Murder Is Easy - Agatha Christie [20]
There they passed a small man with a stiff moustache and protuberant eyes. He had three bulldogs with him to whom he was shouting hoarsely in turn. “Nero, come here, sir. Nelly, leave it. Drop it, I tell you. Augustus—AUGUSTUS, I say—”
He broke off to raise his hat to Bridget, stared at Luke with what was evidently a devouring curiosity and passed on resuming his hoarse expostulations.
“Major Horton and his bulldogs?” quoted Luke.
“Quite right.”
“Haven’t we seen practically everyone of note in Wychwood this morning?”
“Practically.”
“I feel rather obtrusive,” said Luke. “I suppose a stranger in an English village is bound to stick out a mile,” he added ruefully, remembering Jimmy Lorrimer’s remarks.
“Major Horton never disguises his curiosity very well,” said Bridget. “He did stare, rather.”
“He’s the sort of man you could tell was a Major anywhere,” said Luke rather viciously.
Bridget said abruptly: “Shall we sit on the bank a bit? We’ve got lots of time.”
They sat on a fallen tree that made a convenient seat. Bridget went on:
“Yes, Major Horton is very military—has an orderly room manner. You’d hardly believe he was the most henpecked man in existence a year ago!”
“What, that fellow?”
“Yes. He had the most disagreeable woman for a wife that I’ve ever known. She had the money too, and never scrupled to underline the fact in public.”
“Poor brute—Horton, I mean.”
“He behaved very nicely to her—always the officer and gentleman. Personally, I wonder he didn’t take a hatchet to her.”
“She wasn’t popular, I gather.”
“Everybody disliked her. She snubbed Gordon and patronized me and made herself generally unpleasant wherever she went.”
“But I gather a merciful providence removed her?”
“Yes, about a year ago. Acute gastritis. She gave her husband, Dr. Thomas and two nurses absolute Hell—but she died all right. The bulldogs brightened up at once.”
“Intelligent brutes!”
There was a silence. Bridget was idly picking at the long grass. Luke frowned at the opposite bank unseeingly. Once again the dreamlike quality of his mission obsessed him. How much was fact—how much imagination? Wasn’t it bad for one to go about studying every fresh person you met as a potential murderer? Something degrading about that point of view.
“Damn it all,” thought Luke, “I’ve been a policeman too long!”
He was brought out of his abstraction with a shock. Bridget’s cold clear voice was speaking.
“Mr. Fitzwilliam,” she said, “just exactly why have you come down here?”
Six
HAT PAINT
Luke had been just in the act of applying a match to a cigarette. The unexpectedness of her remark momentarily paralysed his hand. He remained quite motionless for a second or two, the match burned down and scorched his fingers.
“Damn,” said Luke as he dropped the match and shook his hand vigorously. “I beg your pardon. You gave me rather a nasty jolt.” He smiled ruefully.
“Did I?”
“Yes.” He sighed. “Oh, well, I suppose anyone of real intelligence was bound to see through me! That story of my writing a book on folklore didn’t take you in for a moment, I suppose?”
“Not after I’d once seen you.”
“You believed it up to then?”
“Yes.”
“All the same it wasn’t really a good story,” said Luke critically. “I mean, any man might want to write a book, but the bit about coming down here and passing myself off as a cousin—I suppose that made you smell a rat?”
Bridget shook her head.
“No. I had an explanation for that—I thought I had, I mean. I presumed you were pretty hard up—a lot of my and Jimmy’s friends are that—and I thought he suggested the cousin stunt so that—well, so that it would save your pride.”
“But when I arrived,” said Luke, “my appearance immediately suggested such opulence that that explanation was out of the question?”
Her mouth curved in its slow smile.
“Oh, no,” she said. “It wasn’t that. It was simply that you were the wrong kind of person.”
“Not sufficient brains to write a book? Don’t spare my feelings. I’d rather know.”
“You might write a book