The Floating Admiral - Agatha Christie [124]
Chapter 7. I suppose Miss Sayers thinks the Vicar knew something about it all. The length of the rope ought to indicate that the Vicarage boat was twice moored that night, and loosed each time by a cutting of the painter from a position of disadvantage; hence the missing two feet of rope, which should be hanging up somewhere, unless deliberately removed since the murder. The double loosing of the boat suggests either that there were two separate plots afoot, or else that there has been a very elaborate frame-up.
The return of the Hollands, with their story of having seen Penistone alive after midnight, seems to put a wholly new complexion on the story; I wish I could discover what. If the permission to marry was genuine, their motive for murder ceases, and their motive for hurry is difficult to see. If they were the murderers, why throw suspicion on themselves by their haste to marry? It all beats me, and I wish she had not left me to conduct the interview.
Anyhow, this is my solution:
Walter Fitzgerald took strongly after his mother and could, with make-up, pass as the Admiral, his uncle. It was probably thus that he managed to shift a peccadillo of his own in Shanghai on to his uncle’s shoulders. The Admiral suspected this; which is why he collected papers in his desk calculated to blast Walter’s reputation if he reappeared in Europe. Almost more important, the Admiral held and was suppressing papers which would have proved Walter’s innocence in the matter of forgery, and would have made it possible for him to reappear in Society. Walter survived the War, and ran away with Celia Mount, the Vicar’s wife, in 1920. Celia, to further his interests, went to act as (French) maid to Elma, the sister. Elma knew that her brother meant to recover the papers, but not that he intended to murder, and thus silence, his uncle. The Admiral came to Lingham so as to be near Denny, whom he was blackmailing. Celia, finding her husband so close, went to see him and urged him to divorce her. He refused on conscientious grounds. She left, having taken a wax impression of the key of the Admiral’s desk.
Holland had somehow become an enemy of Walter’s in China. Walter therefore decided to saddle him with whatever suspicion attached to the murder. Elma was not in love with Holland, but wanted to marry him so as to get the full control of her own money. Penistone refused his consent, because he suspected Holland, whom he had met in Sir Wilfrid’s house, of acting in Sir Wilfrid’s interests.
Walter and Celia, on the fatal night, motored down to Lingham. They knew from Elma the plans of the Rundel Croft household. Celia was put down at the Vicarage, where she found the Vicar in the garden, and persuaded him to ferry her across in his boat and detain the Admiral in conversation, while she went into the study and secured the papers “needed to save an innocent man.” The Vicar had to cut his painter, owing to the state of the tide. Celia secured the papers, about 10.30; and sent a telephone message as from Elma (who was upstairs, ignorant of her presence) asking Holland to come round at midnight. Meanwhile (the Vicar still talking to the Admiral) Walter has gone to the inn and posed as Penistone, hoping thus to implicate Holland. (It would be found that he had not taken the train, and that Holland had gone out at night; it would be assumed that the murder had taken place, and the body set adrift, at or near Whynmouth. Perhaps the plotters made a mistake about the tides.) Then Walter returned to Rundel Croft, where