Sparkling Cyanide - Agatha Christie [77]
‘I just felt paralysed I think. I stood there, shaking. You came round to look at him, and I moved back a little, and the waiters came and someone asked for a doctor. And all the time I was standing there frozen. Then suddenly a big lump came in my throat and tears began to run down my cheeks and I jerked open my bag to get my handkerchief. I just fumbled in it, not seeing properly, and got out my handkerchief, but there was something caught up inside the handkerchief—a folded stiff bit of white paper, like the kind you get powders in from the chemist. Only, you see, Anthony, it hadn’t been in my bag when I started from home. I hadn’t had anything like that! I’d put the things in myself when the bag was quite empty—a powder compact, a lip-stick, my handkerchief, my evening comb in its case and a shilling and a couple of sixpences. Somebody had put that packet in my bag—they must have done. And I remembered how they’d found a packet like that in Rosemary’s bag after she died and how it had had cyanide in it. I was frightened, Anthony, I was horribly frightened. My fingers went limp and the packet fluttered down from my handkerchief under the table. I let it go. And I didn’t say anything. I was too frightened. Somebody meant it to look as though I had killed George, and I didn’t.’
Anthony gave vent to a long and prolonged whistle.
‘And nobody saw you?’ he said.
Iris hesitated.
‘I’m not sure,’ she said slowly. ‘I believe Ruth noticed. But she was looking so dazed that I don’t know whether she really noticed—or if she was just staring at me blankly.’
Anthony gave another whistle.
‘This,’ he remarked, ‘is a pretty kettle of fish.’
Iris said:
‘It’s got worse and worse. I’ve been so afraid they’d find out.’
‘Why weren’t your fingerprints on it, I wonder? The first thing they’d do would be to fingerprint it.’
‘I suppose it was because I was holding it through the handkerchief.’
Anthony nodded.
‘Yes, you had luck there.’
‘But who could have put it in my bag? I had my bag with me all the evening.’
‘That’s not so impossible as you think. When you went to dance after the cabaret, you left your bag on the table. Somebody may have tampered with it then. And there are the women. Could you get up and give me an imitation of just how a woman behaves in the ladies’ cloakroom? It’s the sort of thing I wouldn’t know. Do you congregate and chat or do you drift off to different mirrors?’
Iris considered.
‘We all went to the same table—a great long glass-topped one. And we put our bags down and looked at our faces, you know.’
‘Actually I don’t. Go on.’
‘Ruth powdered her nose and Sandra patted her hair and pushed a hairpin in and I took off my fox cape and gave it to the woman and then I saw I’d got some dirt on my hand—a smear of mud and I went over to the washbasins.’
‘Leaving your bag on the glass table?’
‘Yes. And I washed my hands. Ruth was still fixing her face I think and Sandra went and gave up her cloak and then she went back to the glass and Ruth came and washed her hands and I went back to the table and just fixed my hair a little.’
‘So either of those two could have put something in your bag without your seeing?’
‘Yes, but I can’t believe either Ruth or Sandra would do such a thing.’
‘You think too highly of people. Sandra is the kind of Gothic creature who would have burned her enemies at the stake in the Middle Ages—and Ruth would make the most devastatingly practical poisoner that ever stepped this earth.’
‘If it was Ruth why didn’t she say she saw me drop it?’
‘You have me there. If Ruth deliberately planted cyanide on you, she’d take jolly good care you didn’t get rid of it. So it looks as though it wasn’t Ruth. In fact the waiter is far and away the best bet. The waiter, the waiter! If only