Parker Pyne Investigates - Agatha Christie [33]
It represented a group of four persons: a bearded man, a plump woman (Mrs Gardner), a tall, lank man with a pleasantly sheepish grin, and somebody in a print dress and apron–herself!
Stupefied, Mrs Rymer gazed at the photograph. Mrs Gardner put the soup down beside her and quietly left the room.
Mrs Rymer sipped the soup mechanically. It was good soup, strong and hot. All the time her brain was in a whirl. Who was mad? Mrs Gardner or herself? One of them must be! But there was the doctor too.
‘I’m Amelia Rymer,’ she said firmly to herself. ‘I know I’m Amelia Rymer and nobody’s going to tell me different.’
She had finished the soup. She put the bowl back on the tray. A folded newspaper caught her eye and she picked it up and looked at the date on it, October 19. What day had she gone to Mr Parker Pyne’s office? Either the fifteenth or the sixteenth. Then she must have been ill for three days.
‘That rascally doctor!’ said Mrs Rymer wrathfully.
All the same, she was a shade relieved. She had heard of cases where people had forgotten who they were for years at a time. She had been afraid some such thing had happened to her.
She began turning the pages of the paper, scanning the columns idly, when suddenly a paragraph caught her eye.
Mrs Abner Rymer, widow of Abner Rymer, the ‘button shank’ king, was removed yesterday to a private home for mental cases. For the past two days she has persisted in declaring she was not herself, but a servant girl named Hannah Moorhouse.
‘Hannah Moorhouse! So that’s it,’ said Mrs Rymer. ‘She’s me and I’m her. Kind of double, I suppose. Well, we can soon put that right! If that oily hypocrite of a Parker Pyne is up to some game or other–’
But at this minute her eye was caught by the name Constantine staring at her from the printed page. This time it was a headline.
DR CONSTANTINE’S CLAIM
At a farewell lecture given last night on the eve of his departure for Japan, Dr Claudius Constantine advanced some startling theories. He declared that it was possible to prove the existence of the soul by transferring a soul from one body to another. In the course of his experiments in the East he had, he claimed, successfully effected a double transfer–the soul of a hypnotized body A being transferred to a hypnotized body B and the soul of body B to the soul of body A. On recovering from the hypnotic sleep, A declared herself to be B, and B thought herself to be A. For the experiment to succeed, it was necessary to find two people with a great bodily resemblance. It was an undoubted fact that two people resembling each other were en rapport. This was very noticeable in the case of twins, but two strangers, varying widely in social position, but with a marked similarity of feature, were found to exhibit the same harmony of structure.
Mrs Rymer cast the paper from her. ‘The scoundrel! The black scoundrel!’
She saw the whole thing now! It was a dastardly plot to get hold of her money. This Hannah Moorhouse was Mr Pyne’s tool–possibly an innocent one. He and that devil Constantine had brought off this fantastic coup.
But she’d expose him! She’d show him up! She’d have the law on him! She’d tell everyone–
Abruptly Mrs Rymer came to a stop in the tide of her indignation. She remembered the first paragraph. Hannah Moorhouse had not been a docile tool. She had protested; had declared her individuality. And what had happened?
‘Clapped into a lunatic asylum, poor girl,’ said Mrs Rymer.
A chill ran down her spine.
A lunatic asylum. They got you in there and they never let you get out. The more you said you were sane, the less they’d believe you. There you were and there you stayed. No, Mrs Rymer wasn’t going to run the risk of that.
The door opened and Mrs Gardner came in.
‘Ah, you’ve drunk your soup, my dear. That’s good. You’ll soon be better now.’
‘When was I taken ill?’ demanded Mrs Rymer.
‘Let me see. It was three days ago–on Wednesday. That was the fifteenth. You were took bad about four o’clock.’
‘Ah!’ The ejaculation was fraught with meaning. It had been just about four o’clock