The Moving Finger - Agatha Christie [46]
I said, frowning:
“But if Agnes were suspicious of this person—”
Nash interrupted me.
“She wasn’t. Not to the pitch of definite suspicion. She just thought it ‘queer.’ She was a slow-witted girl, I imagine, and she was only vaguely suspicious with a feeling that something was wrong. She certainly didn’t suspect that she was up against a woman who would do murder.”
“Did you suspect that?” I asked.
Nash shook his head. He said, with feeling:
“I ought to have known. That suicide business, you see, frightened Poison Pen. She got the wind up. Fear, Mr. Burton, is an incalculable thing.”
“Yes, fear. That was the thing we ought to have foreseen. Fear—in a lunatic brain….
“You see,” said Superintendent Nash, and somehow his words made the whole thing seem absolutely horrible. “We’re up against someone who’s respected and thought highly of—someone, in fact, of good social position!”
III
Presently Nash said that he was going to interview Rose once more. I asked him, rather diffidently, if I might come too. Rather to my surprise he assented cordially.
“I’m very glad of your cooperation, Mr. Burton, if I may say so.”
“That sounds suspicious,” I said. “In books when a detective welcomes someone’s assistance, that someone is usually the murderer.”
Nash laughed shortly. He said: “You’re hardly the type to write anonymous letters, Mr. Burton.”
He added: “Frankly, you can be useful to us.”
“I’m glad, but I don’t see how.”
“You’re a stranger down here, that’s why. You’ve got no preconceived ideas about the people here. But at the same time, you’ve got the opportunity of getting to know things in what I may call a social way.”
“The murderer is a person of good social position,” I murmured.
“Exactly.”
“I’m to be the spy within the gates?”
“Have you any objection?”
I thought it over.
“No,” I said, “frankly I haven’t. If there’s a dangerous lunatic about driving inoffensive women to suicide and hitting miserable little maidservants on the head, then I’m not averse to doing a bit of dirty work to put that lunatic under restraint.”
“That’s sensible of you, sir. And let me tell you, the person we’re after is dangerous. She’s about as dangerous as a rattlesnake and a cobra and a black mamba rolled into one.”
I gave a slight shiver. I said:
“In fact, we’ve got to make haste?”
“That’s right. Don’t think we’re inactive in the force. We’re not. We’re working on several different lines.”
He said it grimly.
I had a vision of a fine far-flung spider’s web….
Nash wanted to hear Rose’s story again, so he explained to me, because she had already told him two different versions, and the more versions he got from her, the more likely it was that a few grains of truth might be incorporated.
We found Rose washing up breakfast, and she stopped at once and rolled her eyes and clutched her heart and explained again how she’d been coming over queer all the morning.
Nash was patient with her but firm. He’d been soothing the first time, so he told me, and peremptory the second, and he now employed a mixture of the two.
Rose enlarged pleasurably on the details of the past week, of how Agnes had gone about in deadly fear, and had shivered and said, “Don’t ask me,” when Rose had urged her to say what was the matter. “It would be death if she told me,” that’s what she said, finished Rose, rolling her eyes happily.
Had Agnes given no hint of what was troubling her?
No, except that she went in fear of her life.
Superintendent Nash sighed and abandoned the theme, contenting himself with extracting an exact account of Rose’s own activities the preceding afternoon.
This, put baldly, was that Rose had caught the 2:30 bus and had spent the afternoon and evening with her family, returning by the 8:40 bus from Nether Mickford. The recital was complicated by the extraordinary presentiments of evil Rose had had all the afternoon and