Ordeal by Innocence - Agatha Christie [85]
Coaxing her, soothing her, Kirsten did her best to make her relax.
Donald Craig strode out of the sitting room.
“Who said that girl had fainted?” he demanded.
Micky stared at him.
“But she did faint,” he said.
“Where was she when she fainted?”
“She was with me … She came out of the house and walked to meet me. Then—she just collapsed.”
“Collapsed, did she? Yes, she collapsed all right,” said Donald Craig grimly. He moved quickly towards the telephone “I must get hold of an ambulance,” he said, “at once.”
“An ambulance?” Both Kirsten and Micky stared at him. Mary did not seem to have heard.
“Yes.” Donald was dialling angrily. “That girl didn’t faint,” he said. “She was stabbed. Do you hear? Stabbed in the back. We’ve got to get her to hospital at once.”
Twenty-three
I
In his hotel room, Arthur Calgary went over and over the notes he had made.
From time to time, he nodded his head.
Yes … he was on the right tack now. To begin with, he had made the mistake of concentrating on Mrs. Argyle. In nine cases out of ten that would have been the right procedure. But this was the tenth case.
All along he had felt the presence of an unknown factor. If he could once isolate and identify that factor, the case would be solved. In seeking it he had been obsessed by the dead woman. But the dead woman, he saw now, was not really important. Any victim, in a sense, would have done.
He had shifted his viewpoint—shifted it back to the moment when all this had begun. He had shifted it back to Jacko.
Not just Jacko as a young man unjustly sentenced for a crime he did not commit—but Jacko, the intrinsic human being. Was Jacko, in the words of the old Calvinistic doctrine, “a vessel appointed to destruction?” He’d been given every chance in life, hadn’t he? Dr. MacMaster’s opinion, at any rate, was that he was one of those who are born to go wrong. No environment could have helped him or saved him. Was that true? Leo Argyle had spoken of him with indulgence, with pity. How had he put it? “One of Nature’s misfits.” He had accepted the modern psychological approach. An invalid, not a criminal. What had Hester said? Bluntly, that Jacko was always awful!
A plain, childish statement. And what was it Kirsten Lindstrom had said? That Jacko was wicked! Yes, she had put it as strongly as that. Wicked! Tina had said: “I never liked him or trusted him.” So they all agreed, didn’t they, in general terms? It was only in the case of his widow that they’d come down from the general to the particular. Maureen Clegg had thought of Jacko entirely from her own point of view. She had wasted herself on Jacko. She had been carried away by his charm and she was resentful of the fact. Now, securely remarried, she echoed her husband’s views. She had given Calgary a forthright account of some of Jacko’s dubious dealings, and the methods by which he had obtained money. Money….
In Arthur Calgary’s fatigued brain the word seemed to dance on the wall in gigantic letters. Money! Money! Money! Like a motif in an opera, he thought. Mrs. Argyle’s money! Money put into trust! Money put into an annuity! Residual estate left to her husband! Money got from the bank! Money in the bureau drawer! Hester rushing out to her car with no money in her purse, getting two pounds from Kirsten Lindstrom. Money found on Jacko, money that he swore his mother had given him.
The whole thing made a pattern—a pattern woven out of irrelevant details about money.
And surely, in that pattern, the unknown factor was becoming clear.
He looked at his watch. He had promised to ring up Hester at an agreed time. He drew the telephone towards him and asked for the number.
Presently her voice came to him, clear, rather childish.
“Hester. Are you all right?”
“Oh, yes, I’m all right.”
It took him a moment or two to grasp the implication of that accented word. Then he