The Floating Admiral - Agatha Christie [100]
Rudge nodded. “Never mind about them. I want you to look after somebody else. That reporter chap from the Evening Gazette. Know him?”
“Him with the short hair and the spectacles?”
“Yes. Calls himself Graham.”
“Isn’t that his real name, then, Mr. Rudge?”
“It is not. His real name,” said Rudge, “is Walter Fitzgerald.”
9
“You should have rung me up last night, Rudge,” said Major Twyfitt severely. “Or at least you should have got in touch with the Superintendent. The fellow might have got away.”
“I had a man at the back of the Lord Marshall as well as the front all night, sir,” pleaded Rudge.
The Superintendent said nothing, but his look was voluble.
“How long have you known this man Graham was Fitzgerald?”
“Not definitely till I identified that specimen of typing I took in his room as coming from the same machine that typed the Admiral’s consent to Mrs. Holland’s marriage. Of course, I suspected it before,” said Rudge, with a side-glance at the Superintendent, “as soon as I heard about Hempstead finding those remains of a beard in the washbasin trap at Rundel Croft; because I remembered that this reporter’s face was a good deal lighter round the chin than on the forehead. I thought at first that he’d been dosing himself with some kind of sunburn application.”
“And you say you rang up the Evening Gazette last night?”
“Yes, sir; and he’s their man all right. And he had a beard when they saw him last. The editor told me he’s not their real crime expert. He’s ill as it happens, so when Fitzgerald rang them up on the morning after the murder to tell them he was on the spot and ask if he could cover it, they said he could, though I gather he wasn’t on their salary-list before. Sort of free-lance contributor, but they liked his stuff. ‘Graham’ was the name he wrote under.”
“Yes; that gave him an excuse to be on the spot and keep in touch with developments of course. Very handy, from his point of view. He doesn’t know you suspect him? You’re sure of that?”
“I’ve got no reason to think he does, sir.”
“Well, let’s hope he doesn’t,” said the Superintendent with energy. “Because if he’s got wind of it and gets away—well, you’ll be for it, Rudge.”
“I didn’t think there was enough evidence for an arrest,” pleaded Rudge. “Not then.”
“But you do now?”
“Well, that’s for you and the Major to say,” replied Rudge smugly. “But I haven’t wasted the extra time, sir, I can assure you.” This was no less than the truth. Rudge had not got to bed at all the previous night.
“Tell us what you’ve done, then, man,” said the Superintendent impatiently.
Rudge cleared his throat. “Perhaps I’d better run through the case as I saw it before last night, more or less. I don’t mean the facts. We know those. I mean, the ideas that the facts gave me.”
The silence of the other two encouraged him to do so.
“Well, first of all, of course, there was the question, why was the Admiral’s body in a boat at all? So much easier, if you’ve got a boat handy, to have taken it out to sea and sunk it with a few weights. The only reason I could see was to create a misleading impression; and the only misleading impression I could see was that the body had floated down-stream instead of up—in other words, that the murder had been committed some way above Lingham. That gave me a pointer towards a theory that it had actually been committed in Whynmouth, or at any rate between Whynmouth and Lingham. Anyhow, I concentrated on that area.”
“Even then,” observed Major Twyfitt, “it seems a pretty poor reason for not sinking the body and hiding the fact of murder altogether.”
“That also occurred to me, sir,” Rudge replied, a trifle complacently. “I was sure there was another reason, and I believe I know now what it is. Old Ware put me on to it. I’m as certain as I am of anything that he knows more than he’s let on; and I’m pretty certain he knows who killed the Admiral. Anyhow, he dropped me a hint. He said, how did I know it was murder?”
“What’s that?” demanded the Superintendent.