Towards Zero - Agatha Christie [51]
“She’s not so conservative,” said Battle. “No photographs either. Not one who lives in the past.”
There were three or four empty rooms, all well kept and dusted ready for occupation, and a couple of bathrooms. Then came Lady Tressilian’s big double room. After that, reached by going down three little steps, came the two rooms and bathroom occupied by the Stranges.
Battle did not waste much time in Nevile’s room. He glanced out of the open casement window below which the rocks fell sheer to the sea. The view was to the west, towards Stark Head, which rose wild and forbidding out of the water.
“Gets the afternoon sun,” he murmured. “But rather a grim morning outlook. Nasty smell of seaweed at low tide, too. And that headland has got a grim look. Don’t wonder it attracts suicides!”
He passed into the larger room, the door of which had been unlocked.
Here everything was in wild confusion. Clothes lay about in heaps—filmy underwear, stockings, jumpers tried on and discarded—a patterned summer frock thrown sprawling over the back of a chair. Battle looked inside the wardrobe. It was full of furs, evening dresses, shorts, tennis frocks, playsuits.
Battle shut the doors again almost reverently.
“Expensive tastes,” he remarked. “She must cost her husband a lot of money.”
Leach said darkly:
“Perhaps that’s why—”
He left the sentence unfinished.
“Why he needed a hundred—or rather fifty thousand pounds? Maybe. We’d better see, I think, what he has to say about it.”
They went down to the library. Williams was despatched to tell the servants they could get on with the housework. The family were free to return to their rooms if they wished. They were to be informed of that fact and also that Inspector Leach would like an interview with each of them separately, starting with Mr. Nevile Strange.
When Williams had gone out of the room, Battle and Leach established themselves behind a massive Victorian table. A young policeman with notebook sat in the corner of the room, his pencil poised.
Battle said:
“You carry on for a start, Jim. Make it impressive.” As the other nodded his head, Battle rubbed his chin and frowned.
“I wish I knew what keeps putting Hercule Poirot into my head.”
“You mean that old chap—the Belgian—comic little guy?”
“Comic my foot,” said Superintendent Battle. “About as dangerous as a black mamba and a she-leopard—that’s what he is when he starts making a mountebank of himself! I wish he was here—this sort of thing would be right up his street.”
“In what way?”
“Psychology,” said Battle. “Real psychology—not the half-baked stuff people hand out who know nothing about it.” His memory dwelt resentfully on Miss Amphrey and his daughter Sylvia. “No—the real genuine article—knowing just what makes the wheels go round. Keep a murderer talking—that’s one of his lines. Says everyone is bound to speak what’s true sooner or later—because in the end it’s easier than telling lies. And so they make some little slip they don’t think matters—and that’s when you get them.”
“So you’re going to give Nevile Strange plenty of rope?”
Battle gave an absentminded assent. Then he added, in some annoyance and perplexity:
“But what’s really worrying me is—what put Hercule Poirot into my head? Upstairs—that’s where it was. Now what did I see that reminded me of that little guy?”
The conversation was put to an end by the arrival of Nevile Strange.
He looked pale and worried, but much less nervous than he had done at the breakfast table. Battle eyed him keenly. Incredible that a man who knew—and he must know if he were capable of any thought processes at all—that he had left his fingerprints on the instrument of the crime—and who had since had his fingerprints taken by the police—should show neither intense nervousness nor elaborate brazening of it out.
Nevile Strange looked quite natural—shocked, worried, grieved—and just slightly and healthily nervous.
Jim Leach was speaking in his pleasant west country voice.
“We would like you to answer certain questions, Mr. Strange. Both as to your movements last night, and in reference