Ordeal by Innocence - Agatha Christie [74]
“As you might say, Mr. Huish, I didn’t take much notice at the time. You know what these children are. Always talking and thinking about space ships and things. And he comes home to me and he says, ‘Mum, I’ve seen a sputnik, it’s come down.’ Well, I mean, before that it was flying saucers. It’s always something. It’s these Russians that go putting things into their heads.”
Superintendent Huish sighed and thought how much easier it would be if mothers would not insist on accompanying their sons and talking for them.
“Come on, Cyril,” he said, “you went home and told your Mum—that’s right, isn’t it?—that you’d seen this Russian sputnik—whatever it was.”
“Didn’t know no better then,” said Cyril. “I was only a kid then. That’s two years ago. Course, I know better now.”
“Them bubble cars,” his mother put in, “was quite new at the time. There hadn’t been one about locally, so naturally when he saw it—and bright red too—he didn’t realize as it was just an ordinary car. And when we heard the next morning as Mrs. Argyle had been done in, Cyril he says to me, ‘Mum,’ he says, ‘it’s them Russians,’ he says, ‘they come down in that sputnik of theirs and they must have got in and killed her.’ ‘Don’t talk such nonsense,’ I said. And then of course later in the day we hear her own son has been arrested for having done it.”
Superintendent Huish addressed himself patiently once more to Cyril.
“It was in the evening, I understand? What time, do you remember?”
“I’d had me tea,” said Cyril, breathing hard in the effort of remembrance, “and Mum was out at the Institute, so I went out again a bit with the boys and we larked around a bit up that way down the new road.”
“And what was you doing there, I’d like to know,” his mother put in.
PC Good, who’d brought in this promising piece of evidence, interposed. He knew well enough what Cyril and the boys had been doing down the new road. The disappearance of chrysanthemums had been angrily reported from several householders there, and he knew well enough that the bad characters of the village surreptitiously encouraged the younger generation to supply them with flowers which they themselves took to market. This was not the moment, PC Good knew, to go into past cases of delinquency. He said heavily:
“Boys is boys, Mrs. Green, they gets larking around.”
“Yes,” said Cyril, “just having a game or two, we were. And that’s where I saw it. ‘Coo,’ I said, ‘what’s this?’ O’ course I know now. I’m not a silly kid any longer. It was just one o’ them bubble cars. Bright red, it was.”
“And the time?” said Superintendent Huish patiently.
“Well, as I say, I’d had me tea an’ we’d gone out there and larked. I heard the clock strike and ‘Coo,’ I thought, ‘Mum’ll be home and won’t she create if I’m not there.’ So I went home. I told her that I thought I’d seen that Russian satellite come down. Mum said it were all lies, but it wasn’t. Only o’ course, I knows better now. I was just a kid then, see.”
Superintendent Huish said that he saw. After a few more questions he dismissed Mrs. Green and her offspring. PC Good, remaining behind, put on the gratified expression of a junior member of the force who has shown intelligence and hopes that it will count in his favour.
“It just come to me,” said PC Good, “what that boy’d been around saying about Russians doing Mrs. Argyle in. I thought to meself, ‘Well, that may mean something.’”
“It does mean something,” said the superintendent. “Miss Tina Argyle has a red bubble car, and it looks as though I’d have to ask her a few more questions.”
III
“You were there that night, Miss Argyle?”
Tina looked at the superintendent. Her hands lay loosely in her lap, her eyes, dark, unwinking, told nothing.
“It is so long ago,” she said, “really I cannot remember.”
“Your car was seen there,” said Huish.
“Was it?”
“Come now, Miss Argyle. When we asked you for an account of your movements on that night, you told us that you went home and didn’t go out that evening. You made yourself supper and listened to the gramophone. Now, that isn’t true. Just