, which seemed to put the lid on the amusing remarks of the Scottish gardener.
‘Oh! Damn!’ said Mr Eastwood.
He rose and seized the Daily Mail. It was just possible that someone or other had been done to death in such a way as to lend inspiration to a perspiring