Mrs McGinty's Dead - Agatha Christie [92]
‘But Robin Upward was taking no chances. He purloins the sugar hammer, laughingly referred to as a perfect weapon for murder by Mrs Summerhayes, and on the following evening, he stops at Mrs McGinty’s cottage on his way to broadcast. She takes him into the parlour, quite unsuspicious, and he kills her. He knows where she keeps her savings—everyone in Broadhinny seems to know—and he fakes a burglary, hiding the money outside the house. Bentley is suspected and arrested. Everything is now safe for clever Robin Upward.
‘But then, suddenly, I produce four photographs, and Mrs Upward recognizes the one of Eva Kane as being identical with a photograph of Robin’s ballerina mother! She needs a little time to think things out. Murder is involved. Can it be possible that Robin—? No, she refuses to believe it.
‘What action she would have taken in the end we do not know. But Robin was taking no chances. He plans the whole mise en scène. The visit to the Rep on Janet’s night out, the telephone calls, the coffee cup carefully smeared with lipstick taken from Eve Carpenter’s bag, he even buys a bottle of her distinctive perfume. The whole thing was a theatrical scene setting with prepared props. Whilst Mrs Oliver waited in the car, Robin ran back twice into the house. The murder was a matter of seconds. After that there was only the swift distribution of the “props”. And with Mrs Upward dead, he inherited a large fortune by the terms of her will, and no suspicion could attach to him since it would seem quite certain that a woman had committed the crime. With three women visiting the cottage that night, one of them was almost sure to be suspected. And that, indeed, was so.
‘But Robin, like all criminals, was careless and over confident. Not only was there a book in the cottage with his original name scribbled in it, but he also kept, for purposes of his own, the fatal photograph. It would have been much safer for him if he had destroyed it, but he clung to the belief that he could use it to incriminate someone else at the right moment.
‘He probably thought then of Mrs Summerhayes. That may be the reason he moved out of the cottage and into Long Meadows. After all, the sugar hammer was hers, and Mrs Summerhayes was, he knew, an adopted child and might find it hard to prove she was not Eva Kane’s daughter.
‘However, when Deirdre Henderson admitted having been on the scene of the crime, he conceived the idea of planting the photograph amongst her possessions. He tried to do so, using a ladder that the gardener had left against the window. But Mrs Wetherby was nervous and had insisted on all the windows being kept locked, so Robin did not succeed in his purpose. He came straight back here and put the photograph in a drawer which, unfortunately for him, I had searched only a short time before.
‘I knew, therefore, that the photograph had been planted, and I knew by whom—by the only person in the house—that person who was typing industriously over my head.
‘Since the name Evelyn Hope had been written on the flyleaf of the book from the cottage, Evelyn Hope must be either Mrs Upward—or Robin Upward…
‘The name Evelyn had led me astray—I had connected it with Mrs Carpenter since her name was Eve. But Evelyn was a man’s name as well as a woman’s.
‘I remembered the conversation Mrs Oliver had told me about at the Little Rep in Cullenquay. The young actor who had been talking to her was the person I wanted to confirm my theory—the theory that Robin was not Mrs Upward’s own son. For by the way he had talked, it seemed clear that he knew the real facts. And his story of Mrs Upward’s swift retribution on a young man who had deceived her as to his origins was suggestive.
‘The truth is that I ought to have seen the whole thing very much sooner. I was handicapped by a serious error. I believed that I had been deliberately pushed with the intention of sending me on to a railway line—and that the person