Ordeal by Innocence - Agatha Christie [29]
“So you weren’t surprised,” said Calgary, “when he was arrested for murder?”
“Frankly, yes, I was surprised. Not because the idea of murder would have been particularly repugnant to Jacko. He was the sort of young man who is conscienceless but the kind of murder he’d done did surprise me. Oh, I know he had a violent temper and all that. As a child he often hurled himself on another child or hit him with some heavy toy or bit of wood. But it was usually a child smaller than himself, and it was usually not so much blind rage as the wish to hurt or get hold of something that he himself wanted. The kind of murder I’d have expected Jacko to do, if he did one, was the type where a couple of boys go out on a raid; then, when the police come after them, the Jackos say ‘Biff him on the head, bud. Let him have it. Shoot him down.’ They’re willing for murder, ready to incite to murder, but they’ve not got the nerve to do murder themselves with their own hands. That’s what I should have said. Now it seems,” added the doctor, “I would have been right.”
Calgary stared down at the carpet, a worn carpet with hardly any of its pattern remaining.
“I didn’t know,” he said, “what I was up against. I didn’t realize what it was going to mean to the others. I didn’t see that it might—that it must—”
The doctor was nodding gently.
“Yes,” he said. “It looks that way, doesn’t it? It looks as though you’ve got to put it right there amongst them.”
“I think,” said Calgary, “that that’s really what I came to talk to you about. There doesn’t seem, on the face of it, any real motive for any of them to have killed her.”
“Not on the face of it,” agreed the doctor. “But if you go a little behind the face of it—oh, yes, I think there’s plenty of reason why someone might have wanted to kill her.”
“Why?” asked Calgary.
“You feel it’s really your business, do you?”
“I think so. I can’t help feeling so.”
“Perhaps I should feel the same in your place … I don’t know. Well, what I’d say is that none of them really belonged to themselves. Not so long as their mother—I’ll call her that for convenience—was alive. She had a good hold of them still, you know, all of them.”
“In what way?”
“Financially she’d provided for them. Provided for them handsomely. There was a large income. It was divided between them in such proportions as the Trustees thought fit. But although Mrs. Argyle herself was not one of the Trustees, nevertheless her wishes, so long as she was alive, were operative.” He paused a minute and then went on.
“It’s interesting in a way, how they all tried to escape. How they fought not to conform to the pattern that she’d arranged for them. Because she did arrange a pattern, and a very good pattern. She wanted to give them a good home, a good education, a good allowance and a good start in the professions that she chose for them. She wanted to treat them exactly as though they were hers and Leo Argyle’s own children. Only of course they weren’t hers and Leo Argyle’s own children. They had entirely different instincts, feelings, aptitudes and demands. Young Micky now works as a car salesman. Hester more or less ran away from home to go on the stage. She fell in love with a very undesirable type and was absolutely no good as an actress. She had to come home. She had to admit—and she didn’t like admitting—that her mother had been right. Mary Durrant insisted on marrying a man during the war whom her mother warned her not to marry. He was a brave and