The Floating Admiral - Agatha Christie [82]
Now, if Inspector Rudge had a weakness, it was for that deceptive fruit, the greengage. The Londoner knows gages only in boxes or barrow-tainted, knows that you have to eat three brackish spheres plucked too early, for the sake of the one sugary perfection plucked too late. But a small boy, Tommy Rudge, had stayed at his grandmother’s somewhere up in Norfolk, thirty years earlier, and had eaten Norfolk gages from just such a wall. Memory, the experienced harpist, plucked at the Inspector’s heart-strings. There was the tree: there were the greengages, each with the golden crack of perfection widening on its jade cheek. The Inspector o’erleaped the years and the three feet of lettuce-bed at the same moment. He plucked, ate, dripped juice from chin and fingers, and dropped the stone at his feet.
As he did so a glint of light caught his eyes and made him peer downwards. The glint explained itself quickly enough, but it was not the bit of broken bottle winking in the sun which held his attention after that first preliminary glance: yet his attention was held—held by a couple of greengage stones, not of his spitting-out, but not yet dry. By them lay a handkerchief, juice-stained, rolled into a ball, and on the bare ground at the foot of the tree were footprints, small, neat footprints. “Size three,” thought Rudge, mechanically appraising, “and French heels at that!”
Stooping without moving in his tracks, he drew the handkerchief to him, shook it out. It unrolled easily, for it was still wet: somebody clearly enough had wiped fingertips messed with juice upon it. Then, unsteadily rising, still careful not to disturb the neighbouring tracks, he examined his find.
It was stained, it was crumpled; but the linen was fine, the embroidery delicate. “Two-fifteen a dozen,” estimated the accurate Inspector Rudge, who had a gift for acquiring information of the oddest kind, and whose mother, a lady’s maid in her day, had always seen to it that his information was correct. “Two-fifteen at a guess, unless it’s sales,” repeated Inspector Rudge thoughtfully, when, fingering the corners, he discovered in one of them, small, detached, not part of the pattern, the initial C.
Very thoughtfully Inspector Rudge smoothed and folded the handkerchief, produced from his note-book a clean envelope, tucked it in, and restored the whole to an inner pocket. Yet more thoughtfully he glanced about him, hesitated over the stones, shook his head, considered the footprints, shook his head again, then, with a precaution entirely unlike his impetuous arrival, high-stepped off the bed on to the path, and began pacing majestically to and fro once more.
The late afternoon sun poured down upon his bowed shoulders till his blue serge suit shone sordidly, as blue serge will on a fine day. An inquisitive robin, mistaking him by his gait for the gardener, kept pace with him in the bushes. So slow was his progress that Michaelmas daisies, swaying over the path and pushed aside as he passed, had time to beat his broad back resentfully. For the Inspector was deep in thought and something more than thought. He was floundering, as once or twice before in his strange life he had floundered, out of the shallow of common sense into the unplumbed deeps of instinct. A mood was on him: that part of his mind which, as he put it, “felt through his elbows” was in charge. Something was wrong, somewhere, somehow, and Inspector Rudge knew it. There was no one in the house as far as he could tell. He had spied into the hall and found it empty: the placard on the back door was explanation enough. Someone might be hiding in the house, of course. But why should they