Ordeal by Innocence - Agatha Christie [38]
“M’m, yes, well—yes that might be so, I suppose,” said MacMaster.
“Do you think—what do you think?”
“It’s more to the point,” MacMaster pointed out, “what you are thinking.”
The young man said bitterly:
“I suppose, if I wasn’t a doctor, I shouldn’t even begin to think such things. She’d be my girl and my girl could do no wrong. But as it is—”
“Yes—come on. You’d better get it off your chest.”
“You see, I know something of what goes on in Hester’s mind. She—she’s a victim of early insecurity.”
“Quite so,” said MacMaster. “That’s the way we put it nowadays.”
“She hasn’t had time yet to get properly integrated. She was suffering, at the time of the murder, from a perfectly natural feeling of an adolescent young woman—resentment of authority—an attempt to escape from smother-love which is responsible for so much harm nowadays. She wanted to rebel, to get away. She’s told me all this herself. She ran away and joined a fourth-class touring theatrical company. Under the circumstances I think her mother behaved very reasonably. She suggested that Hester should go to London and go to RADA and study acting properly if she wanted to do so. But that wasn’t what Hester wanted to do. This running away to act was just a gesture really. She didn’t really want to train for the stage, or to take up the profession seriously. She just wanted to show she could be on her own. Anyway, the Argyles didn’t try to coerce her. They gave her a quite handsome allowance.”
“Which was very clever of them,” said MacMaster.
“And then she had this silly love affair with a middle-aged member of the company. In the end she realized for herself that he was no good. Mrs. Argyle came along and dealt with him and Hester came home.”
“Having learnt her lesson, as they used to say in my young days,” said MacMaster. “But of course one never liked learning one’s lessons. Hester didn’t.”
Donald Craig went on anxiously:
“She was full, still, of pent-up resentment; all the worse because she had to acknowledge secretly, if not openly, that her mother had been perfectly right; that she was no good as an actress and that the man she had lavished her affections on wasn’t worth it. And that, anyway, she didn’t really care for him. ‘Mother knows best.’ It’s always galling to the young.”
“Yes,” said MacMaster. “That was one of poor Mrs. Argyle’s troubles, though she’d never have thought of it like that. The fact was she was nearly always right, that she did know best. If she’d been one of those women who run into debt, lose their keys, miss trains, and do foolish actions that other people have to help them out of, her entire family would have been much fonder of her. Sad and cruel, but there’s life for you. And she wasn’t a clever enough woman to get her own way by guile. She was complacent, you know. Pleased with her own power and judgment and quite quite sure of herself. That’s a very difficult thing to come up against when you’re young.”
“Oh, I know,” said Donald Craig. “I realize all that. It’s because I realize it so well that I feel—that I wonder—” He stopped.
MacMaster said gently:
“I’d better say it for you, hadn’t I, Don? You’re afraid that it was your Hester who heard the quarrel between her mother and Jacko, who got worked up by hearing it, perhaps, and who, in a fit of rebellion against authority, and against her mother’s superior assumption of omniscience, went into that room, picked up the poker and killed her. That’s what you’re afraid of, isn’t it?”
The young man nodded miserably.
“Not really. I don’t believe it, but—but I feel—I feel that it could have happened. I don’t feel Hester has got the poise, the balance to—I feel she’s young for her age, uncertain of herself, liable to have brainstorms. I look at that household and I don’t feel that any of them are likely to have done such a thing until I come to Hester. And then—then I’m not sure.”
“I see,” said Dr. MacMaster. “Yes, I see.”
“I don’t really blame her,” said Don Craig quickly. “I don’t think the poor child really knew what she was