Mysterious Mr. Quin - Agatha Christie [79]
Mr Satterthwaite thought of Frank Bristow’s words. ‘She was not quite real you know. Shadowy. Like one of the people who come out of hills in Gaelic fairy tales.’
‘Shadowy,’ he had called her. That described her exactly. A shadow, a reflection of something else. Where then was the real Alix, and his mind answered quickly: ‘In the past. Divided from us by fourteen years of time.’
‘My dear,’ he said, ‘you frighten me. You are like the Weeping Lady with the Silver Ewer.’
Crash! The coffee cup on the table by Aspasia’s elbow fell shattered to the floor. Mr Satterthwaite waved aside her apologies. He thought: ‘We are getting nearer, we are getting nearer every minute–but nearer to what?’
‘Let us take our minds back to that night fourteen years ago,’ he said. ‘Lord Charnley killed himself. For what reason? No one knows.’
Lady Charnley stirred slightly in her chair.
‘Lady Charnley knows,’ said Frank Bristow abruptly.
‘Nonsense,’ said Colonel Monckton, then stopped, frowning at her curiously.
She was looking across at the artist. It was as though he drew the words out of her. She spoke, nodding her head slowly, and her voice was like a snowflake, cold and soft.
‘Yes, you are quite right. I know. That is why as long as I live I can never go back to Charnley. That is why when my boy Dick wants me to open the place up and live there again I tell him it can’t be done.’
‘Will you tell us the reason, Lady Charnley?’ said Mr Quin.
She looked at him. Then, as though hypnotised, she spoke as quietly and naturally as a child.
‘I will tell you if you like. Nothing seems to matter very much now. I found a letter among his papers and I destroyed it.’
‘What letter?’ said Mr Quin.
‘The letter from the girl–from that poor child. She was the Merriams’ nursery governess. He had–he had made love to her–yes, while he was engaged to me just before we were married. And she–she was going to have a child too. She wrote saying so, and that she was going to tell me about it. So, you see, he shot himself.’
She looked round at them wearily and dreamily like a child who has repeated a lesson it knows too well.
Colonel Monckton blew his nose.
‘My God,’ he said, ‘so that was it. Well, that explains things with a vengeance.’
‘Does it?’ said Mr Satterthwaite, ‘it doesn’t explain one thing. It doesn’t explain why Mr Bristow painted that picture.’
‘What do you mean?’
Mr Satterthwaite looked across at Mr Quin as though for encouragement, and apparently got it, for he proceeded:
‘Yes, I know I sound mad to all of you, but that picture is the focus of the whole thing. We are all here tonight because of that picture. That picture had to be painted–that is what I mean.’
‘You mean the uncanny influence of the Oak Parlour?’ began Colonel Monckton.
‘No,’ said Mr Satterthwaite. ‘Not the Oak Parlour. The Terrace Room. That is it! The spirit of the dead man standing outside the window and looking in and seeing his own dead body on the floor.’
‘Which he couldn’t have done,’ said the Colonel, ‘because the body was in the Oak Parlour.’
‘Supposing it wasn’t,’ said Mr Satterthwaite, ‘supposing it was exactly where Mr Bristow saw it, saw it imaginatively, I mean on the black and white flags in front of the window.’
‘You are talking nonsense,’ said Colonel Monckton, ‘if it was there we shouldn’t have found it in the Oak Parlour.’
‘Not unless someone carried it there,’ said Mr Satterthwaite.
‘And in that case how could we have seen Charnley going in at the door of the Oak Parlour?’ inquired Colonel Monckton.
‘Well, you didn’t see his face, did you?’ asked Mr Satterthwaite. ‘What I mean is, you saw a man going into the Oak Parlour in fancy dress, I suppose.’
‘Brocade things and a wig,’ said Monckton.
‘Just so, and you thought it was Lord Charnley because the girl called out to him as Lord Charnley.’
‘And because when we broke in a few minutes later there was only Lord Charnley there dead. You can’t get away from that, Satterthwaite.’
‘No,’ said Mr Satterthwaite, discouraged. ‘No–unless