The Moving Finger - Agatha Christie [55]
He paused, smiled again, and said, “You see, we are thorough.”
I said slowly, “So your case is eliminated down to those four— Miss Ginch, Mr. Pye, Miss Griffith and little Miss Barton?”
“Oh, no, no, we’ve got a couple more—besides the vicar’s lady.”
“You’ve thought of her?”
“We’ve thought of everybody, but Mrs. Dane Calthrop is a little too openly mad, if you know what I mean. Still, she could have done it. She was in a wood watching birds yesterday afternoon—and the birds can’t speak for her.”
He turned sharply as Owen Griffith came into the police station.
“Hallo, Nash. I heard you were round asking for me this morning. Anything important?”
“Inquest on Friday, if that suits you, Dr. Griffith.”
“Right. Moresby and I are doing the P.M. tonight.”
Nash said:
“There’s just one other thing, Dr. Griffith. Mrs. Symmington was taking some cachets, powders or something, that you prescribed for her—”
He paused. Owen Griffith said interrogatively:
“Yes?”
“Would an overdose of those cachets have been fatal?”
Griffith said dryly:
“Certainly not. Not unless she’d taken about twenty-five of them!”
“But you once warned her about exceeding the dose, so Miss Holland tells me.”
“Oh that, yes. Mrs. Symmington was the sort of woman who would go and overdo anything she was given—fancy that to take twice as much would do her twice as much good, and you don’t want anyone to overdo even phenacetin or aspirin—bad for the heart. And anyway there’s absolutely no doubt about the cause of death. It was cyanide.”
“Oh, I know that—you don’t get my meaning. I only thought that when committing suicide you’d prefer to take an overdose of a soporific rather than to feed yourself prussic acid.”
“Oh quite. On the other hand, prussic acid is more dramatic and is pretty certain to do the trick. With barbiturates, for instance, you can bring the victim round if only a short time has elapsed.”
“I see, thank you, Dr. Griffith.”
Griffith departed, and I said goodbye to Nash. I went slowly up the hill home. Joanna was out—at least there was no sign of her, and there was an enigmatical memorandum scribbled on the telephone block presumably for the guidance of either Partridge or myself.
“If Dr. Griffith rings up, I can’t go on Tuesday, but could manage Wednesday or Thursday.”
I raised my eyebrows and went into the drawing room. I sat down in the most comfortable armchair—(none of them were very comfortable, they tended to have straight backs and were reminiscent of the late Mrs. Barton)—stretched out my legs and tried to think the whole thing out.
With sudden annoyance I remembered that Owen’s arrival had interrupted my conversation with the inspector, and that he had just mentioned two other people as being possibilities.
I wondered who they were.
Partridge, perhaps, for one? After all, the cut book had been found in this house. And Agnes could have been struck down quite unsuspecting by her guide and mentor. No, you couldn’t eliminate Partridge.
But who was the other?
Somebody, perhaps, that I didn’t know? Mrs. Cleat? The original local suspect?
I closed my eyes. I considered four people, strangely unlikely people, in turn. Gentle, frail little Emily Barton? What points were there actually against her? A starved life? Dominated and repressed from early childhood? Too many sacrifices asked of her? Her curious horror of discussing anything “not quite nice”? Was that actually a sign of inner preoccupation with just these themes? Was I getting too horribly Freudian? I remembered a doctor once telling me that the mutterings of gentle maiden ladies when going off under an anaesthetic were a revelation. “You wouldn’t think they knew