The Clocks - Agatha Christie [89]
He paused and said: “You really like the beastly things, don’t you?”
“I find the whole subject passionately interesting.”
“I should find it repulsive. Splendid variation in nature, isn’t there? Tastes, I mean. How’s that patent murder of yours? I bet you the girl did it.”
“You’re wrong,” I said.
Beck shook his finger at me in an admonitory and avuncular manner.
“What I say to you is: ‘Be prepared.’ And I don’t mean it in the Boy Scout sense.”
I walked down Charing Cross Road deep in thought.
At the tube station I bought a paper.
I read that a woman, supposed to have collapsed in the rush hour at Victoria Station yesterday, had been taken to hospital. On arrival there she was found to have been stabbed. She had died without recovering consciousness.
Her name was Mrs. Merlina Rival.
II
I rang Hardcastle.
“Yes,” he said in answer to my questions. “It’s just as they say.”
His voice sounded hard and bitter.
“I went to see her night before last. I told her her story about the scar just wouldn’t jell. That the scar tissue was comparatively recent. Funny how people slip up. Just by trying to overdo things. Somebody paid that woman to identify the corpse as being that of her husband, who ran out on her years ago.
“Very well she did it, too! I believed her all right. And then whoever it was tried to be a little too clever. If she remembered that unimportant little scar as an afterthought, it would carry conviction and clinch the identification. If she had plumped out with it straight away, it might have sounded a bit too glib.”
“So Merlina Rival was in it up to the neck?”
“Do you know, I rather doubt that. Suppose an old friend or acquaintance goes to her and says: ‘Look here, I’m in a bit of a spot. A chap I’ve had business dealings with has been murdered. If they identify him and all our dealings come to light, it will be absolute disaster. But if you were to come along and say it’s that husband of yours, Harry Castleton, who did a bunk years ago, then the whole case will peter out.’”
“Surely she’d jib at that—say it was too risky?”
“If so, that someone would say: ‘What’s the risk? At the worst, you’ve made a mistake. Any woman can make a mistake after fifteen years.’ And probably at that point a nice little sum would have been mentioned. And she says O.K. she’ll be a sport! and do it.”
“With no suspicions?”
“She wasn’t a suspicious woman. Why, good lord, Colin, every time we catch a murderer there are people who’ve known him well, and simply can’t believe he could do anything like that!”
“What happened when you went up to see her?”
“I put the wind up her. After I left, she did what I expected she’d do—tried to get in touch with the man or woman who’d got her into this. I had a tail on her, of course. She went to a post office and put through a call from an automatic call box. Unfortunately, it wasn’t the box I’d expected her to use at the end of her own street. She had to get change. She came out of the call box looking pleased with herself. She was kept under observation, but nothing of interest happened until yesterday evening. She went to Victoria Station and took a ticket to Crowdean. It was half past six, the rush hour. She wasn’t on her guard. She thought she was going to meet whoever it was at Crowdean. But the cunning devil was a step ahead of her. Easiest thing in the world to gang up behind someone in a crowd, and press the knife in … Don’t suppose she even knew she had been stabbed. People don’t, you know. Remember that case of Barton in the Levitti Gang robbery? Walked the length of a street before he fell down dead. Just a sudden sharp pain—then you think you’re all right again. But you’re not. You’re dead on your feet although you don’t know it.”
He finished