Postern of Fate (Tommy and Tuppence Series) - Agatha Christie [36]
‘Well, it would be of course. The cellar is full of cobwebs. There wasn’t anything there, anyway,’ said Tuppence. ‘At least there were some bottles of bay rum.’
‘Bay rum?’ said Tommy. ‘That’s interesting.’
‘Is it?’ said Tuppence. ‘Does one drink it? It seems to me most unlikely.’
‘No,’ said Tommy, ‘I think people used to put it on their hair. I mean men, not women.’
‘I believe you’re right,’ said Tuppence. ‘I remember my uncle–yes, I had an uncle who used bay rum. A friend of his used to bring it him from America.’
‘Oh really? That seems very interesting,’ said Tommy.
‘I don’t think it is particularly interesting,’ said Tuppence. ‘It’s no help to us, anyway. I mean, you couldn’t hide anything in a bottle of bay rum.’
‘Oh, so that’s what you’ve been doing.’
‘Well, one has to start somewhere,’ said Tuppence. ‘It’s just possible if what your pal said to you was true, something could be hidden in this house, though it’s rather difficult to imagine where it could be or what it could be, because, you see, when you sell a house or die and go out of it, the house is then of course emptied, isn’t it? I mean, anyone who inherits it takes the furniture out and sells it, or if it’s left, the next person comes in and they sell it, and so anything that’s left in now would have belonged to the last tenant but one and certainly not much further back than that.’
‘Then why should somebody want to injure you or injure me or try to get us to leave this house–unless, I mean, there was something here that they didn’t want us to find?’
‘Well, that’s all your idea,’ said Tuppence. ‘It mightn’t be true at all. Anyway, it’s not been an entirely wasted day. I have found some things.’
‘Anything to do with Mary Jordan?’
‘Not particularly. The cellar, as I say, is not much good. It had a few old things to do with photography, I think. You know, a developing lamp or something like they used to use in old days, with red glass in it, and the bay rum. But there were no sort of flagstones that looked as though you could pull them up and find anything underneath. There were a few decayed trunks, some tin trunks and a couple of old suitcases, but things that just couldn’t be used to put anything in any more. They’d fall to bits if you kicked them. No. It was a wash-out.’
‘Well, I’m sorry,’ said Tommy. ‘So no satisfaction.’
‘Well, there were some things that were interesting. I said to myself, one has to say something to oneself–I think I’d better go upstairs now and take the cobwebs off before I go on talking.’
‘Well, I think perhaps you had,’ said Tommy. ‘I shall like looking at you better when you’ve done that.’
‘If you want to get the proper Darby and Joan feeling,’ said Tuppence, ‘you must always look at me and consider that your wife, no matter what her age, still looks lovely to you.’
‘Tuppence dearest,’ said Tommy, ‘you look excessively lovely to me. And there is a kind of roly-poly of a cobweb hanging down over your left ear which is most attractive. Rather like the curl that the Empress Eugenie is sometimes represented as having in pictures. You know, running along the corner of her neck. Yours seems to have got a spider in it, too.’
‘Oh,’ said Tuppence, ‘I don’t like that.’
She brushed the web away with her hand. She duly went upstairs and returned to Tommy later. A glass was awaiting her. She looked at it doubtfully.
‘You aren’t trying to make me drink bay rum, are you?’
‘No. I don’t think I particularly want to drink bay rum myself.’
‘Well,’ said Tuppence, ‘if I may get on with what I was saying–’
‘I should like you to,’ said Tommy. ‘You’ll do it anyway, but I would like to feel it was because I urged you to do so.’
‘Well, I said to myself, “Now if I was going to hide anything in this house that I didn’t want anyone else to find, what sort of place would I choose?”’
‘Yes,’ said Tommy, ‘very logical.’
‘And so I thought, what places are there where one can hide things? Well, one of them of course is Mathilde’s stomach.’
‘I