Towards Zero - Agatha Christie [76]
“Suppose Kay had come in?”
“She’d been mildly doped, I’ll bet. She was yawning from dinner on, so they tell me. Besides, he’d taken care to have a quarrel with her so that she’d lock her door and keep out of his way.”
“I’m trying to think if I noticed the ball was gone from the fender. I don’t think I did. When did he put it back?”
“Next morning when all the hullabaloo arose. Once he got back in Ted Latimer’s car, he had all night to clear up his traces and fix things, mend the tennis racquet, etc. By the way, he hit the old lady back-handed, you know. That’s why the crime appeared to be left-handed. Strange’s backhand was always his strong point, remember!”
“Don’t—don’t—” Audrey put up her hands. “I can’t bear any more.”
He smiled at her.
“All the same it’s done you good to talk it all out. Mrs. Strange, may I be impertinent and give you some advice?”
“Yes, please.”
“You lived for eight years with a criminal lunatic—that’s enough to sap any woman’s nerves. But you’ve got to snap out of it now, Mrs. Strange. You don’t need to be afraid any more—and you’ve got to make yourself realize that.”
Audrey smiled at him. The frozen look had gone from her face; it was a sweet, rather timid, but confiding face, with the wide-apart eyes full of gratitude.
She said, hesitating a little: “You told the others there was a girl—a girl who acted as I did?”
Battle slowly nodded his head.
“My own daughter,” he said. “So you see, my dear, that miracle had to happen. These things are sent to teach us!”
III
Angus MacWhirter was packing.
He laid three shirts carefully in his suitcase, and then that dark blue suit which he had remembered to fetch from the cleaners. Two suits left by two different MacWhirters had been too much for the girl in charge.
There was a tap on the door and he called “Come in.”
Audrey Strange walked in. She said:
“I’ve come to thank you—are you packing?”
“Yes. I’m leaving here tonight. And sailing the day after tomorrow.”
“For South America?”
“For Chile.”
She said:
“I’ll pack for you.”
He protested, but she overbore him. He watched her as she worked deftly and methodically.
“There,” she said when she had finished.
“You did that well,” said MacWhirter.
There was a silence. Then Audrey said:
“You saved my life. If you hadn’t happened to see what you did see—”
She broke off.
Then she said: “Did you realize at once, that night on the cliff when you—you stopped me going over—when you said ‘Go home, I’ll see that you’re not hanged’—did you realize then that you’d got some important evidence?”
“Not precisely,” said MacWhirter. “I had to think it out.”
“Then how could you say—what you did say?”
MacWhirter always felt annoyed when he had to explain the intense simplicity of his thought processes.
“I meant just precisely that—that I intended to prevent you from being hanged.”
The colour came up in Audrey’s cheeks.
“Supposing I had done it?”
“That would have made no difference.”
“Did you think I had done it, then?”
“I didn’t speculate on the matter overmuch. I was inclined to believe you were innocent, but it would have made no difference to my course of action.”
“And then you remembered the man on the rope?”
MacWhirter was silent for a few moments. then he cleared his throat.
“You may as well know, I suppose. I did not actually see a man climbing up a rope—indeed I could not have done so, for I was up on Stark Head on Sunday night, not on Monday. I deduced what must have happened from the evidence of the suit and my suppositions were confirmed by the findings of a wet rope in the attic.”
From red Audrey had gone