Mrs McGinty's Dead - Agatha Christie [88]
‘No, I am not mad. Because I repeat to you the childish rhyme of a childish game, it does not mean that I am in my second childhood. Some of you may have played that game as children. Mrs Upward had played it. Indeed she repeated it to me—with a difference. She said: “Mrs McGinty’s dead. How did she die? Sticking her neck out just like I.” That is what she said—and that is what she did. She stuck her neck out—and so she also, like Mrs McGinty, died…
‘For our purpose we must go back to the beginning—to Mrs McGinty—down on her knees scrubbing other people’s houses, Mrs McGinty was killed, and a man, James Bentley, was arrested, tried and convicted. For certain reasons, Superintendent Spence, the officer in charge of the case, was not convinced of Bentley’s guilt, strong though the evidence was. I agreed with him. I came down here to answer a question. “How did Mrs McGinty die? Why did she die?”
‘I will not make you the long and complicated histories. I will say only that as simple a thing as a bottle of ink gave me a clue. In the Sunday Comet, read by Mrs McGinty on the Sunday before her death, four photographs were published. You know all about those photographs by now, so I will only say that Mrs McGinty recognized one of those photographs as a photograph she had seen in one of the houses where she worked.
‘She spoke of this to James Bentley though he attached no importance to the matter at the time, nor indeed afterwards. Actually he barely listened. But he had the impression that Mrs McGinty had seen the photograph in Mrs Upward’s house and that when she referred to a woman who need not be so proud if all was known, she was referring to Mrs Upward. We cannot depend on that statement of his, but she certainly used that phrase about pride and there is no doubt that Mrs Upward was a proud and imperious woman.
‘As you all know—some of you were present and the others will have heard—I produced those four photographs at Mrs Upward’s house. I caught a flicker of surprise and recognition in Mrs Upward’s expression and taxed her with it. She had to admit it. She said that she “had seen one of the photographs somewhere but she couldn’t remember where”. When asked which photograph, she pointed to a photograph of the child Lily Gamboll. But that, let me tell you, was not the truth. For reasons of her own, Mrs Upward wanted to keep her recognition to herself. She pointed to the wrong photograph to put me off.
‘But one person was not deceived—the murderer. One person knew which photograph Mrs Upward had recognized. And here I will not beat to and fro about the bush—the photograph in question was that of Eva Kane—a woman who was accomplice, victim or possibly leading spirit in the famous Craig Murder Case.
‘On the next evening Mrs Upward was killed. She was killed for the same reason that Mrs McGinty was killed. Mrs McGinty stuck her hand out, Mrs Upward stuck her neck out—the result was the same.
‘Now before Mrs Upward died, three women received telephone calls. Mrs Carpenter, Mrs Rendell, and Miss Henderson. All three calls were a message from Mrs Upward asking the person in question to come and see her that evening. It was her servant’s night out and her son and Mrs Oliver were going into Cullenquay. It would seem, therefore, that she wanted a private conversation with each of these three women.
‘Now why three women? Did Mrs Upward know where she had seen the photograph of Eva Kane? Or did she know she had seen it but could not remember where? Had these three women anything in common? Nothing, it would seem, but their age. They were all, roughly, in the neighbourhood of thirty.
‘You have, perhaps, read the article in the Sunday Comet. There is a truly sentimental picture in it of Eva Kane’s daughter in years to come. The women asked by Mrs Upward to come and see her were all of the right age to be Eva Kane’s daughter.
‘So it would seem that living in Broadhinny was a young woman who was the daughter of the celebrated murderer Craig and of his mistress Eva Kane, and it would also seem that that young