Murder at the Vicarage - Agatha Christie [74]
‘Dear Vicar, – I think you ought to know what is Going On. Your lady has been seen coming out of Mr Redding’s cottage in a surreptitious manner. You know wot i mean. The two are Carrying On together. i think you ought to know.
‘A Friend.’
I made a faint exclamation of disgust and crumpling up the paper tossed it into the open grate just as Griselda entered the room.
‘What’s that you’re throwing down so contemptuously?’ she asked.
‘Filth,’ I said.
Taking a match from my pocket, I struck it and bent down. Griselda, however, was too quick for me. She had stooped down and caught up the crumpled ball of paper and smoothed it out before I could stop her.
She read it, gave a little exclamation of disgust, and tossed it back to me, turning away as she did so. I lighted it and watched it burn.
Griselda had moved away. She was standing by the window looking out into the garden.
‘Len,’ she said, without turning round.
‘Yes, my dear.’
‘I’d like to tell you something. Yes, don’t stop me. I want to, please. When – when Lawrence Redding came here, I let you think that I had only known him slightly before. That wasn’t true. I – had known him rather well. In fact, before I met you, I had been rather in love with him. I think most people are with Lawrence. I was – well, absolutely silly about him at one time. I don’t mean I wrote him compromising letters or anything idiotic like they do in books. But I was rather keen on him once.’
‘Why didn’t you tell me?’ I asked.
‘Oh! Because! I don’t know exactly except that – well, you’re foolish in some ways. Just because you’re so much older than I am, you think that I – well, that I’m likely to like other people. I thought you’d be tiresome, perhaps, about me and Lawrence being friends.’
‘You’re very clever at concealing things,’ I said, remembering what she had told me in that room less than a week ago, and the ingenuous way she had talked.
‘Yes, I’ve always been able to hide things. In a way, I like doing it.’
Her voice held a childlike ring of pleasure to it.
‘But it’s quite true what I said. I didn’t know about Anne, and I wondered why Lawrence was so different, not – well, really not noticing me. I’m not used to it.’
There was a pause.
‘You do understand, Len?’ said Griselda anxiously.
‘Yes,’ I said, ‘I understand.’
But did I?
Chapter 25
I found it hard to shake off the impression left by the anonymous letter. Pitch soils.
However, I gathered up the other three letters, glanced at my watch, and started out.
I wondered very much what this might be that had ‘come to the knowledge’ of three ladies simultaneously. I took it to be the same piece of news. In this, I was to realize that my psychology was at fault.
I cannot pretend that my calls took me past the police station. My feet gravitated there of their own accord. I was anxious to know whether Inspector Slack had returned from Old Hall.
I found that he had, and further, that Miss Cram had returned with him. The fair Gladys was seated in the police station carrying off matters with a high hand. She denied absolutely having taken the suitcase to the woods.
‘Just because one of these gossiping old cats had nothing better to do than look out of her window all night you go and pitch upon me. She’s been mistaken once, remember, when she said she saw me at the end of the lane on the afternoon of the murder, and if she was mistaken then, in daylight, how can she possibly have recognized me by moonlight?
‘Wicked it is, the way these old ladies go on down here. Say anything, they will. And me asleep in my bed as innocent as can be. You ought to be ashamed of yourselves, the lot of you.’
‘And supposing the landlady of the Blue Boar identifies the suitcase as yours, Miss Cram?’
‘If she says anything of the kind, she’s wrong. There’s no name on it. Nearly everybody’s got a suitcase like that. As for poor Dr Stone, accusing him of being a common burglar! And he has a lot of letters after his name.’
‘You refuse to give us any explanation, then, Miss Cram?’