The Pale Horse - Agatha Christie [52]
“That would be Mrs. Delafontaine?”
“Yes.”
“Go on.”
“I made up my mind that I’d got to find out more about this business.”
“And you set about it. How?”
I told him of my call on Mrs. Tuckerton. Finally I came to Mr. Bradley and the Municipal Square Buildings in Birmingham.
I had his full interest now. He repeated the name.
“Bradley,” he said. “So Bradley’s in this?”
“You know him?”
“Oh yes, we know all about Mr. Bradley. He’s given us a lot of trouble. He’s a smooth dealer, an adept at never doing anything that we can pin on him. He knows every trick and dodge of the legal game. He’s always just on the right side of the line. He’s the kind of man who could write a book like those old cookery books, “A hundred ways of evading the law.” But murder, such a thing as organised murder—I should have said that that was right off his beat. Yes—right off his beat—”
“Now that I’ve told you about our conversation, could you act upon it?”
Lejeune slowly shook his head.
“No, we couldn’t act on it. To begin with, there were no witnesses to your conversation. It was just between the two of you and he could deny the whole thing if he wanted to! Apart from that, he was quite right when he told you that a man can bet on anything. He bets somebody won’t die—and he loses. What is there criminal about that? Unless we can connect Bradley in some way with the actual crime in question—and that, I imagine, will not be easy.”
He left it with a shrug of his shoulders. He paused a minute and then said,
“Did you, by any chance, come across a man called Venables when you were down in Much Deeping?”
“Yes,” I said, “I did. I was taken over to lunch with him one day.”
“Ah! What impression, if I may ask, did he make upon you?”
“A very powerful impression. He’s a man of great personality. An invalid.”
“Yes. Crippled by polio.”
“He can only move about in a wheeled chair. But his disability seems to have heightened his determination to live and enjoy living.”
“Tell me all you can about him.”
I described Venables’s house, his art treasures, the range and sweep of his interests.
Lejeune said:
“It’s a pity.”
“What is a pity?”
He said drily: “That Venables is a cripple.”
“Excuse me, but you are quite certain he really is a cripple? He couldn’t be—well—faking the whole thing?”
“We’re as sure of his being a cripple as one can be sure of anything. His doctor is Sir William Dugdale of Harley Street, a man absolutely above suspicion. We have Sir William’s assurance that the limbs are atrophied. Our little Mr. Osborne may be certain that Venables was the man he saw walking along Barton Street that night. But he’s wrong.”
“I see.”
“As I say, it’s a pity, because if there is such a thing as an organisation for private murder, Venables is the kind of man who would be capable of planning it.”
“Yes; that’s what I thought.”
With his forefinger Lejeune traced interlacing circles on the table in front of him. Then he looked up sharply.
“Let’s assemble what we’ve got; adding to our own knowledge the knowledge you’ve brought us. It seems reasonably certain that there is some agency or organisation that specialises in what one might call the removal of unwanted persons. There’s nothing crude about the organisation. It doesn’t employ ordinary thugs or gunmen… There’s nothing to show that the victims haven’t died a perfectly natural death. I may say that in addition to the three deaths you’ve mentioned, we’ve got a certain amount of rather indefinite information about some of the others—deaths were from natural causes in each instance, but there were those who profited by these deaths. No evidence, mind you.
“It’s clever, damnably clever, Mr. Easterbrook. Whoever thought it out—and it’s been thought out in great detail—has brains. We’ve only got hold of a few scattered names. Heaven knows how many more of them there are—how widespread the whole thing may be. And we’ve only got the few names we have got, by the accident of a woman knowing herself to be dying, and wanting