The Clocks - Agatha Christie [76]
“I doubt that.”
“I’ll tell you something, Dick. When I’ve tidied up my present assignment, I’m quitting. At least—I think I am.”
“Why?”
“I’m like an old-fashioned Victorian clergyman. I have Doubts.”
“Give yourself time.”
I wasn’t sure what he meant by that. I asked him what he himself was looking so worried about.
“Read that.” He passed me the letter he had been studying.
Dear Sir,
I’ve just thought of something. You asked me if my husband had any identifying marks and I said he hadn’t. But I was wrong. Actually he has a kind of scar behind his left ear. He cut himself with a razor when a dog we had jumped up at him, and he had to have it stitched up. It was so small and unimportant I never thought of it the other day.
Yours truly,
Merlina Rival
“She writes a nice dashing hand,” I said, “though I’ve never really fancied purple ink. Did the deceased have a scar?”
“He had a scar all right. Just where she says.”
“Didn’t she see it when she was shown the body?”
Hardcastle shook his head.
“The ear covers it. You have to bend the ear forward before you can see it.”
“Then that’s all right. Nice piece of corroboration. What’s eating you?”
Hardcastle said gloomily that this case was the devil! He asked if I would be seeing my French or Belgian friend in London.
“Probably. Why?”
“I mentioned him to the chief constable who says he remembers him quite well—that Girl Guide murder case. I was to extend a very cordial welcome to him if he is thinking of coming down here.”
“Not he,” I said. “The man is practically a limpet.”
II
It was a quarter past twelve when I rang the bell at 62, Wilbraham Crescent. Mrs. Ramsay opened the door. She hardly raised her eyes to look at me.
“What is it?” she said.
“Can I speak to you for a moment? I was here about ten days ago. You may not remember.”
She lifted her eyes to study me further. A faint frown appeared between her eyebrows.
“You came—you were with the police inspector, weren’t you?”
“That’s right, Mrs. Ramsay. Can I come in?”
“If you want to, I suppose. One doesn’t refuse to let the police in. They’d take a very poor view of it if you did.”
She led the way into the sitting room, made a brusque gesture towards a chair and sat down opposite me. There had been a faint acerbity in her voice, but her manner now resumed a listlessness which I had not noted in it previously.
I said:
“It seems quiet here today … I suppose your boys have gone back to school?”
“Yes. It does make a difference.” She went on, “I suppose you want to ask some more questions, do you, about this last murder? The girl who was killed in the telephone box.”
“No, not exactly that. I’m not really connected with the police, you know.”
She looked faintly surprised.
“I thought you were Sergeant—Lamb, wasn’t it?”
“My name is Lamb, yes, but I work in an entirely different department.”
The listlessness vanished from Mrs. Ramsay’s manner. She gave me a quick, hard, direct stare.
“Oh,” she said, “well, what is it?”
“Your husband is still abroad?”
“Yes.”
“He’s been gone rather a long time, hasn’t he, Mrs. Ramsay? And gone rather a long way?”
“What do you know about it?”
“Well, he’s gone beyond the Iron Curtain, hasn’t he?”
She was silent for a moment or two, and then she said in a quiet, toneless voice:
“Yes. Yes, that’s quite right.”
“Did you know he was going?”
“More or less.” She paused a minute and then said, “He wanted me to join him there.”
“Had he been thinking of it for some time?”
“I suppose so. He didn’t tell me until lately.”
“You are not in sympathy with his views?”
“I was once, I suppose. But you must know that already … You check up pretty thoroughly on things like that, don’t you? Go back into the past, find out who was a fellow traveller, who was a party member, all that sort of thing.”
“You might be able to give us information that would be very useful to us,” I said.
She shook her head.
“No. I can’t do that. I don’t mean that I won’t. You see, he never told me anything definite. I didn’t want to know. I was sick and tired of the whole thing! When Michael told