Towards Zero - Agatha Christie [64]
The little incident had left MacWhirter in a more cheerful mood. He took the bus into Saltington, where he had left a suit to be cleaned.
The girl in charge of the 24-Hour Cleaners looked at him vacantly.
“MacWhirter, did you say? I’m afraid it isn’t ready yet.”
“It should be.” He had been promised that suit the day before, and even that would have been 48 and not 24 hours. A woman might have said all this. MacWhirter merely scowled.
“There’s not been time yet,” said the girl, smiling indifferently.
“Nonsense.”
The girl stopped smiling. She snapped,
“Anyway, it’s not done,” she said.
“Then I’ll take it away as it is,” said MacWhirter.
“Nothing’s been done to it,” the girl warned him.
“I’ll take it away.”
“I dare say we might get it done by tomorrow—as a special favour.”
“I’m not in the habit of asking for special favours. Just give me the suit, please.”
Giving him a bad-tempered look, the girl went into the back room. She returned with a clumsily done up parcel which she pushed across the counter.
MacWhirter took it and went out.
He felt, quite ridiculously, as though he had won a victory. Actually it merely meant that he would have to have the suit cleaned elsewhere!
He threw the parcel on his bed when he returned to the Hotel and looked at it with annoyance. Perhaps he could get it sponged and pressed in the Hotel. It was not really too bad—perhaps it didn’t actually need cleaning?
He undid the parcel and gave vent to an expression of annoyance. Really, the 24-Hour Cleaners were too inefficient for words. This wasn’t his suit. It wasn’t even the same colour. It had been a dark blue suit he had left with them. Impertinent, inefficient muddlers.
He glanced irritably at the label. It had the name MacWhirter all right. Another MacWhirter? Or some stupid interchange of labels?
Staring down vexedly at the crumpled heap, he suddenly sniffed.
Surely he knew that smell—a particularly unpleasant smell…connected somehow with a dog. Yes, that was it. Diana and her dog. Absolutely and literally stinking fish!
He bent down and examined the suit. There it was, a discoloured patch on the shoulder of the coat. On the shoulder—
Now that, thought MacWhirter, is really very curious….
Anyway, next day, he would have a few grim words with the girl at the 24-Hour Cleaners. Gross mismanagement!
XIV
After dinner he strolled out of the Hotel and down the road to the Ferry. It was a clear night, but cold, with a sharp foretaste of winter. Summer was over.
MacWhirter crossed in the ferry to the Saltcreek side. It was the second time that he was revisiting Stark Head. The place had a fascination for him. He walked slowly up the hill, passing the Balmoral Court Hotel and then a big house set on the point of a cliff. Gull’s Point—he read the name on the painted door. Of course, that was where the old lady had been murdered. There had been a lot of talk in the Hotel about it, his chambermaid had insisted on telling him all about it and the newspapers had given it a prominence which had annoyed MacWhirter, who preferred to read of worldwide affairs and who was not interested in crime.
He went on, downhill again to skirt a small beach and some old-fashioned fishing cottages that had been modernized. Then up again till the road ended and petered out into the track that led up on Stark Head.
It was grim and forbidding on Stark Head. MacWhirter stood on the cliff edge looking down to the sea. So he had stood on that other night. He tried to recapture some of the feeling he had had then—the desperation, anger, weariness—the longing to be out of it all. But there was nothing to recapture. All that had gone. There was instead a cold anger. Caught on that tree, rescued