Murder of Roger Ackroyd - Agatha Christie [52]
I listened to all this in silence.
“What does he think? That’s what I want to know. Does he actually imagine I’m hiding something? He—he—positively accused me yesterday.”
I shrugged my shoulders.
“It is surely of no consequence, Mrs. Ackroyd,” I said. “Since you are not concealing anything, any remarks he may have made do not apply to you.”
Mrs. Ackroyd went off at a tangent, after her usual fashion.
“Servants are so tiresome,” she said. “They gossip, and talk amongst themselves. And then it gets round—and all the time there’s probably nothing in it at all.”
“Have the servants been talking?” I asked. “What about?”
Mrs. Ackroyd cast a very shrewd glance at me. It quite threw me off my balance.
“I was sure you’d know, doctor, if anyone did. You were with M. Poirot all the time, weren’t you?”
“I was.”
“Then of course you know. It was that girl, Ursula Bourne, wasn’t it? Naturally—she’s leaving. She would want to make all the trouble she could. Spiteful, that’s what they are. They’re all alike. Now, you being there, doctor, you must know exactly what she did say? I’m most anxious that no wrong impression should get about. After all, you don’t repeat every little detail to the police, do you? There are family matters sometimes—nothing to do with the question of the murder. But if the girl was spiteful, she may have made out all sorts of things.”
I was shrewd enough to see that a very real anxiety lay behind these outpourings. Poirot had been justified in his premises. Of the six people round the table yesterday, Mrs. Ackroyd at least had had something to hide. It was for me to discover what that something might be.
“If I were you, Mrs. Ackroyd,” I said brusquely, “I should make a clean breast of things.”
She gave a little scream.
“Oh! doctor, how can you be so abrupt. It sounds as though—as though—And I can explain everything so simply.”
“Then why not do so?” I suggested.
Mrs. Ackroyd took out a frilled handkerchief, and became tearful.
“I thought, doctor, that you might put it to M. Poirot—explain it, you know—because it’s so difficult for a foreigner to see our point of view. And you don’t know—nobody could know—what I’ve had to contend with. A martyrdom—a long martyrdom. That’s what my life has been. I don’t like to speak ill of the dead—but there it is. Not the smallest bill but it had all to be gone over—just as though Roger had had a few miserly hundreds a year instead of being (as Mr. Hammond told me yesterday) one of the wealthiest men in these parts.”
Mrs. Ackroyd paused to dab her eyes with the frilled handkerchief.
“Yes,” I said encouragingly. “You were talking about bills?”
“Those dreadful bills. And some I didn’t like to show Roger at all. They were things a man wouldn’t understand. He would have said the things weren’t necessary. And of course they mounted up, you know, and they kept coming in—”
She looked at me appealingly, as though asking me to condole with her on this striking peculiarity.
“It’s a habit they have,” I agreed.
And the tone altered—became quite abusive. “I assure you, doctor, I was becoming a nervous wreck. I couldn’t sleep at nights. And a dreadful fluttering round the heart. And then I got a letter from a Scotch gentleman—as a matter of fact there were two letters—both Scotch gentlemen. Mr. Bruce MacPherson was one, and the other was Colin MacDonald. Quite a coincidence.”
“Hardly that,” I said drily. “They are usually Scotch gentlemen, but I suspect a Semitic strain in their ancestry.”
“Ten pounds to ten thousand on note of hand alone,” murmured Mrs. Ackroyd reminiscently. “I wrote to one of them, but it seemed there were difficulties.”
She paused.
I gathered that we were just coming to delicate ground. I have never known anyone more difficult to bring to the point.