The Clocks - Agatha Christie [56]
The buzzer on Hardcastle’s table sounded. He picked up the receiver.
“Yes? … What? … Who found her? Did she give her name? … I see. Carry on.” He put down the receiver again. His face as he turned to me was a changed face. It was stern, almost vindictive.
“They’ve found a girl dead in a telephone box on Wilbraham Crescent,” he said.
“Dead?” I stared at him. “How?”
“Strangled. With her own scarf!”
I felt suddenly cold.
“What girl? It’s not—”
Hardcastle looked at me with a cold, appraising glance that I didn’t like.
“It’s not your girlfriend,” he said, “if that’s what you’re afraid of. The constable there seems to know who she is. He says she’s a girl who works in the same office as Sheila Webb. Edna Brent her name is.”
“Who found her? The constable?”
“She was found by Miss Waterhouse, the woman from Number 18. It seems she went to the box to make a telephone call as her phone was out of order and found the girl there huddled down in a heap.”
The door opened and a police constable said:
“Doctor Rigg telephoned that he’s on his way, sir. He’ll meet you at Wilbraham Crescent.”
Seventeen
It was an hour and a half later and Detective Inspector Hardcastle sat down behind his desk and accepted with relief an official cup of tea. His face still held its bleak, angry look.
“Excuse me, sir, Pierce would like a word with you.”
Hardcastle roused himself.
“Pierce? Oh, all right. Send him in.”
Pierce entered, a nervous-looking young constable.
“Excuse me, sir, I thought per’aps as I ought to tell you.”
“Yes? Tell me what?”
“It was after the inquest, sir. I was on duty at the door. This girl—this girl that’s been killed. She—she spoke to me.”
“Spoke to you, did she? What did she say?”
“She wanted to have a word with you, sir.”
Hardcastle sat up, suddenly alert.
“She wanted to have a word with me? Did she say why?”
“Not exactly, sir. I’m sorry, sir, if I—if I ought to have done something about it. I asked her if she could give me a message or—or if perhaps she could come to the station later on. You see, you were busy with the chief constable and the coroner and I thought—”
“Damn!” said Hardcastle, under his breath. “Couldn’t you have told her just to wait until I was free?”
“I’m sorry, sir.” The young man flushed. “I suppose if I’d known, I ought to have done so. But I didn’t think it was anything important. I don’t think she thought it was important. It was just something she said she was worried about.”
“Worried?” said Hardcastle. He was silent for quite a minute turning over in his mind certain facts. This was the girl he had passed in the street when he was going to Mrs. Lawton’s house, the girl who had wanted to see Sheila Webb. The girl who had recognized him as she passed him and had hesitated a moment as though uncertain whether to stop him or not. She’d had something on her mind. Yes, that was it. Something on her mind. He’d slipped up. He’d not been quick enough on the ball. Filled with his own purpose of finding out a little more about Sheila Webb’s background, he had overlooked a valuable point. The girl had been worried? Why? Now, probably, they’d never know why.
“Go on, Pierce,” he said, “tell me all you can remember.” He added kindly, for he was a fair man: “You couldn’t know that it was important.”
It wasn’t, he knew, any good to pass on his own anger and frustration by blaming it on the boy. How should the boy have known? Part of his training was to uphold discipline, to make sure that his superiors were only accosted at the proper times and in the proper places. If the girl had said it was important or urgent, that would have been different. But she hadn’t been, he thought, remembering his first view of her in the office, that kind of girl. A slow thinker. A girl probably distrustful of her own mental processes.
“Can you remember exactly what happened, and what she said to you, Pierce?” he asked.
Pierce was looking at him with a kind of eager gratitude.
“Well, sir, she just come up to me when everyone was leaving and she sort of hesitated a moment and looked round just