The Moving Finger - Agatha Christie [45]
“Yes,” I said thoughtfully. “It fits well enough. And somehow or other, Poison Pen found out. How did she find out, superintendent?”
“You’re not used to living in the country, Mr. Burton. It’s a kind of miracle how things get round. First of all there’s the telephone call. Who overheard it your end?” I reflected.
“I answered the telephone originally. Then I called up the stairs to Partridge.”
“Mentioning the girl’s name?”
“Yes—yes, I did.”
“Anyone overhear you?”
“My sister or Miss Griffith might have done so.”
“Ah, Miss Griffith. What was she doing up there?”
I explained.
“Was she going back to the village?”
“She was going to Mr. Pye first.”
Superintendent Nash sighed.
“That’s two ways it could have gone all over the place.”
I was incredulous.
“Do you mean that either Miss Griffith or Mr. Pye would bother to repeat a meaningless little bit of information like that?”
“Anything’s news in a place like this. You’d be surprised. If the dressmaker’s mother has got a bad corn everybody hears about it! And then there is this end. Miss Holland, Rose—they could have heard what Agnes said. And there’s Fred Rendell. It may have gone round through him that Agnes went back to the house that afternoon.”
I gave a slight shiver. I was looking out of the window. In front of me was a neat square of grass and a path and the low prim gate.
Someone had opened the gate, had walked very correctly and quietly up to the house, and had pushed a letter through the letter box. I saw, hazily, in my mind’s eye, that vague woman’s shape. The face was blank—but it must be a face that I knew….
Superintendent Nash was saying:
“All the same, this narrows things down. That’s always the way we get ’em in the end. Steady, patient elimination. There aren’t so very many people it could be now.”
“You mean—?”
“It knocks out any women clerks who were at their work all yesterday afternoon. It knocks out the schoolmistress. She was teaching. And the district nurse. I know where she was yesterday. Not that I ever thought it was any of them, but now we’re sure. You see, Mr. Burton, we’ve got two definite times now on which to concentrate—yesterday afternoon, and the week before. On the day of Mrs. Symmington’s death from, say, a quarter past three (the earliest possible time at which Agnes could have been back in the house after her quarrel) and four o’clock when the post must have come (but I can get that fixed more accurately with the postman). And yesterday from ten minutes to three (when Miss Megan Hunter left the house) until half past three or more probably a quarter past three as Agnes hadn’t begun to change.”
“What do you think happened yesterday?”
Nash made a grimace.
“What do I think? I think a certain lady walked up to the front door and rang the bell, quite calm and smiling, the afternoon caller… Maybe she asked for Miss Holland, or for Miss Megan, or perhaps she had brought a parcel. Anyway Agnes turns round to get a salver for cards, or to take the parcel in, and our ladylike caller bats her on the back of her unsuspecting head.”
“What with?”
Nash said:
“The ladies round here usually carry large sizes in handbags. No saying what mightn’t be inside it.”
“And then stabs her through the back of the neck and bundles her into the cupboard? Wouldn’t that be a hefty job for a woman?”
Superintendent Nash looked at me with rather a queer expression.
“The woman we’re after isn’t normal—not by a long way—and that type of mental instability goes with surprising strength. Agnes wasn’t a big girl.”
He paused and then asked: “What made Miss Megan Hunter think of looking in that cupboard?”
“Sheer instinct,” I said.
Then I asked: “Why drag Agnes into the cupboard? What was the point?”
“The longer it was before the body was found, the more difficult it would