Postern of Fate (Tommy and Tuppence Series) - Agatha Christie [47]
‘Not really,’ said Tommy, ‘I don’t think so.’
‘Why don’t you think so?’
‘Well, because if she, Mary Jordan, was here to find out something, and if she did find out something, then perhaps when they–I mean Commander X or other people–there must have been other people too in it–when they found out that she’d found out something–’
‘Now don’t get me muddled again,’ said Tuppence. ‘If you say things like that, it’s very muddling. Yes. Go on.’
‘All right. Well, when they found out that she’d found out a lot of things, well, then they had to–’
‘To silence her,’ said Tuppence.
‘You make it sound like Phillips Oppenheim now,’ said Tommy. ‘And he was before 1914, surely.’
‘Well, anyway, they had to silence Mary before she could report what she’d found out.’
‘There must be a little more to it than that,’ said Tommy. ‘Perhaps she’d got hold of something important. Some kind of papers or written document. Letters that might have been sent or passed to someone.’
‘Yes. I see what you mean. We’ve got to look among a different lot of people. But if she was one of the ones to die because of a mistake that had been made about the vegetables, then I don’t see quite how it could be what Alexander called “one of us”. It presumably wasn’t one of his family.’
‘It could have been like this,’ said Tommy. ‘It needn’t have been actually someone in the house. It’s very easy to pick wrong leaves looking alike, bunch ’em all up together and take them into the kitchen; you wouldn’t, I think, make them really–I mean, not really–too lethal. Just the people at one particular meal would get rather ill after it and they’d send for a doctor and the doctor would get the food analysed and he’d realize somebody’d made a mistake over vegetables. He wouldn’t think anyone had done it on purpose.’
‘But then everybody at that meal would have died,’ said Tuppence. ‘Or everybody would have been ill but not died.’
‘Not necessarily,’ said Tommy. ‘Suppose they wanted a certain person–Mary J.–to die, and they were going to give a dose of poison to her, oh, in a cocktail before the lunch or dinner or whatever it was or in coffee or something after the meal–actual digitalin, or aconite or whatever it is in foxgloves–’
‘Aconite’s in monkshood, I think,’ said Tuppence.
‘Don’t be so knowledgeable,’ said Tommy. ‘The point is everyone gets a mild dose by what is clearly a mistake, so everyone gets mildly ill–but one person dies. Don’t you see, if most people were taken ill after whatever it was–dinner or lunch one day and it was looked into, and they found out about the mistake, well, things do happen like that. You know, people eat fungus instead of mushrooms, and deadly nightshade berries children eat by mistake because the berries look like fruit. Just a mistake and people are ill, but they don’t usually all die. Just one of them does, and the one that did die would be assumed to have been particularly allergic to whatever it was and so she had died but the others hadn’t. You see, it would pass off as really due to the mistake and they wouldn’t have looked to see or even suspected there was some other way in which it happened–’
‘She might have got a little ill like the others and then the real dose might have been put in her early tea the next morning,’ said Tuppence.
‘I’m sure, Tuppence, that you’ve lots of ideas.’
‘About that part of it, yes,’ said Tuppence. ‘But what about the other things? I mean who and what and why? Who was the “one of us”–“one of them” as we’d better say now–who had the opportunity? Someone staying down here, friends of other people perhaps? People who brought a letter, forged perhaps, from a friend saying “Do be kind to my friend, Mr or Mrs Murray Wilson, or some name, who is down here. She is so anxious to see your pretty garden,” or something. All that would be easy enough.’
‘Yes, I think it would.’
‘In that case,’ said Tuppence, ‘there’s perhaps something still here in the house that would explain what happened to me today and yesterday, too.’
‘What happened to