The Sittaford Mystery - Agatha Christie [54]
‘What has all this got to do with it?’ said Emily.
‘Don’t be so impatient, I am coming to the point. The old chap was rather screwed when he wrote it—done himself well at the dinner—after giving me the item I wanted, he went on to waste a good bit of juicy description on me. You know—about the speeches, and what asses so and so, a famous novelist and a famous playwright, were. And he said he had been rottenly placed at dinner. There was an empty seat on one side of him where Ruby McAlmott, that awful best-seller woman, ought to have sat and an empty place on the other side of him where the sex specialist, Martin Dering, ought to have been, but he moved up nearer to a poet, who is very well known in Blackheath, and tried to make the best of things. Now, do you see the point?’
‘Charles! Darling!’ Emily became lyrical with excitement. ‘How marvellous. Then the brute wasn’t at the dinner at all?’
‘Exactly.’
‘You are sure you’ve remembered the name right?’
‘I’m positive. I have torn up the letter, worse luck, but I can always wire to Carruthers to make sure. But I absolutely know that I’m not mistaken.’
‘There’s the publisher still, of course,’ said Emily. ‘The one he spent the afternoon with. But I rather think it was a publisher who was just going back to America, and if so, that looks fishy. I mean it looks as though he had selected someone who couldn’t be asked without rather a lot of trouble.’
‘Do you really think we have hit it?’ said Charles Enderby.
‘Well, it looks like it. I think the best thing to be done is—to go straight to that nice Inspector Narracott and just tell him these new facts. I mean, we can’t tackle an American publisher who is on the Mauretania or the Berengaria or somewhere. That’s a job for the police.’
‘My word if this comes off. What a scoop!’ said Mr Enderby. ‘If it does, I should think the Daily Wire couldn’t offer me less than—’
Emily broke ruthlessly into his dreams of advancement.
‘But we mustn’t lose our heads,’ she said, ‘and throw everything else to the wind. I must go to Exeter. I don’t suppose I shall be able to be back here until tomorrow. But I’ve got a job for you.’
‘What kind of a job?’
Emily described her visit to the Willetts and the strange sentence she had overheard on leaving.
‘We have got absolutely and positively to find out what is going to happen tonight. There’s something in the wind.’
‘What an extraordinary thing!’
‘Wasn’t it? But of course it may be a coincidence. Or it may not—but you observe that the servants are being cleared out of the way. Something queer is going to happen there tonight, and you have to be on the spot to see what it is.’
‘You mean I have to spend the whole night shivering under a bush in the garden?’
‘Well, you don’t mind that, do you? Journalists don’t mind what they do in a good cause.’
‘Who told you that?’
‘Never mind who told me, I know it. You will do it, won’t you?’
‘Oh, rather,’ said Charles. ‘I am not going to miss anything. If anything queer goes on at Sittaford House tonight, I shall be in it.’
Emily then told him about the luggage label.
‘It’s odd,’ said Mr Enderby. ‘Australia is where the third Pearson is, isn’t it?—the youngest one. Not, of course, that that means anything, but still it—well, there might be a connection.’
‘H’m,’ said Emily. ‘I think that’s all. Have you anything to report on your side?’
‘Well,’ said Charles, ‘I’ve got an idea.’
‘Yes?’
‘The only thing is I don’t know how you’ll like it.’
‘What do you mean—how I’ll like it?’
‘You won’t fly out over it, will you?’
‘I don’t suppose so. I mean I hope I can listen sensibly and quietly to anything.’
‘Well, the point is,’ said Charles Enderby eyeing her doubtfully, ‘don’t think I mean to be