The Floating Admiral - Agatha Christie [33]
Rudge puffed away at his pipe and flicked over the pages of his notebook. The maid—yes, Jennie Merton: nice little thing, and quite intelligent. She had given him a pretty clear picture of Elma Fitzgerald and her uncle and the household as a whole. Had she, though? Had he not been a shade too ready to take her opinion as reliable? She had been there just three weeks; and yet when she had told him that Elma and the Admiral were “sharp” with one another, and that Elma and Holland did not “hold hands” much and that she could not understand the whys and wherefores of Elma’s variability in getting herself up and putting on her best clothes—well, had not he been a bit too ready to think that there was something mysterious, almost sinister, in all of this? More likely the other maid, the one who had been so bored that she had left after a week of Rundel Croft, could have told him the inner history of the Admiral’s household: perhaps they were used to a gayer life. … Anyhow, she must have been pretty thoroughly bored if she had chucked her wages in order to get away. He pulled himself up sharply; here he was, on the brink of labelling the vanished maid as a foreign adventuress—and all on the strength of a few words of Jennie Merton’s.
And when he came to think about it, there was something, well, a little confusing about Jennie’s account of the morning, and the disappearance of that white evening dress. Emery, apparently, had found Jennie, and Jennie had gone to wake up her mistress and to tell her she was wanted (the whole process taking no less than ten minutes). Then Jennie was told to clear out at once, as her mistress wished to get up. But at some stage she was told to pack a few things for the night. And when she started on the packing—and that, presumably, was while her mistress was being interviewed downstairs—the white frock had vanished and was nowhere to be found. Yet Jennie blandly assumed that the frock was afterwards packed in the bag by her mistress, as if that explained everything. It certainly seemed to suggest that her wits were not so wonderfully sharp after all. And what was more, he would have another word or two with her on the subject.
There was certainly a good job of work to be done at Rundel Croft. That was not to say there was nothing to do at the Vicarage. If the two boys had found no trace of the weapon, a proper search might need to be organised. And then the Vicar’s hat: on the one hand he had been so quick to remember where he had absent-mindedly left it, which seemed a bit inconsistent; and on the other he had shown no perturbation when the subject was mentioned—at any rate infinitely less than at other points in the interview.
Inspector Rudge knocked out his pipe and started up the car. He was for Rundel Croft, and as he turned into the drive he found yet another reason for his decision—the traces in the boat and boat-house. He left the car in front of the house and hurried round and down in search of his two subordinates. They greeted him in a manner which suggested that they were bursting with news.
“Well, Sergeant?” he asked. “Anything important? Found the weapon?”
“No, sir, but—”
“What, then? The footprints?”
“Er—no, sir.”
“H’m. Well, we’ll hear about it in a minute.”
Then he realised that he was being rather needlessly abrupt and that Sergeant Appleton in particular was now wearing a distinctly sullen expression.
“Sorry,” he said with a pleasant smile. “The point is that we’ve a lot to get through and I want to get started at once on the