The Clocks - Agatha Christie [73]
I was in luck. Sheila could come straight away. She had, however, an appointment at twelve o’clock. I said that I would have finished with her well before that as I had an appointment myself.
I was outside the swing doors of the Clarendon when Sheila appeared. I stepped forward.
“Mr. Douglas Weatherby at your service,” I said.
“Was it you rang up?”
“It was.”
“But you can’t do things like that.” She looked scandalized.
“Why not? I’m prepared to pay the Cavendish Bureau for your services. What does it matter to them if we spend your valuable and expensive time in the Buttercup Café just across the street instead of dictating dull letters beginning ‘Yours of the 3rd prontissimo to hand,’ etc. Come on, let’s go and drink indifferent coffee in peaceful surroundings.”
The Buttercup Café lived up to its name by being violently and aggressively yellow. Formica tabletops, plastic cushions and cups and saucers were all canary colour.
I ordered coffee and scones for two. It was early enough for us to have the place practically to ourselves.
When the waitress had taken the order and gone away, we looked across the table at each other.
“Are you all right, Sheila?”
“What do you mean—am I all right?”
Her eyes had such dark circles under them that they looked violet rather than blue.
“Have you been having a bad time?”
“Yes—no—I don’t know. I thought you had gone away?”
“I had. I’ve come back.”
“Why?”
“You know why.”
Her eyes dropped.
“I’m afraid of him,” she said after a pause of at least a minute, which is a long time.
“Who are you afraid of?”
“That friend of yours—that inspector. He thinks … he thinks I killed that man, and that I killed Edna too….”
“Oh, that’s just his manner,” I said reassuringly. “He always goes about looking as though he suspected everybody.”
“No, Colin, it’s not like that at all. It’s no good saying things just to cheer me up. He’s thought that I had something to do with it right from the beginning.”
“My dear girl, there’s no evidence against you. Just because you were there on the spot that day, because someone put you on the spot….”
She interrupted.
“He thinks I put myself on the spot. He thinks it’s all a trumped-up story. He thinks that Edna in some way knew about it. He thinks that Edna recognized my voice on the telephone pretending to be Miss Pebmarsh.”
“Was it your voice?” I asked.
“No, of course it wasn’t. I never made that telephone call. I’ve always told you so.”
“Look here, Sheila,” I said. “Whatever you tell anyone else, you’ve got to tell me the truth.”
“So you don’t believe a word I say!”
“Yes, I do. You might have made that telephone call that day for some quite innocent reason. Someone may have asked you to make it, perhaps told you it was part of a joke, and then you got scared and once you’d lied about it, you had to go on lying. Was it like that?”
“No, no, no! How often have I got to tell you?”
“It’s all very well, Sheila, but there’s something you’re not telling me. I want you to trust me. If Hardcastle has got something against you, something that he hasn’t told me about—”
She interrupted again.
“Do you expect him to tell you everything?”
“Well, there’s no reason why he shouldn’t. We’re roughly members of the same profession.”
The waitress brought our order at this point. The coffee was as pale as the latest fashionable shade of mink.
“I didn’t know you had anything to do with the police,” Sheila said, slowly stirring her coffee round and round.
“It’s not exactly the police. It’s an entirely different branch. But what I was getting at was, that if Dick doesn’t tell me things he knows about you, it’s for a special reason. It’s because he thinks I’m interested in you. Well, I am interested in you. I’m more than that. I’m for you, Sheila, whatever you’ve done. You came out of that house that day scared to death. You were really scared. You weren’t pretending. You couldn’t have acted a part the