Towards Zero - Agatha Christie [63]
“Kay?” Nevile looked slightly surprised. “Oh, I suppose so. At least—I’ve never talked much about it with her—”
“I think you’ll find,” said Battle, “that she’s under a misapprehension. She thinks that the money on Lady Tressilian’s death comes to you and your present wife. At least, that’s what she gave me to understand this morning. That’s why I came along to find out how the position really lay.”
“How extraordinary,” said Nevile. “Still, I suppose it might have happened quite easily. She has said once or twice, now that I think about it, ‘We come into that money when Camilla dies,’ but I suppose I assumed that she was just associating herself with me in my share of it.”
“It’s extraordinary,” said Battle, “the amount of misunderstandings there are even between two people who discuss a thing quite often—both of them assuming different things and neither of them discovering the discrepancy.”
“I suppose so,” said Nevile, not sounding very interested. “It doesn’t matter much in this case, anyway. It’s not as though we’re short of money at all. I’m very glad for Audrey. She has been very hard up and this will make a big difference to her.”
Battle said bluntly: “But surely, sir, at the time of the divorce, she was entitled to an allowance from you?”
Nevile flushed. He said in a constrained voice:
“There is such a thing as—as pride, Superintendent. Audrey has always persistently refused to touch a penny of the allowance I wished to make her.”
“A very generous allowance,” put in Mr. Trelawny. “But Mrs. Audrey Strange has always returned it and refused to accept it.”
“Very interesting,” said Battle, and went out before anyone could ask him to elaborate that comment.
He went out and found his nephew.
“On its face value,” he said, “there’s a nice monetary motive for nearly everybody in this case. Nevile Strange and Audrey Strange get a cool fifty thousand each. Kay Strange thinks she’s entitled to fifty thousand. Mary Aldin gets an income that frees her from having to earn her living. Thomas Royde, I’m bound to say, doesn’t gain. But we can include Hurstall and even Barrett if we admit that she’d take the risk of finishing herself off to avoid suspicion. Yes, as I say, there are no lack of money motives. And yet, if I’m right, money doesn’t enter into this at all. If there’s such a thing as murder for pure hate, this is it. And if no one comes along and throws a spanner into the works, I’m going to get the person who did it!”
XIII
Angus MacWhirter sat on the terrace of the Easterhead Bay Hotel and stared across the river to the frowning height of Stark Head opposite.
He was engaged at the moment in a careful stocktaking of his thoughts and emotions.
He hardly knew what it was that had made him choose to spend his last few days of leisure where he now was. Yet something had drawn him there. Perhaps the wish to test himself—to see if there remained in his heart any of the old despair.
Mona? How little he cared now. She was married to the other man. He had passed her in the street one day without feeling any emotion. He could remember his grief and bitterness when she left him, but they were past now and gone.
He was recalled from these thoughts by an impact of wet dog and the frenzied appeal of a newly made friend, Miss Diana Brinton, aged thirteen.
“Oh come away, Don. Come away. Isn’t it awful? He’s rolled on some fish or something down on the beach. You can smell him yards away. The fish was awfully dead, you know!”
MacWhirter’s nose confirmed this assumption.
“In a sort of crevice on the rocks,” said Miss Brinton. “I took him into the sea and tried to wash it off, but it doesn’t seem to have done much good.”
MacWhirter agreed. Don, a wirehaired terrier of amiable and loving disposition, was looking hurt by the tendency of his friends to keep him firmly at arm’s length.
“Sea water’s no good,” said MacWhirter. “Hot water and soap’s the only thing.”
“I know. But that’s not so jolly easy in a Hotel. We haven’t got a private bath.”
In the end MacWhirter and Diana surreptitiously entered by the side door with