N or M_ - Agatha Christie [36]
‘Oh well,’ said Tuppence, ‘with my own two–’
Mrs O’Rourke cut in quickly:
‘Two? It was three boys I understood you had?’
‘Oh yes, three. But two of them are very near in age and I was thinking of the days spent with them.’
‘Ah! I see. Sit down now, Mrs Blenkensop. Make yourself at home.’
Tuppence sat down obediently and wished that Mrs O’Rourke did not always make her feel so uncomfortable. She felt now exactly like Hansel or Gretel accepting the witch’s invitation.
‘Tell me now,’ said Mrs O’Rourke. ‘What do you think of Sans Souci?’
Tuppence began a somewhat gushing speech of eulogy, but Mrs O’Rourke cut her short without ceremony.
‘What I’d be asking you is if you don’t feel there’s something odd about the place?’
‘Odd? No, I don’t think so.’
‘Not about Mrs Perenna? You’re interested in her, you must allow. I’ve seen you watching her and watching her.’
Tuppence flushed.
‘She–she’s an interesting woman.’
‘She is not then,’ said Mrs O’Rourke. ‘She’s a commonplace woman enough–that is if she’s what she seems. But perhaps she isn’t. Is that your idea?’
‘Really, Mrs O’Rourke, I don’t know what you mean.’
‘Have you ever stopped to think that many of us are that way–different to what we seem on the surface. Mr Meadowes, now. He’s a puzzling kind of man. Sometimes I’d say he was a typical Englishman, stupid to the core, and there’s other times I’ll catch a look or a word that’s not stupid at all. It’s odd that, don’t you think so?’
Tuppence said firmly:
‘Oh, I really think Mr Meadowes is very typical.’
‘There are others. Perhaps you’ll know who I’ll be meaning?’
Tuppence shook her head.
‘The name,’ said Mrs O’Rourke encouragingly, ‘begins with an S.’
She nodded her head several times.
With a sudden spark of anger and an obscure impulse to spring to the defence of something young and vulnerable, Tuppence said sharply:
‘Sheila’s just a rebel. One usually is, at that age.’
Mrs O’Rourke nodded her head several times, looking just like an obese china mandarin that Tuppence remembered on her Aunt Gracie’s mantelpiece. A vast smile tilted up the corners of her mouth. She said softly:
‘You mayn’t know it, but Miss Minton’s Christian name is Sophia.’
‘Oh,’ Tuppence was taken aback. ‘Was it Miss Minton you meant?’
‘It was not,’ said Mrs O’Rourke.
Tuppence turned away to the window. Queer how this old woman could affect her, spreading about her an atmosphere of unrest and fear. ‘Like a mouse between a cat’s paws,’ thought Tuppence. ‘That’s what I feel like…’
This vast smiling monumental old woman, sitting there, almost purring–and yet there was the pat pat of paws playing with something that wasn’t, in spite of the purring, to be allowed to get away…
‘Nonsense–all nonsense! I imagine these things,’ thought Tuppence, staring out of the window into the garden. The rain had stopped. There was a gentle patter of raindrops off the trees.
Tuppence thought: ‘It isn’t all my fancy. I’m not a fanciful person. There is something, some focus of evil there. If I could see–’
Her thoughts broke off abruptly.
At the bottom of the garden the bushes parted slightly. In the gap a face appeared, staring stealthily up at the house. It was the face of the foreign woman who had stood talking to Carl von Deinim in the road.
It was so still, so unblinking in its regard, that it seemed to Tuppence as though it was not human. Staring, staring up at the windows of Sans Souci. It was devoid of expression, and yet there was–yes, undoubtedly there was–menace about it. Immobile, implacable. It represented some spirit, some force, alien to Sans Souci and the commonplace banality of English guesthouse life. ‘So,’ Tuppence thought, ‘might Jael have looked, awaiting to drive the nail through the forehead of sleeping Sisera.’
These thoughts took only a second or two to flash through Tuppence’s mind. Turning abruptly from the window, she murmured something to Mrs O’Rourke, hurried out of the room and ran downstairs and out of the front door.
Turning to the right she ran down the side garden path to where