The Pale Horse - Agatha Christie [72]
“Something like radioactivity at a distance?”
“Something of that kind. You see, people are discovering things all the time—frightening things. Some variation of this new knowledge might be adapted by some unscrupulous person for their own purposes— Thyrza’s father was a physicist, you know—”
“But what? What? That damned box! If we could get it examined? If the police—”
“Police aren’t very keen on getting a search warrant and removing property without a good deal more to go on than we’ve got.”
“If I went round there and smashed up the damned thing?”
Mrs. Dane Calthrop shook her head.
“From what you told me, the damage, if there has been damage, was done that night.”
I dropped my head in my hands and groaned.
“I wish we’d never started this damned business.”
Mrs. Dane Calthrop said firmly: “Your motives were excellent. And what’s done is done. You’ll know more when Ginger rings back after the doctor has been. She’ll ring Rhoda’s, I suppose—”
I took the hint.
“I’d better get back.”
“I’m being stupid,” said Mrs. Dane Calthrop suddenly as I left. “I know I’m being stupid. Trappings! We’re letting ourselves be obsessed by trappings. I can’t help feeling that we’re thinking the way they want us to think.”
Perhaps she was right. But I couldn’t see any other way of thinking.
Ginger rang me two hours later.
“He’s been,” she said. “He seemed a bit puzzled, but he says it’s probably ’flu. There’s quite a lot about. He’s sent me to bed and is sending along some medicine. My temperature is quite high. But it would be with ’flu, wouldn’t it?”
There was a forlorn appeal in her hoarse voice, under its surface bravery.
“You’ll be all right,” I said miserably. “Do you hear? You’ll be all right. Do you feel very awful?”
“Well—fever—and aching, and everything hurts, my feet and my skin. I hate anything touching me… And I’m so hot.”
“That’s the fever, darling. Listen, I’m coming up to you! I’m leaving now—at once. No, don’t protest.”
“All right. I’m glad you’re coming, Mark. I daresay—I’m not so brave as I thought….”
II
I rang up Lejeune.
“Miss Corrigan’s ill,” I said.
“What?”
“You heard me. She’s ill. She’s called her own doctor. He says perhaps ’flu. It may be. But it may not. I don’t know what you can do. The only idea that occurs to me is to get some kind of specialist onto it.”
“What kind of specialist?”
“A psychiatrist—or psychoanalyst, or psychologist. A psycho something. A man who knows about suggestion and hypnotism and brainwashing and all that kind of thing. There are people who deal with that kind of thing?”
“Of course there are. Yes. There are one or two Home Office men who specialise in it. I think you’re dead right. It may be just ’flu—but it may be some kind of psycho business about which nothing much is known. Lord, Easterbrook, this may be just what we’ve been hoping for!”
I slammed down the receiver. We might be learning something about psychological weapons—but all that I cared about was Ginger, gallant and frightened. We hadn’t really believed, either of us—or had we? No, of course we hadn’t. It had been a game—a cops and robbers game. But it wasn’t a game.
The Pale Horse was proving itself a reality.
I dropped my head into my hands and groaned.
Twenty-one
Mark Easterbrook’s Narrative
I
I doubt if I shall ever forget the next few days. It appears to me now as a kind of bewildered kaleidoscope without sequence or form. Ginger was removed from the flat to a private nursing home. I was allowed to see her only at visiting hours.
Her own doctor, I gather, was inclined to stand on his high horse about the whole business. He could not understand what the fuss was all about. His own diagnosis was quite clear—bronchopneumonia following on influenza, though complicated by certain slightly unusual symptoms, but that, as he pointed out, “happens all the time. No case is ever ‘typical.’ And some people don’t respond to antibiotics.