Towards Zero - Agatha Christie [56]
“I’m sure he didn’t. He’s not an extravagant person—he never has been.”
“No, but his wife is.”
“Kay? Yes, perhaps—but oh, it’s too ridiculous. I’m sure the last thing Nevile has been thinking of lately is money.”
Superintendent Battle coughed.
“He’s had other worries, I understand?”
“Kay told you, I suppose? Yes, it really has been rather difficult. Still, it’s nothing to do with this dreadful business.”
“Probably not, but all the same I’d like to hear your version of the affair, Miss Aldin.”
Mary said slowly: “Well, as I say, it has created a difficult—situation. Whosoever’s idea it was to begin with—”
He interrupted her deftly.
“I understood it was Mr. Nevile Strange’s idea?”
“He said it was.”
“But you yourself didn’t think so?”
“I—no—it isn’t like Nevile somehow. I’ve had a feeling all along that somebody else put the idea into his head.”
“Mrs. Audrey Strange, perhaps?”
“It seems incredible that Audrey should do such a thing.”
“Then who else could it have been?”
Mary raised her shoulders helplessly.
“I don’t know. It’s just—queer.”
“Queer,” said Battle thoughtfully. “That’s what I feel about this case. It’s queer.”
“Everything’s been queer. There’s been a feeling—I can’t describe it. Something in the air. A menace.”
“Everybody strung up and on edge?”
“Yes, just that…We’ve all suffered from it. Even Mr. Latimer—” She stopped.
“I was just coming to Mr. Latimer. What can you tell me, Miss Aldin, about Mr. Latimer? Who is Mr. Latimer?”
“Well, really, I don’t know much about him. He’s a friend of Kay’s.”
“He’s Mrs. Strange’s friend. Known each other a long time?”
“Yes, she knew him before her marriage.”
“Mr. Strange like him?”
“Quite well, I believe.”
“No—trouble there?”
Battle put it delicately. Mary replied at once and emphatically: “Certainly not!”
“Did Lady Tressilian like Mr. Latimer?”
“Not very much.”
Battle took warning from the aloof tone of her voice and changed the subject.
“This maid, now, Jane Barrett, she has been with Lady Tressilian a long time? You consider her trustworthy?”
“Oh absolutely. She was devoted to Lady Tressilian.”
Battle leaned back in his chair.
“In fact you wouldn’t consider for a moment the possibility that Barrett hit Lady Tressilian over the head and then doped herself to avoid being suspected?”
“Of course not. Why on earth should she?”
“She gets a legacy, you know.”
“So do I,” said Mary Aldin.
She looked at him steadily.
“Yes,” said Battle. “So do you. Do you know how much?”
“Mr. Trelawny has just arrived. He told me.”
“You didn’t know about it beforehand?”
“No. I certainly assumed, from what Lady Tressilian occasionally let fall, that she had left me something. I have very little of my own, you know. Not enough to live on without getting work of some kind. I thought that Lady Tressilian would leave me at least a hundred a year—but she has some cousins, and I did not at all know how she proposed to leave that money which was hers to dispose of. I knew, of course, that Sir Matthew’s estate went to Nevile and Audrey.”
“So she didn’t know what Lady Tressilian was leaving her,” Leach said when Mary Aldin had been dismissed. “At least that’s what she says.”
“That’s what she says,” agreed Battle. “And now for Bluebeard’s first wife.”
VII
Audrey was wearing a pale grey flannel coat and skirt. In it she looked so pale and ghostlike that Battle was reminded of Kay’s words, “a grey ghost creeping about the house.”
She answered his questions simply and without any signs of emotion.
Yes, she had gone to bed at ten o’clock, the same time as Miss Aldin. She had heard nothing during the night.
“You’ll excuse me butting into your private affairs,” said Battle, “but will you explain just how it comes about that you are here in the house?”
“I always come to stay at this time. This year, my—my late husband wanted to come at the same time and asked me if I would mind.”
“It was his suggestion?”
“Oh yes.”
“Not yours?”
“Oh no.”
“But you agreed?”
“Yes, I agreed…I didn’t feel—that