The Hollow - Agatha Christie [43]
‘The revolver was not, of course, loaded when you put it away, Sir Henry?’
‘Certainly not.’
‘And you keep your ammunition–where?’
‘Here.’ Sir Henry took a key from a pigeon-hole and unlocked one of the lower drawers of the desk.
‘Simple enough,’ thought Grange. The Christow woman had seen where it was kept. She’d only got to come along and help herself. Jealousy, he thought, plays the dickens with women. He’d lay ten to one it was jealousy. The thing would come clear enough when he’d finished the routine here and got on to the Harley Street end. But you’d got to do things in their proper order.
He got up and said:
‘Well, thank you, Sir Henry. I’ll let you know about the inquest.’
Chapter 13
They had the cold ducks for supper. After the ducks there was a caramel custard which, Lady Angkatell said, showed just the right feeling on the part of Mrs Medway.
Cooking, she said, really gave great scope to delicacy of feeling.
‘We are only, as she knows, moderately fond of caramel custard. There would be something very gross, just after the death of a friend, in eating one’s favourite pudding. But caramel custard is so easy–slippery if you know what I mean–and then one leaves a little on one’s plate.’
She sighed and said that she hoped they had done right in letting Gerda go back to London.
‘But quite correct of Henry to go with her.’
For Sir Henry had insisted on driving Gerda to Harley Street.
‘She will come back here for the inquest, of course,’ went on Lady Angkatell, meditatively eating caramel custard. ‘But naturally she wanted to break it to the children–they might see it in the papers and only a Frenchwoman in the house–one knows how excitable–a crise de nerfs, possibly. But Henry will deal with her, and I really think Gerda will be quite all right. She will probably send for some relations–sisters perhaps. Gerda is the sort of person who is sure to have sisters–three or four, I should think, probably living at Tunbridge Wells.’
‘What extraordinary things you do say, Lucy,’ said Midge.
‘Well, darling, Torquay if you prefer it–no, not Torquay. They would be at least sixty-five if they were living at Torquay. Eastbourne, perhaps, or St Leonards.’
Lady Angkatell looked at the last spoonful of caramel custard, seemed to condole with it, and laid it down very gently uneaten.
David, who only liked savouries, looked down gloomily at his empty plate.
Lady Angkatell got up.
‘I think we shall all want to go to bed early tonight,’ she said. ‘So much has happened, hasn’t it? One has no idea from reading about these things in the paper how tiring they are. I feel, you know, as though I had walked about fifteen miles. Instead of actually having done nothing but sit down–but that is tiring, too, because one does not like to read a book or a newspaper, it looks so heartless. Though I think perhaps the leading article in The Observer would have been all right–but not the News of the World. Don’t you agree with me, David? I like to know what the young people think, it keeps one from losing touch.’
David said in a gruff voice that he never read the News of the World.
‘I always do,’ said Lady Angkatell. ‘We pretend we get it for the servants, but Gudgeon is very understanding and never takes it out until after tea. It is a most interesting paper, all about women who put their heads in gas ovens–an incredible number of them!’
‘What will they do in the houses of the future which are all electric?’ asked Edward Angkatell with a faint smile.
‘I suppose they will just have to decide to make the best of things–so much more sensible.’
‘I disagree with you, sir,’ said David, ‘about the houses of the future being all electric. There can be communal heating laid on from a central supply. Every working-class house should be completely labour-saving.’
Edward Angkatell said hastily that he was afraid that was a subject he was not very well up in. David’s lip curled with scorn.
Gudgeon