Mysterious Mr. Quin - Agatha Christie [62]
Margery brushed aside this legal pronouncement.
‘I don’t see that it matters in the least,’ she declared. ‘Clayton saw me sign and then she signed her name. I was going to ring for the butler, but you will do instead.’
Mr Satterthwaite uttered no fresh protest, he unscrewed his fountain pen and then, as he was about to append his signature, he paused suddenly. The name, written just above his own, recalled a flow of memories. Alice Clayton.
Something seemed to be struggling very hard to get through to him. Alice Clayton, there was some significance about that. Something to do with Mr Quin was mixed up with it. Something he had said to Mr Quin only a very short time ago.
Ah, he had it now. Alice Clayton, that was her name. The little bit of a thing. People changed–yes, but not like that. And the Alice Clayton he knew had had brown eyes. The room seemed whirling round him. He felt for a chair and presently, as though from a great distance, he heard Margery’s voice speaking to him anxiously. ‘Are you ill? Oh, what is it? I am sure you are ill.’
He was himself again. He took her hand.
‘My dear, I see it all now. You must prepare yourself for a great shock. The woman upstairs whom you call Clayton is not Clayton at all. The real Alice Clayton was drowned on the “Uralia”.’
Margery was staring at him. ‘Who–who is she then?’
‘I am not mistaken, I cannot be mistaken. The woman you call Clayton is your mother’s sister, Beatrice Barron. You remember telling me that she was struck on the head by a spar? I should imagine that that blow destroyed her memory, and that being the case, your mother saw the chance–’
‘Of pinching the title, you mean?’ asked Margery bitterly. ‘Yes, she would do that. It seems dreadful to say that now she is dead, but she was like that.’
‘Beatrice was the elder sister,’ said Mr Satterthwaite. ‘By your uncle’s death she would inherit everything and your mother would get nothing. Your mother claimed the wounded girl as her maid, not as her sister. The girl recovered from the blow and believed, of course, what was told her, that she was Alice Clayton, your mother’s maid. I should imagine that just lately her memory had begun to return, but that the blow on the head, given all these years ago, has at last caused mischief on the brain.’
Margery was looking at him with eyes of horror.
‘She killed Mother and she wanted to kill me,’ she breathed.
‘It seems so,’ said Mr Satterthwaite. ‘In her brain there was just one muddled idea–that her inheritance had been stolen and was being kept from her by you and your mother.’
‘But–but Clayton is so old.’
Mr Satterthwaite was silent for a minute as a vision rose up before him–the faded old woman with grey hair, and the radiant golden-haired creature sitting in the sunshine at Cannes. Sisters! Could it really be so? He remembered the Barron girls and their likeness to each other. Just because two lives had developed on different tracks–
He shook his head sharply, obsessed by the wonder and pity of life…
He turned to Margery and said gently: ‘We had better go upstairs and see her.’
They found Clayton sitting in the little workroom where she sewed. She did not turn her head as they came in for a reason that Mr Satterthwaite soon found out.
‘Heart failure,’ he murmured, as he touched the cold rigid shoulder. ‘Perhaps it is best that way.’
Chapter 8
The Face of Helen
I
Mr Satterthwaite was at the Opera and sat alone in his big box on the first tier. Outside the door was a printed card bearing his name. An appreciator and a connoisseur of all the arts, Mr Satterthwaite was especially fond of good music, and was a regular subscriber to Covent Garden every year, reserving a box for Tuesdays and Fridays throughout the season.
But it was not often that he sat in it alone. He was a gregarious little gentleman, and he liked filling his box with the élite of the great world to which he belonged, and also with the aristocracy