The Mirror Crack'd - Agatha Christie [68]
Jim frowned as he picked up a bit of strato-cruiser and consulted the instructional diagram.
‘I do wish you’d listen when I’m talking,’ said Cherry.
‘What did you say?’
‘Arthur Badcock and Mary Bain.’
‘For the Lord’s sake, Cherry, his wife’s only just dead! You women! I’ve heard he’s in a terrible state of nerves still — jumps if you speak to him.’
‘I wonder why…I shouldn’t have thought he’d take it that way, would you?’
‘Can you clear off this end of the table a bit?’ said Jim, relinquishing even a passing interest in the affairs of his neighbours. ‘Just so that I can spread some of these pieces out a bit.’
Cherry heaved an exasperated sigh.
‘To get any attention round here, you have to be a super jet, or a turbo prop,’ she said bitterly. ‘You and your construction models!’
She piled the tray with the remains of supper and carried it over to the sink. She decided not to wash up, a necessity of daily life she always put off as long as possible. Instead, she piled everything into the sink, haphazard, slipped on a corduroy jacket and went out of the house, pausing to call over her shoulder:
‘I’m just going to slip along to see Gladys Dixon. I want to borrow one of her Vogue patterns.’
‘All right, old girl.’ Jim bent over his model.
Casting a venomous look at her next-door neighbour’s front door as she passed, Cherry went round the corner into Blenheim Close and stopped at No. 16. The door was open and Cherry tapped on it and went into the hall calling out:
‘Is Gladdy about?’
‘Is that you, Cherry?’ Mrs Dixon looked out of the kitchen. ‘She’s upstairs in her room, dressmaking.’
‘Right. I’ll go up.’
Cherry went upstairs to a small bedroom in which Gladys, a plump girl with a plain face, was kneeling on the floor, her cheeks flushed, and several pins in her mouth, tacking up a paper pattern.
‘Hallo, Cherry. Look, I got a lovely bit of stuff at Harper’s sale at Much Benham. I’m going to do that cross-over pattern with frills again, the one I did in Terylene before.’
‘That’ll be nice,’ said Cherry.
Gladys rose to her feet, panting a little.
‘Got indigestion now,’ she said.
‘You oughtn’t to do dressmaking right after supper,’ said Cherry, ‘bending over like that.’
‘I suppose I ought to slim a bit,’ said Gladys. She sat down on the bed.
‘Any news from the studios?’ asked Cherry, always avid for film news.
‘Nothing much. There’s a lot of talk still. Marina Gregg came back on the set yesterday — and she created something frightful.’
‘What about?’
‘She didn’t like the taste of her coffee. You know, they have coffee in the middle of the morning. She took one sip and said there was something wrong with it. Which was nonsense, of course. There couldn’t have been. It comes in a jug straight from the canteen. Of course I always put hers in a special china cup, rather posh — different from the others — but it’s the same coffee. So there couldn’t have been anything wrong with it, could there?’
‘Nerves, I suppose,’ said Cherry. ‘What happened?’
‘Oh, nothing. Mr Rudd just calmed everyone down. He’s wonderful that way. He took the coffee from her and poured it down the sink.’
‘That seems to be rather stupid,’ said Cherry slowly.
‘Why — what do you mean?’
‘Well, if there was anything wrong with it — now nobody will ever know.’
‘Do you think there really might have been?’ asked Gladys looking alarmed.
‘Well —’ Cherry shrugged her shoulders, ‘— there was something wrong with her cocktail the day of the fête, wasn’t there, so why not the coffee? If at first you don’t succeed, try, try, try again.’
Gladys shivered.
‘I don’t half like it, Cherry,’ she said. ‘Somebody’s got it in for her all right. She’s had more letters, you know, threatening her — and there was that bust business the other day.’
‘What bust business?’
‘A marble bust. On the set. It’s a corner of a room in some Austrian palace or other. Funny name like Shotbrown. Pictures and china and