Sleeping Murder - Agatha Christie [37]
“Yes, that will be quite all right.”
Gwenda rose to her feet and Walter Fane rose also.
Gwenda said, with exactly the little rush she had rehearsed beforehand, “I—I asked specially for you, because I think—I mean I believe—that you once knew my—my mother.”
“Indeed?” Walter Fane put a little additional social warmth into his manner. “What was her name?”
“Halliday. Megan Halliday. I think—I’ve been told—that you were once engaged to her?”
A clock on the wall ticked. One, two, one two, one two.
Gwenda suddenly felt her heart beating a little faster. What a very quiet face Walter Fane had. You might see a house like that—a house with all the blinds pulled down. That would mean a house with a dead body in it. (What idiotic thoughts you do have, Gwenda!)
Walter Fane, his voice unchanged, unruffled, said, “No, I never knew your mother, Mrs. Reed. But I was once engaged, for a short period, to Helen Kennedy who afterwards married Major Halliday as his second wife.”
“Oh, I see. How stupid of me. I’ve got it all wrong. It was Helen—my stepmother. Of course it’s all long before I remember. I was only a child when my father’s second marriage broke up. But I heard someone say that you’d once been engaged to Mrs. Halliday in India—and I thought of course it was my own mother—because of India, I mean … My father met her in India.”
“Helen Kennedy came out to India to marry me,” said Walter Fane. “Then she changed her mind. On the boat going home she met your father.”
It was a plain unemotional statement of fact. Gwenda still had the impression of a house with the blinds down.
“I’m so sorry,” she said. “Have I put my foot in it?”
Walter Fane smiled—his slow, pleasant smile. The blinds were up.
“It’s nineteen or twenty years ago, Mrs. Reed,” he said. “One’s youthful troubles and follies don’t mean much after that space of time. So you are Halliday’s baby daughter. You know, don’t you, that your father and Helen actually lived here in Dillmouth for a while?”
“Oh yes,” said Gwenda, “that’s really why we came here. I didn’t remember it properly, of course, but when we had to decide where we’d live in England, I came to Dillmouth first of all, to see what it was really like, and I thought it was such an attractive place that I decided that we’d park ourselves right here and nowhere else. And wasn’t it luck? We’ve actually got the same house that my people lived in long ago.”
“I remember the house,” said Walter Fane. Again he gave that slow, pleasant smile. “You may not remember me, Mrs. Reed, but I rather imagine I used to give you piggybacks once.”
Gwenda laughed.
“Did you really? Then you’re quite an old friend, aren’t you? I can’t pretend I remember you—but then I was only about two and a half or three, I suppose … Were you back on leave from India or something like that?”
“No, I’d chucked India for good. I went out to try tea-planting—but the life didn’t suit me. I was cut out to follow in my father’s footsteps and be a prosy unadventurous country solicitor. I’d passed all my law exams earlier, so I simply came back and went straight into the firm.” He paused and said, “I’ve been here ever since.”
Again there was a pause and he repeated in a lower voice, “Yes—ever since….”
But eighteen years, thought Gwenda, isn’t really such a long time as all that….
Then, with a change of manner, he shook hands with her and said, “Since we seem to be old friends, you really must bring your husband to tea with my mother one day. I’ll get her to write to you. In the meanwhile, eleven o’clock on Thursday?”
Gwenda went out of the office and down the stairs. There was a cobweb in the angle of the stairway. In the middle of the web was a pale, rather nondescript spider. It didn’t look, Gwenda thought, like a real spider. Not the fat juicy kind of spider who caught flies and ate them. It was more like a ghost of a spider. Rather like Walter Fane, in fact.
II
Giles met his wife on the seafront.
“Well?” he asked.
“He was here in Dillmouth at the time,” said Gwenda. “Back from