The Floating Admiral - Agatha Christie [55]
“Now, sir,” he opened briskly, “when we last met you told a tale which was, you will admit, in contradiction with what you said just now?”
“These giant intellects! Yes, I told you I was in bed at Whynmouth. Actually I was here. A discrepancy.”
“Excuse me, sir, but what I’m getting at is this—was it all untrue, what you told me? For instance, I have it down here that you were not seen by anybody after eleven o’clock. Do you still stick to that? It doesn’t seem quite so likely, does it? Perhaps you would try to remember anybody you passed on your way out here—you will have walked, I suppose? Or did you come by the omnibus?”
“The last ’bus, my dear Rudge, as you and I know very well, leaves at half-past ten. No, I walked; and I passed some of the gentlemen who had recently left the Lord Marshall, but they did not look as if they were likely to preserve a clear memory of their impressions. There were some lovers about, but I am afraid I cannot swear to their features, and I doubt if they could to mine. I had no speech with anybody.”
“Didn’t meet one of our men, for example?”
There was a fraction of a pause, almost as if a ready invention were suddenly at fault.
“No, I think not,” was the answer given. “Once I looked up a side-street, and thought I saw a policeman’s lantern being flashed, but it might have been somebody lighting a bicycle lamp. I can’t remember which street it was, now.”
“And you would be coming straight along the main road?”
“All the way.”
“Now, then, sir, let’s get at this, if you don’t mind. Were you meaning to pay this rather late visit all the time? Or were you delayed on the road? Or did the idea just come to you suddenly, when it was already closing-time or close on it?”
“My dear Inspector, you are a little elementary. I have no doubt the Boots told you that he saw my shoes out in the passage. And therefore the story I have decided to tell you is that I was already in process of going to bed when an accident made me alter my purpose. Looking out from my window, I saw a man turning away from the front door whom I seemed to recognise by the set of his shoulders. Then I told myself I was a fool; something about the hat convinced me that he was a clergyman. Then reflection told me that clergymen are not thrown out of pubs at closing-time. And I felt convinced, I don’t know how, that it was poor old Penistone. I wanted to see him, as you know; I threw on the rest of my clothes hastily and went out into the street. There was no sign of him then, of course, but I hurried down the road I supposed he would be taking; and in the end—well, in the end I came all the way here.”
“On the off-chance of finding him still awake, late at night like that?”
“Inspector, I do not know whether you are a married man, or whether your bosom has always been impervious to the softer emotions. But if you will ask anyone who has been violently in love, he will tell you that a lover thinks nothing of walking a mile or two merely to stand outside a window and sentimentalise among the rhododendrons. That is all I would have done, if I had not found the lights going strong in the poor old Admiral’s study.”
“You saw them as you came along?”
“Do you know, you would get much more information if you didn’t try to catch a fellow out all the time. Of course, I didn’t see them from the road. I had come round into the lawn, and saw them from there. I went up and knocked, and the Admiral let me in through the french window. He told me I had come just in time, ‘quite dramatic,’ he said—he was in the act of making out for his niece the document we had been waiting for these weeks past, his consent to our marriage. And, sure enough, it was