The Pale Horse - Agatha Christie [41]
“Girlish high spirits! She tugged Tommy’s hair out by the roots.”
“I’m just telling you what Lou told me.”
“She seems to have been very forthcoming.”
“Oh, they all like talking about their affairs. They’ll talk to anyone who will listen. Anyway, Lou has got another boyfriend now—another dud, I’d say, but she’s already crazy about him. So it doesn’t look to me as though she’d been a client of the Pale Horse. I brought the term up, but it didn’t register. I think we can wash her out. Luigi doesn’t think there was much in it, either. On the other hand, he thinks Tommy was serious about Gene. And Gene was going for her in a big way. What have you done about the stepmother?”
“She was abroad. She comes back tomorrow. I’ve written her a letter—or rather I got my secretary to write it, asking for an appointment.”
“Good. We’re getting things moving. I hope everything doesn’t peter out.”
“If it gets us anywhere!”
“Something will,” said Ginger enthusiastically. “That reminds me. To go back to the beginning of all this, the theory is that Father Gorman was killed after being called out to a dying woman, and that he was murdered because of something she told him or confessed to him. What happened to that woman? Did she die? And who was she? There ought to be some lead there.”
“She died. I don’t really know much about her. I think her name was Davis.”
“Well, couldn’t you find out more?”
“I’ll see what I can do.”
“If we could get at her background, we might find out how she knew what she did know.”
“I see your point.”
I got Jim Corrigan on the telephone early the next morning and put my query to him.
“Let me see now. We did get a bit further, but not much. Davis wasn’t her real name, that’s why it took a little time to check up on her. Half a moment, I jotted down a few things… Oh yes, here we are. Her real name was Archer, and her husband had been a smalltime crook. She left him and went back to her maiden name.”
“What sort of a crook was Archer? And where is he now?”
“Oh, very small stuff. Pinched things from department stores. Unconsidered trifles here and there. He had a few convictions. As to where he is now, he’s dead.”
“Not much there.”
“No, there isn’t. The firm Mrs. Davis was working for at the time of her death, the C.R.C. (Customers’ Reactions Classified), apparently didn’t know anything about her, or her background.”
I thanked him and rang off.
Twelve
Mark Easterbrook’s Narrative
Three days later Ginger rang me up.
“I’ve got something for you,” she said. “A name and address. Write it down.”
I took out my notebook.
“Go ahead.”
“Bradley is the name and the address is Seventy-eight Municipal Square Buildings, Birmingham.”
“Well, I’m damned, what is all this?”
“Goodness knows! I don’t. I doubt if Poppy does really!”
“Poppy? Is this—”
“Yes. I’ve been working on Poppy in a big way. I told you I could get something out of her if I tried. Once I got her softened up, it was easy.”
“How did you set about it?” I asked curiously.
Ginger laughed.
“Girls-together stuff. You wouldn’t understand. The point is that if a girl tells things to another girl it doesn’t really count. She doesn’t think it matters.”
“All in the trade union so to speak?”
“You could put it like that. Anyway, we lunched together, and I yapped a bit about my love life—and various obstacles—married man with impossible wife—Catholic—wouldn’t divorce him—made his life hell. And how she was an invalid, always in pain, but not likely to die for years. Really much better for her if she could die. Said I’d a good mind to try the Pale Horse, but I didn’t really know how to set about it—and would it be terribly expensive? And Poppy said yes, she thought it would. She’d heard they charged the earth. And I said ‘Well,