Mrs McGinty's Dead - Agatha Christie [26]
Poirot mentioned Mrs Summerhayes at Long Meadows.
Oh yes, auntie went to her—two days a week. They’d come back from India where they’d had a lot of native servants and Mrs Summerhayes didn’t know a thing about a house. They tried to market-garden, but they didn’t know anything about that, either. When the children came home for the holidays, the house was just pandemonium. But Mrs Summerhayes was a nice lady and auntie liked her.
So the portrait grew. Mrs McGinty knitted, and scrubbed floors and polished brass, she liked cats and didn’t like dogs. She liked children, but not very much. She kept herself to herself.
She attended church on Sunday, but didn’t take part in any church activities. Sometimes, but rarely, she went to the pictures. She didn’t hold with goings on—and had given up working for an artist and his wife when she discovered they weren’t properly married. She didn’t read books, but she enjoyed the Sunday paper and she liked old magazines when her ladies gave them to her. Although she didn’t go much to the pictures, she was interested in hearing about film stars and their doings. She wasn’t interested in politics, but voted Conservative like her husband had always done. Never spent much on clothes, but got quite a lot given her from her ladies, and was of a saving disposition.
Mrs McGinty was, in fact, very much the Mrs McGinty that Poirot had imagined she would be. And Bessie Burch, her niece, was the Bessie Burch of Superintendent Spence’s notes.
Before Poirot took his leave, Joe Burch came home for the lunch hour. A small, shrewd man, less easy to be sure about than his wife. There was a faint nervousness in his manner. He showed less signs of suspicion and hostility than his wife. Indeed he seemed anxious to appear cooperative. And that, Poirot reflected, was very faintly out of character. For why should Joe Burch be anxious to placate an importunate foreign stranger? The reason could only be that the stranger had brought with him a letter from Superintendent Spence of the County Police.
So Joe Burch was anxious to stand in well with the police? Was it that he couldn’t afford, as his wife could, to be critical of the police?
A man, perhaps, with an uneasy conscience. Why was that conscience uneasy? There could be so many reasons—none of them connected with Mrs McGinty’s death. Or was it that, somehow or other, the cinema alibi had been cleverly faked, and that it was Joe Burch who had knocked on the door of the cottage, had been admitted by auntie and who had struck down the unsuspecting old woman? He would pull out the drawers and ransack the rooms to give the appearance of robbery, he might hide the money outside, cunningly, to incriminate James Bentley, the money that was in the Savings Bank was what he was after. Two hundred pounds coming to his wife which, for some reason unknown, he badly needed. The weapon, Poirot remembered, had never been found. Why had that not also been found on the scene of the crime? Any moron knew enough to wear gloves or rub off fingerprints. Why then had the weapon, which must have been a heavy one with a sharp edge, been removed? Was it because it could easily be identified as belonging to the Burch ménage? Was that same weapon, washed and polished, here in the house now? Something in the nature of a meat chopper, the police surgeon had said—but not, it seemed, actually a meat chopper. Something, perhaps a little unusual…a little out of the ordinary, easily identified. The police had hunted for it, but not found it. They had searched woods, dragged ponds. There was nothing missing from Mrs McGinty’s kitchen, and nobody could say that James Bentley had had anything of that kind in his possession. They had never traced any purchase of a meat chopper or any such implement to him. A small, but negative point in his favour. Ignored