The Floating Admiral - Agatha Christie [79]
In fact the whole thing was darned fishy, and he would be bound to get some valuable information from Mount. Somewhat cheered, Rudge set out for the Vicarage.
CHAPTER X
By Edgar Jepson
THE BATHROOM BASIN
POLICE CONSTABLE RICHARD HEMPSTEAD had been cherishing his aunt, Mrs. Emery. At first when she returned to her native neighbourhood and settled down at Rundel Croft, he had showed himself nephewly, but in moderation, certainly not to the point of cherishing her, and even now the cherishing, it is to be feared, was not a natural effusion of pure nepotic feeling. It was the result of feeling, indeed, of two feelings: a strong feeling, a hunch, in fact, that the secret of the murder of the Admiral was to be found in Rundel Croft, and a scarcely less strong feeling that the society of Jennie Merton was good for him.
So it came about that during the last week he had been often in the house. When he was on his round, all kinds of reasons for just looking in on his aunt occurred to him; the house being empty, except for her and Jennie and Emery, burglars might have broken in, or the chickens might have been stolen; or he had to ask her some question, connected with the mystery, of no great importance; or he had to give her some information, of no great importance, about the progress of the police towards the solution of it. He was gifted with a quite decent creative imagination, which, doubtless, was often of use to him in the witness-box. When he was off duty he would, in nephewly fashion, drop in to tea or supper.
It is to be doubted that Mrs. Emery, who had rather more than her fair share of womanly intelligence, as the wives of the Emerys of this world generally have, ascribed his assiduity to the finer feelings of a nephew. She perceived that Jennie was, as a rule, at hand—she would have a good view of the drive from the windows of the upper part of the house, where most of her work lay—to open the door to him when he called. Also she had once heard her say, as she was bringing him from the back door to the kitchen: “Oh, go hon, Mr. Hempstead!”
Well, as Mrs. Emery saw it, Jennie was a good girl, as girls go nowadays, and showed quite a lot of sense in the way she was picking up cooking, and cooking was what a man really wanted when he was married; and in any case Dick was one of those pig-headed young men, who will go their own way, and he might do worse. Anyhow, who was she to interfere with love’s young dream?
So it came about that Hempstead had had the run of Rundel Croft, for Elma Holland and her husband had not been in his way. If sometimes he was not alone, but accompanied by Jennie, when he was having the run of it, it did no one any harm. Also, he was a useful man to have about, for in a big house like Rundel Croft little things were always getting out of order and going wrong, and he was useful with his hands. Mrs. Emery soon fell into the way of getting him to set the little things right that the Admiral had been used to set right, putting a spring in a lock that had ceased to work, restoring a patch of paint that had been rubbed off, to maintain in fact the spick and spanness the Admiral had demanded. He was a useful visitor.
He had inspired into Jennie his strong opinion that the solution of the mystery of the murder was to be found in the house, and though she would have helped him in his search, or at any rate superintended it at intervals, in any case, that identity of opinion made her help him with enthusiasm.
Together they searched the house with uncommon thoroughness, every nook and cranny