Unexpected Guest - Agatha Christie [49]
Starkwedder walked slowly towards Laura. ‘I never meant any of this to happen,’ he told her, his voice husky with emotion. ‘I mean–finding you, and finding that I cared about you, and that–Oh God, it’s hopeless. Hopeless.’ As she stared at him, dazed, Starkwedder took her hand and kissed the palm. ‘Goodbye, Laura,’ he said, gruffly.
He went quickly out through the french windows and disappeared into the mist. Laura ran out onto the terrace and called after him, ‘Wait–wait. Come back!’
The mist swirled, and the Bristol fog signal began to boom. ‘Come back, Michael, come back!’ Laura cried. There was no reply. ‘Come back, Michael,’ she called again. ‘Please come back! I care about you too.’
She listened intently, but heard only the sound of a car starting up and moving off. The fog signal continued to sound as she collapsed against the window and burst into a fit of uncontrollable sobbing.
Postscript
The following chapter is taken from Charles Osborne’s The Life and Crimes of Agatha Christie, a biographical companion to the works of the ‘Queen of Crime’. First published in 1982 and fully revised in 1999, it examines chronologically each of Agatha Christie’s books and plays in detail, together with the events in her life at the time, and this chapter offers a fascinating insight into the origins of The Unexpected Guest.
The Unexpected Guest
Play (1958)
On 12 April 1958, The Mousetrap reached its 2,239th performance at the Ambassadors Theatre, thereby breaking the record for the longest London run of a play. To commemorate the breaking of the record, Agatha Christie presented to the Ambassadors Theatre a specially designed mousetrap. She was, of course, delighted that her Mousetrap had broken all records, and she must have had great hopes for a new play she had written, and of which she thought very highly. This was Verdict, which Peter Saunders presented at the Strand Theatre on 22 May. But Verdict failed to please, and closed one month later, on 21 June. The resilient Mrs Christie murmured, ‘At least I am glad The Times liked it,’ and set to work to write another play, which she finished within four weeks, and Peter Saunders immediately put it into production. The new play, The Unexpected Guest, played for a week at the Hippodrome in Bristol, and then moved to the Duchess Theatre in the West End of London, where it opened on 12 August. It played 604 performances there over the following eighteen months.
The Unexpected Guest could perhaps be described as a murder mystery disguised as a murder non-mystery, for it begins when a stranger, the ‘unexpected guest’ of the title, runs his car into a ditch in dense fog in South Wales, near the coast, and makes his way to a house where he finds a woman standing with a gun in her hand over the dead body of her husband, Richard Warwick, whom she admits she has killed. He decides to help her, and together they concoct a story and a plan of action.
The murdered man, a cripple in a wheelchair, appears to have been an unpleasant and sadistic character; apart from members of his own family, there are others who might have murdered him if they had been given the opportunity, among them the father of a child killed two years earlier by Richard Warwick’s careless and perhaps drunken driving. As the play progresses, the possibility arises that Laura Warwick may not have killed her husband, but may be shielding someone else. Richard Warwick’s young half-brother, mentally retarded and potentially dangerous? Laura’s lover, Julian Farrar, who is about to stand for Parliament? Warwick’s mother, a strong-minded old matriarch who knows she has not long to live? Or, of course, the father of the little boy who was killed?
The investigating policemen who turn up in Act I, Scene ii, are a shrewd and sarcastic inspector and a poetically inclined young sergeant who quotes Keats. Towards the end of the play’s second and final act, they identify and apprehend the real murderer. Or do they? This being