Towards Zero - Agatha Christie [54]
Nevile said bitterly: “You mean, don’t you, that you’ve made up your minds I did it, but you want to get at the motive so as to clinch the case against me?”
Battle was silent. Leach looked at the ceiling.
Nevile said desperately:
“It’s like some awful dream. There’s nothing I can say or do. It’s like—like being in a trap and you can’t get out.”
Superintendent Battle stirred. An intelligent gleam showed between his half-closed lids.
“That’s very nicely put,” he said. “Very nicely put indeed. It gives me an idea….”
VI
Sergeant Jones adroitly got rid of Nevile through the hall and then brought Kay in by the french window so that husband and wife did not meet.
“He’ll see all the others, though,” Leach remarked.
“All the better,” said Battle. “It’s only this one I want to deal with whilst she’s still in the dark.”
The day was overcast with a sharp wind. Kay was dressed in a tweed skirt and a purple sweater, above which her hair looked like a burnished copper bowl. She looked half frightened, half excited. Her beauty and vitality bloomed against the dark Victorian background of books and saddleback chairs.
Leach led her easily enough over her account of the previous evening.
She had had a headache and gone to bed early—about quarter past nine, she thought. She had slept heavily and heard nothing until the next morning, when she was wakened by hearing someone screaming.
Battle took up the questioning.
“Your husband didn’t come in to see how you were before he went off for the evening?”
“No.”
“You didn’t see him from the time you left the drawing room until the following morning. Is that right?”
Kay nodded.
Battle stroked his jaw.
“Mrs. Strange, the door between your room and that of your husband was locked. Who locked it?”
Kay said shortly: “I did.”
Battle said nothing—but he waited—waited like an elderly fatherly cat—for a mouse to come out of the hole he was watching.
His silence did what questions might not have accomplished. Kay burst out impetuously:
“Oh, I suppose you’ve got to have it all! That old doddering Hurstall must have heard us before tea and he’ll tell you if I don’t. He’s probably told you already. Nevile and I had had a row—a flaming row! I was furious with him! I went up to bed and locked the door, because I was still in a flaming rage with him!”
“I see—I see,” said Battle, at his most sympathetic. “And what was the trouble all about?”
“Does it matter? Oh, I don’t mind telling you. Nevile has been behaving like a perfect idiot. It’s all that woman’s fault, though.”
“What woman?”
“His first wife. She got him to come here in the first place.”
“You mean—to meet you?”
“Yes. Nevile thinks it was all his own idea—poor innocent! But it wasn’t. He never thought of such a thing until he met her in the Park one day and she got the idea into his head and made him believe he’d thought of it himself. He quite honestly thinks it was his idea, but I’ve seen Audrey’s fine Italian hand behind it from the first.”
“Why should she do such a thing?” asked Battle.
“Because she wanted to get hold of him again,” said Kay. She spoke quickly and her breath came fast. “She’s never forgiven him for going off with me. This is her revenge. She got him to fix up that we’d all be here together and then she got to work on him. She’s been doing it ever since we arrived. She’s clever, you know. Knows just how to look pathetic and elusive—yes, and how to play up another man, too. She got Thomas Royde, a faithful old dog who’s always adored her, to be here at the same time, and she drove Nevile mad by pretending she was going to marry him.”
She stopped, breathing angrily.
Battle said mildly:
“I should have thought he’d be glad for her to—er—find happiness with an old friend.”
“Glad? He’s as jealous as Hell!”
“Then he must be very fond of her.”
“Oh, he is,” said Kay bitterly. “She’s seen to that!”
Battle’s finger still ran dubiously over his jaw.
“You might