Ordeal by Innocence - Agatha Christie [24]
“It was horrid at the time,” she said. “All the neighbours talking and the worry of it all, though I must say the police were very kind, all things considered. Talked to me very politely and spoke very nice about everything.”
He wondered if she had had any feeling for the dead man. He asked her a question abruptly.
“Did you think he’d done it?” he said.
“Do you mean, do I think he’d done his mother in?”
“Yes. Just that.”
“Well, of course—well—well—yes, I suppose I did in a way. Of course, he said he hadn’t, but I mean you never could believe anything Jackie said, and it did seem as though he must have done. You see, he could get very nasty, Jackie could, if you stood up against him. I knew he was in a hole of some kind. He wouldn’t say much to me, just swore at me when I asked him about it. But he went off that day and he said that it was going to be all right. His mother, he said, would stump up. She’d have to. So of course I believed him.”
“He had never told his family about your marriage, I understand. You hadn’t met them?”
“No. You see, they were classy people, had a big house and all that. I wouldn’t have gone down very well. Jackie thought it best to keep me dark. Besides, he said if he took me along his mother’d want to run my life as well as his. She couldn’t help running people, he said, and he’d had enough of it—we did very well as we were, he said.”
She appeared to display no resentment, but to think, indeed, that her husband’s behaviour had been perfectly natural.
“I suppose it was a great shock to you when he was arrested?”
“Well, naturally. However could he do such a thing? I said to myself, but then, you can’t get away from things. He always had a very nasty temper when anything upset him.”
Calgary leaned forward.
“Let’s put it like this. It really seemed to you not at all a surprising thing that your husband should have hit his mother on the head with a poker and stolen a large quantity of money from her?”
“Well, Mr.—er—Calgary, if you’ll excuse me, that’s putting it in rather a nasty way. I don’t suppose he meant to hit her so hard. Don’t suppose he meant to do her in. She just refused to give him some money, he caught up the poker and he threatened her, and when she stuck it out he lost control of himself and gave her a swipe. I don’t suppose he meant to kill her. That was just his bad luck. You see, he needed the money very badly. He’d have gone to prison if he hadn’t got it.”
“So—you don’t blame him?”
“Well, of course I blamed him … I don’t like all that nasty violent behaviour. And your own mother, too! No, I don’t think it was a nice thing to do at all. I began to think as Joe was right in telling me I oughtn’t to have had anything to do with Jackie. But, you know how it is. It’s ever so difficult for a girl to make up her mind. Joe, you see, was always the steady kind. I’ve known him a long time. Jackie was different. He’d got education and all that. He seemed very well off, too, always splashing his money about. And of course he had a way with him, as I’ve been telling you. He could get round anybody. He got round me all right. ‘You’ll regret it, my girl,’ that’s what Joe said. I thought that was just sour grapes and the green-eyed monster, if you understand what I mean. But Joe turned out to be quite right in the end.”
Calgary looked at her. He wondered if she still failed to understand the full implications of his story.
“Right in exactly what way?” he asked.
“Well, landing me up in the proper mess he did. I mean, we’ve always been respectable. Mother brought us up very careful. We’ve always had things nice and no talk. And there was the police arresting my husband! And all the neighbours knowing. In all the papers it was. News of the World and all the rest of them. And ever so many reporters coming round and asking questions. It put me in a very nasty position altogether.”
“But, my dear child,” said Arthur Calgary, “you do realize now that he didn’t do it?”
For a moment the fair, pretty face looked bewildered.
“Of course! I was forgetting. But all the same—well,