Spider's Web - Agatha Christie [49]
‘Oh, I’m all right,’ she replied. ‘I’m pretty tough really, you know. I was just a bit bowled over by opening that door and finding a corpse. Turned me up for the moment, I must admit.’
‘I wondered, perhaps,’ said Clarissa quietly, ‘if you already knew it was there.’
The gardener stared at her. ‘Who? Me?’
‘Yes. You.’
Again seeming to be addressing the entire universe, Hugo said, ‘It doesn’t make sense. Why take the body away? We all know there is a body. We know his identity and everything. No point in it. Why not leave the wretched thing where it was?’
‘Oh, I wouldn’t say there was no point in it, Mr Birch,’ Miss Peake corrected Hugo, leaning across the bridge table to address him. ‘You’ve got to have a body, you know. Habeas corpus and all that. Remember? You’ve got to have a body before you can bring a charge of murder against anybody.’ She turned around to Clarissa. ‘So don’t you worry, Mrs Hailsham-Brown,’ she assured her. ‘Everything’s going to be all right.’
Clarissa stared at her. ‘What do you mean?’
‘I’ve kept my ears open this evening,’ the gardener told her. ‘I haven’t spent all my time lying on the bed in the spare room.’ She looked around at everyone. ‘I never liked that man Elgin, or his wife,’ she continued. ‘Listening at doors, and running to the police with stories about blackmail.’
‘So you heard that?’ Clarissa asked, wonderingly.
‘What I always say is, stand by your own sex,’ Miss Peake declared. She looked at Hugo. ‘Men!’ she snorted. ‘I don’t hold with them.’ She sat down next to Clarissa on the sofa. ‘If they can’t find the body, my dear,’ she explained, ‘they can’t bring a charge against you. And what I say is, if that brute was blackmailing you, you did quite right to crack him over the head and good riddance.’
‘But I didn’t–’ Clarissa began faintly, only to be interrupted by Miss Peake.
‘I heard you tell that Inspector all about it,’ the gardener informed her. ‘And if it wasn’t for that eavesdropping skulking fellow Elgin, your story would sound quite all right. Perfectly believable.’
‘Which story do you mean?’ Clarissa wondered aloud.
‘About mistaking him for a burglar. It’s the blackmail angle that puts a different complexion on it all. So I thought there was only one thing to do,’ the gardener continued. ‘Get rid of the body and let the police chase their tails looking for it.’
Sir Rowland took a few steps backward, staggering in disbelief, as Miss Peake looked complacently around the room. ‘Pretty smart work, even if I do say so myself,’ she boasted.
Jeremy rose, fascinated. ‘Do you mean to say that it was you who moved the body?’ he asked, incredulously.
Everyone was now staring at Miss Peake. ‘We’re all friends here, aren’t we?’ she asked, looking around at them. ‘So I may as well spill the beans. Yes,’ she admitted, ‘I moved the body.’ She tapped her pocket. ‘And I locked the door. I’ve got keys to all the doors in this house, so that was no problem.’
Open-mouthed, Clarissa gazed at her in wonderment. ‘But how? Where–where did you put the body?’ she gasped.
Miss Peake leaned forward and spoke in a conspiratorial whisper. ‘The bed in the spare room. You know, that big four-poster. Right across the head of the bed, under the bolster. Then I remade the bed and lay down on top of it.’
Sir Rowland, flabbergasted, sat down at the bridge table.
‘But how did you get the body up to the spare room?’ Clarissa asked. ‘You couldn’t manage it all by yourself.’
‘You’d be surprised,’ said Miss Peake jovially. ‘Good old fireman’s lift. Slung it over my shoulder.’ With a gesture, she demonstrated how it was done.
‘But what if you had met someone on the stairs?’ Sir Rowland asked her.
‘Ah, but I didn’t,’ replied Miss Peake. ‘The police were in here with Mrs Hailsham-Brown. You three chaps were being kept in the dining-room by then. So I grabbed my chance, and of course grabbed the body too, took it through the hall, locked the library door again, and carried it up the stairs to the spare room.’
‘Well, upon my soul!’ Sir Rowland gasped.
Clarissa got