Partners in Crime_ A Tommy & Tuppence Adventure - Agatha Christie [54]
‘The case stands like this. Captain Sessle was on the verge of discovery and ruin. Suicide would be a natural solution, but the nature of the wound rules that theory out. Who killed him? Was it Doris Evans? Was it the mysterious woman in brown?’
Tommy paused, took a sip of milk, made a wry face, and bit cautiously at the cheesecake.
II
‘Of course,’ murmured Tommy, ‘I saw at once where the hitch in this particular case lay, and just where the police were going astray.’
‘Yes?’ said Tuppence eagerly.
Tommy shook his head sadly.
‘I wish I did. Tuppence, it’s dead easy being the Old Man in the Corner up to a certain point. But the solution beats me. Who did murder the beggar? I don’t know.’
He took some more newspaper cuttings out of his pocket.
‘Further exhibits–Mr Hollaby, his son, Mrs Sessle, Doris Evans.’
Tuppence pounced on the last and looked at it for some time.
‘She didn’t murder him anyway,’ she remarked at last. ‘Not with a hatpin.’
‘Why this certainty?’
‘A lady Molly touch. She’s got bobbed hair. Only one woman in twenty uses hatpins nowadays, anyway–long hair or short. Hats fit tight and pull on–there’s no need for such a thing.’
‘Still, she might have had one by her.’
‘My dear boy, we don’t keep them as heirlooms! What on earth should she have brought a hatpin down to Sunningdale for?’
‘Then it must have been the other woman, the woman in brown.’
‘I wish she hadn’t been tall. Then she could have been the wife. I always suspect wives who are away at the time and so couldn’t have had anything to do with it. If she found her husband carrying on with that girl, it would be quite natural for her to go for him with a hatpin.’
‘I shall have to be careful, I see,’ remarked Tommy.
But Tuppence was deep in thought and refused to be drawn.
‘What were the Sessles like?’ she asked suddenly. ‘What sort of things did people say about them?’
‘As far as I can make out, they were very popular. He and his wife were supposed to be devoted to one another. That’s what makes the business of the girl so odd. It’s the last thing you’d have expected of a man like Sessle. He was an ex-soldier, you know. Came into a good bit of money, retired, and went into this Insurance business. The last man in the world, apparently, whom you would have suspected of being a crook.’
‘It is absolutely certain that he was the crook? Couldn’t it have been the other two who took the money?’
‘The Hollabys? They say they’re ruined.’
‘Oh, they say! Perhaps they’ve got it all in a bank under another name. I put it foolishly, I dare say, but you know what I mean. Suppose they’d been speculating with the money for some time, unbeknownst to Sessle, and lost it all. It might be jolly convenient for them that Sessle died just when he did.’
Tommy tapped the photograph of Mr Hollaby senior with his finger-nail.
‘So you’re accusing this respectable gentleman of murdering his friend and partner? You forget that he parted from Sessle on the links in full view of Barnard and Lecky, and spent the evening in the Dormy House. Besides, there’s the hatpin.’
‘Bother the hatpin,’ said Tuppence impatiently. ‘That hatpin, you think, points to the crime having been committed by a woman?’
‘Naturally. Don’t you agree?’ ‘No. Men are notoriously old-fashioned. It takes them ages to rid themselves of preconceived ideas. They associate hatpins and hairpins with the female sex, and call them “women’s weapons.” They may have been in the past, but they’re both rather out of date now. Why, I haven’t had a hatpin or a hairpin for the last four years.’
‘Then you think –?’
‘That it was a man killed Sessle.