Peril at End House - Agatha Christie [84]
‘But Mademoiselle Nick has her appendix removed quite satisfactorily so the forged will is no good. For the moment, that is. Then the attempts on her life begin. The Crofts are hopeful once more. Finally, I announce her death. The chance is too good to be missed. The forged will is immediately posted to M. Vyse. Of course, to begin with, they naturally thought her much richer than she is. They knew nothing about the mortgage.’
‘What I really want to know, M. Poirot,’ said Lazarus, ‘is how you actually got wise to all this. When did you begin to suspect?’
‘Ah! there I am ashamed. I was so long—so long. There were things that worried me—yes. Things that seemed not quite right. Discrepancies between what Mademoiselle Nick told me and what other people told me. Unfortunately, I always believed Mademoiselle Nick.
‘And then, suddenly, I got a revelation. Mademoiselle Nick made one mistake. She was too clever. When I urged her to send for a friend she promised to do so—and suppressed the fact that she had already sent for Mademoiselle Maggie. It seemed to her less suspicious—but it was a mistake.’
‘For Maggie Buckley wrote a letter home immediately on arrival, and in it she used one innocent phrase that puzzled me: “I don’t see why Nick should have telegraphed for me the way she did. Tuesday would have done just as well.” What did that mention of Tuesday mean? It could only mean one thing. Maggie had been coming to stay on Tuesday anyway. But in that case Mademoiselle Nick had lied—or had at any rate suppressed the truth.
‘And for the first time I looked at her in a different light. I criticized her statements. Instead of believing them, I said, “Suppose this were not true.” I remembered the discrepancies. “How would it be if every time it was Mademoiselle Nick who was lying and not the other person?”
‘I said to myself: “Let us be simple. What has really happened?”
‘And I saw that what had really happened was that Maggie Buckley had been killed. Just that! But who could want Maggie Buckley dead?
‘And then I thought of something else—a few foolish remarks that Hastings had made not five minutes before. He had said that there were plenty of abbreviations for Margaret—Maggie, Margot, etc. And it suddenly occurred to me to wonder what was Mademoiselle Maggie’s real name?
‘Then, tout d’un coup, it came to me! Supposing her name was Magdala! It was a Buckley name, Mademoiselle Nick had told me so. Two Magadala Buckleys. Supposing…
‘In my mind I ran over the letters of Michael Seton’s that I had read. Yes—there was nothing impossible. There was a mention of Scarborough—but Maggie had been in Scarborough with Nick—her mother had told me so.
‘And it explained one thing which had worried me. Why were there so few letters? If a girl keeps her love letters at all, she keeps all of them. Why these select few? Was there any peculiarity about them?
‘And I remembered that there was no name mentioned in them. They all began differently—but they began with a term of endearment. Nowhere in them was there the name—Nick.
‘And there was something else, something that I ought to have seen at once—that cried the truth aloud.’
‘What was that?’
‘Why—this. Mademoiselle Nick underwent an operation for appendicitis on February 27th last. There is a letter of Michael Seton’s dated March 2nd, and no mention of anxiety, of illness or anything unusal. That ought to have shown me that the letters were written to a different person altogether.
‘Then I went through a list of questions that I had made. And I answered them in the light of my new idea.
‘In all but a few isolated questions the result was simple and convincing. And I answered, too, another question which I had asked myself earlier. Why did Mademoiselle Nick buy a black dress? The answer