The Pale Horse - Agatha Christie [76]
“Oh, with her!”
“Yes. She saw you the day you came to collect some pictures.”
“Well, that’s all very nice and I expect you’re very lucky to find her. I believe she’s most trustworthy and reliable and all that. Aunt Min said so. But really—now—”
“Wait, can’t you? I haven’t got to the point. She sat and talked a great deal about Lady Hesketh-Dubois and her last illness, and all that sort of thing, because they do love illnesses and death and then she said it.”
“Said what?”
“The thing that caught my attention. She said something like: ‘Poor dear lady, suffering like she did. That nasty thing on her brain, a growth, they say, and she in quite good health up to just before. And pitiful it was to see her in the nursing home and all her hair, nice thick white hair it was, and always blued regularly once a fortnight, to see it coming out all over the pillow. Coming out in handfuls. And then, Mark, I thought of Mary Delafontaine, that friend of mine. Her hair came out. And I remembered what you told me about some girl you’d seen in a Chelsea coffee place fighting with another girl, and getting her hair all pulled out in handfuls. Hair doesn’t come out as easily as that, Mark. You try—just try to pull your own hair, just a little bit of it, out by the roots! Just try it! You’ll see. It’s not natural, Mark, for all those people to have hair that comes out by the roots. It’s not natural. It must be some special kind of new illness—it must mean something.”
I clutched the receiver and my head swam. Things, half-remembered scraps of knowledge, drew together. Rhoda and her dogs on the lawn—an article I had read in a medical journal in New York—Of course… Of course!
I was suddenly aware that Mrs. Oliver was still quacking happily.
“Bless you,” I said. “You’re wonderful!”
I slammed back the receiver, then took it off again. I dialled a number and was lucky enough this time to get Lejeune straightaway.
“Listen,” I said, “is Ginger’s hair coming out by the roots in handfuls?”
“Well—as a matter of fact I believe it is. High fever, I suppose.”
“Fever my foot,” I said. “What Ginger’s suffering from, what they’ve all suffered from, is thallium poisoning. Please God, we may be in time….”
Twenty-two
Mark Easterbrook’s Narrative
I
“Are we in time? Will she live?”
I wandered up and down. I couldn’t sit still.
Lejeune sat watching me. He was patient and kind.
“You can be sure that everything possible is being done.”
It was the same old answer. It did nothing to comfort me.
“Do they know how to treat thallium poisoning?”
“You don’t often get a case of it. But everything possible will be tried. If you ask me, I think she’ll pull through.”
I looked at him. How could I tell if he really believed what he was saying? Was he just trying to soothe me?
“At any rate, they’ve verified that it was thallium.”
“Yes, they’ve verified that.”
“So that’s the simple truth behind the Pale Horse. Poison. No witchcraft, no hypnotism, no scientific death rays. Plain poisoning! And she flung that at me, damn her. Flung it in my face. Laughing in her cheek all the while, I expect.”
“Who are you talking about?”
“Thyrza Grey. That first afternoon when I went to tea there. Talked about the Borgias and all the build up of ‘rare and untraceable poisons’; the poisoned gloves and all the rest of it. ‘Common white arsenic,’ she said, ‘and nothing else.’ This was just as simple. All that hooey! The trance and the white cocks and the brazier and the pentagrams and the voodoo and the reversed crucifix—all that was for the crudely superstitious. And the famous ‘box’ was another bit of hooey for the contemporary-minded. We don’t believe in spirits and witches and spells nowadays, but we’re a gullible lot when it comes to ‘rays’ and ‘waves’ and psychological phenomena. That box, I bet, is nothing but a nice little assembly of electrical show-off, coloured bulbs and humming valves. Because we live in daily fear of radio fall out and strontium 90 and all the rest of it, we’re amenable