Mrs McGinty's Dead - Agatha Christie [25]
‘Oo,’ said Mrs Summerhayes, her attention diverted from Poirot to the basin in her lap. ‘I’m bleeding over the beans. Not too good as we’ve got to have them for lunch. Still it won’t matter really because they’ll go into boiling water. Things are always all right if you boil them, aren’t they? Even tins.’
‘I think,’ said Hercule Poirot quietly, ‘that I shall not be in for lunch.’
Chapter 5
‘I don’t know, I’m sure,’ said Mrs Burch.
She had said that three times already. Her natural distrust of foreign-looking gentlemen with black moustaches, wearing large fur-lined coats was not to be easily overcome.
‘Very unpleasant, it’s been,’ she went on. ‘Having poor auntie murdered and the police and all that. Tramping round everywhere, and ferreting about, and asking questions. With the neighbours all agog. I didn’t feel at first we’d ever live it down. And my husband’s mother’s been downright nasty about it. Nothing of that kind ever happened in her family, she kept saying. And “poor Joe” and all that. What about poor me? She was my aunt, wasn’t she? But really I did think it was all over now.’
‘And supposing that James Bentley is innocent, after all?’
‘Nonsense,’ snapped Mrs Burch. ‘Of course he isn’t innocent. He did it all right. I never did like the looks of him. Wandering about muttering to himself. Said to auntie, I did: “You oughtn’t to have a man like that in the house. Might go off his head,” I said. But she said he was quiet and obliging and didn’t give trouble. No drinking, she said, and he didn’t even smoke. Well, she knows better now, poor soul.’
Poirot looked thoughtfully at her. She was a big, plump woman with a healthy colour and a good-humoured mouth. The small house was neat and clean and smelt of furniture polish and Brasso. A faint appetizing smell came from the direction of the kitchen.
A good wife who kept her house clean and took the trouble to cook for her man. He approved. She was prejudiced and obstinate but, after all, why not? Most decidedly, she was not the kind of woman one could imagine using a meat chopper on her aunt, or conniving at her husband’s doing so. Spence had not thought her that kind of woman, and rather reluctantly, Hercule Poirot agreed with him. Spence had gone into the financial background of the Burches and had found no motive there for murder, and Spence was a very thorough man.
He sighed, and persevered with his task, which was the breaking down of Mrs Burch’s suspicion of foreigners. He led the conversation away from murder and focused on the victim of it. He asked questions about ‘poor auntie’, her health, her habits, her preferences in food and drink, her politics, her late husband, her attitude to life, to sex, to sin, to religion, to children, to animals.
Whether any of this irrelevant matter would be of use, he had no idea. He was looking through a haystack to find a needle. But, incidentally, he was learning something about Bessie Burch.
Bessie did not really know very much about her aunt. It had been a family tie, honoured as such, but without intimacy. Now and again, once a month or so, she and Joe had gone over on a Sunday to have midday dinner with auntie, and more rarely, auntie had come over to see them. They had exchanged presents at Christmas. They’d known that auntie had a little something put by, and that they’d get it when she died.
‘But that’s not to say we were needing it,’ Mrs Burch explained with rising colour. ‘We’ve got something put by ourselves. And we buried her beautiful. A real nice funeral it was. Flowers and everything.’
Auntie had been fond of knitting. She didn’t like dogs, they messed up a place, but she used to have a cat—a ginger. It strayed away and she hadn’t had one since, but the woman at the post office had been going to give her a kitten. Kept her house very neat and didn’t like litter. Kept brass a treat and washed down the kitchen floor every day. She made quite a nice thing of going out to work. One shilling and tenpence an hour—two shillings from Holmeleigh, that was Mr Carpenter’s of the Works’