Ordeal by Innocence - Agatha Christie [87]
“What you don’t know, Dr. Calgary, is that there’s a big magnolia tree growing up by the side of the house. The kids used to climb it. Micky in particular. It was one of his ways in and out of the house. He could have shinned up that tree, gone into Durrant’s room, stabbed him, back and out again. Oh, it needed split-second timing, but it’s astonishing what audacity will do sometimes. And he was desperate. At all costs he had to prevent Tina and Durrant meeting. To be safe, he had to kill them both.”
Calgary thought for a moment or two.
“You said just now, Superintendent, that Tina has recovered consciousness. Wasn’t she able to say definitely who stabbed her?”
“She wasn’t very coherent,” said Huish slowly. “In fact I doubt if she was conscious in the proper sense of the term.”
He gave a tired smile.
“All right, Dr. Calgary, I’ll tell you exactly what she said. First of all she said a name. Micky….”
“She has accused him, then,” said Calgary.
“That’s what it looks like,” said Huish, nodding his head. “The rest of what she said didn’t make sense. It’s a bit fantastic.”
“What did she say?”
Huish looked down at the pad in front of him.
“‘Micky.’ Then a pause. Then, ‘The cup was empty …’ then another pause, and then, ‘The dove on the mast.’” He looked at Calgary. “Can you make any sense of that?”
“No,” said Calgary. He shook his head and said wonderingly: “The dove on the mast… That seems a very extraordinary thing to say.”
“No masts and no doves as far as we know,” said Huish. “But it meant something to her, something in her own mind. But it mayn’t, you know, have been anything to do with the murder. Goodness knows what realms of fancy she’s floating in.”
Calgary was silent for some moments. He sat thinking things over. He said: “You’ve arrested Micky?”
“We’ve detained him. He will be charged within twenty-four hours.”
Huish looked curiously at Calgary.
“I gather that this lad, Micky, wasn’t your answer to the problem?”
“No,” said Calgary. “No, Micky wasn’t my answer. Even now—I don’t know.” He got up. “I still think I’m right,” he said, “but I quite see that I’ve not got enough to go on for you to believe me. I must go out there again. I must see them all.”
“Well,” said Huish, “be careful of yourself, Dr. Calgary. What is your idea, by the way?”
“Would it mean anything to you,” said Calgary, “if I told you that it is my belief that this was a crime of passion?”
Huish’s eyebrows rose.
“There are a lot of passions, Dr. Calgary,” he said. “Hate, avarice, greed, fear, they’re all passions.”
“When I said a crime of passion,” said Calgary, “I meant exactly what one usually means by that term.”
“If you mean Gwenda Vaughan and Leo Argyle,” said Huish, “that’s what we’ve thought all along, you know, but it doesn’t seem to fit.”
“It’s more complicated than that,” said Arthur Calgary.
Twenty-four
It was again dusk when Arthur Calgary came to Sunny Point on an evening very like the evening when he had first come there. Viper’s Point, he thought to himself as he rang the bell.
Once again events seemed to repeat themselves. It was Hester who opened it. There was the same defiance in her face, the same air of desperate tragedy. Behind her in the hall he saw, as he had seen before, the watchful, suspicious figure of Kirsten Lindstrom. It was history repeating itself.
Then the pattern wavered and changed. The suspicion and the desperation went out of Hester’s face. It broke up into a lovely, welcoming smile.
“You,” she said. “Oh, I’m so glad you’ve come!”
He took her hands in his.
“I want to see your father, Hester. Is he upstairs in the library?”
“Yes. Yes, he’s there with Gwenda.”
Kirsten Lindstrom came forward towards them.
“Why do you come here again?” she said accusingly. “Look at the trouble you brought last time! See what has happened to us all. Hester’s life ruined, Mr. Argyle’s life ruined—and two deaths. Two! Philip Durrant and little Tina. And it is your doing—all your doing!”
“Tina is not dead yet,” said Calgary, “and I have something here to do that I cannot leave undone.”
“What