The Floating Admiral - Agatha Christie [98]
Having walked, in full view of his host, out through the main entrance, Inspector Rudge doubled round to the back one. There he learned, after judicious and veiled questioning, that so far as was known Sir Wilfrid had not left the house at all last Tuesday evening, but had had two friends in to see him. “Leastways, the decanter had gone down by a tidy bit, it had, and there was three glasses to wash up the next morning, to say nothing of more cigarette-ends in the ash-trays than any one man could smoke, so it looks as if there was, don’t it?” Rudge agreed that it did.
As has been said before, Inspector Rudge left nothing to chance.
8
Rudge called in at the police station in Whynmouth before going back to his lodgings, and found that Sergeant Appleton had telephoned through his report from London. He had had no difficulty in obtaining information about Holland. Holland, it seemed, was thoroughly well known in his own line. Several important men had spoken of him to Appleton in the highest, not to say flowery, terms. He was known, apparently, not only all over the East but in London too as the very best type of trading Englishman—energetic, determined, dead honest and reliable, the sort of man whose word it was never necessary to obtain in writing; what he promised, he performed, and what he performed he performed just a shade better than anyone else. Appleton had been impressed, and said so frankly.
About the marriage too there was no room for doubt. It had been performed at a registry office in the West End, and Appleton had inspected the register and spoken with the registrar, who had described husband and wife exactly; he had taken particular notice of them, he said, because they were both so out of the ordinary type.
“Humph!” said Rudge to himself. “And yet according to the Super he’s an accessory after. At least his wife is, which almost always means the same thing. Something funny somewhere.”
He went back to his supper.
As usual he ruminated during the solitary meal. On the whole he was not dissatisfied with his day’s work. It had not been true that he had learned nothing from Sir Wilfrid Denny. Going over the conversation again in his mind Rudge fancied that he had learned one thing of real value, which might lead to quite remarkable results—so remarkable, indeed, that when Rudge first began to realise their possibilities he feared that his imagination, goaded by the events of the last week, was running hopelessly away with him. And yet …
But it was useless to speculate. He must shelve that line of enquiry until there was evidence to support it. In the meantime he would turn his thoughts to the death of Mrs. Mount.
There was one point which told badly against murder, and Superintendent Hawkesworth had, of course, made the most of it. According to the doctor, if Mrs. Mount had been stabbed by some other person, her murderer could not have escaped being spattered, and liberally, too, with blood; her clothing had been of the flimsiest; it would have interposed only a feeble barrier against the stream of blood that must have spurted from a wound in such a position—as indeed the condition of the carpet plainly showed. And yet not a single person so stained had been seen by anyone. Therefore, argued the Superintendent, contemptuously logical, no such person existed.
Rudge, still obstinately fixed in his idea of murder, thought now that he saw a way round this difficulty; and it was a way, too, which might be made to carry several other of the peculiar circumstances of the death. Perfectly simple too: Mrs. Mount had been stabbed from behind, not from in front at all. And that argued that her murderer must be a man. But of this the Inspector was already convinced. If he was right and Mrs. Mount really had been murdered, the man who had killed her was the same as the murderer of Admiral Penistone. Rudge had no doubt at all about that. And he had killed her to close her mouth, which she was just about to open against him.
From the weapon, that usually hopeful source of enquiry,