"I beg your pardon?"
"Why did you pick up the revolver, Mrs. Christow?"
"I - I don't know."
"You shouldn't have touched it, you know."
"Shouldn't I?" Gerda was vague, her face vacant. "But I did. I held it in my hand..."
She looked down now at her hands as though she was, in fancy seeing the revolver lying in them.
She turned sharply to the Inspector. Her voice was suddenly sharp - anguished.
"Who could have killed John? Nobody could have wanted to kill him. He was - he was the best of men. So kind, so unselfish - he did everything for other people. Everybody loved him, Inspector. He was a wonderful doctor. The best and kindest of husbands. It must have been an accident - it must - it must!"
She flung out a hand to the room.
"Ask anyone, Inspector. Nobody could have wanted to kill John, could they?"
She appealed to them all.
Inspector Grange closed up his note-book.
"Thank you, Mrs. Christow," he said in an unemotional voice. "That will be all for the present."
Hercule Poirot and Inspector Grange went together through the chestnut woods to the swimming pool. The thing that had been John Christow but which was now "the body" had been photographed and measured and written about and examined by the police surgeon and had now been taken away to the mortuary. The swimming pool, Poirot thought, looked curiously innocent. Everything about today, he thought, had been strangely fluid. Except John Christow - he had not been fluid. Even in death he had been purposeful and objective. The swimming pool was not now preeminently a swimming pool, it was the place where John Christow's body had lain and where his life blood had welled away over concrete into artificially blue water...
Artificial - for a moment Poirot grasped at the word... Yes, there had been something artificial about it all. As though -
A man in a bathing suit came up to the Inspector.
"Here's the revolver, sir," he said.
Grange took the dripping object gingerly.
"No hope of fingerprints now," he remarked, "but luckily it doesn't matter in this case. Mrs. Christow was actually holding the revolver when you arrived, wasn't she, M. Poirot?"
"Yes."
"Identification of the revolver is the next thing," said Grange. "I should imagine Sir Henry will be able to do that for us. She got it from his study, I should say."
He cast a glance around the pool.
"Now, let's have that again to be quite clear. The path below the pool comes up from the farm and that's the way Lady Angkatell came. The other two, Mr. Edward Angkatell and Miss Savernake, came down from the woods - but not together. He came by the left-hand path, and she by the right-hand one which leads out of the long flower walk above the house. But they were both standing on the far side of the pool when you arrived?"
"Yes."
"And this path here beside the pavilion leads on to Podder's Lane. Right - we'll go along it."
As they walked, Grange spoke, without excitement, just with knowledge and quiet pessimism.
"Never like these cases much," he said. "Had one last year - down near Ashridge. Retired military man he was - distinguished career. Wife was the nice, quiet, old-fashioned kind, sixty-five, grey hair - rather pretty hair with a wave in it. Did a lot of gardening. One day she goes up to his room, gets out his service revolver, and walks out into the garden and shoots him. Just like that! A good deal behind it, of course, that one had to dig out. Sometimes they think up some fool story about a tramp! We pretend to accept it, of course, keep things quiet whilst we're making inquiries, but we know what's what."
"You mean," said Poirot, "that you have decided that Mrs. Christow shot her husband?"
Grange gave him a look of surprise.
"Well, don't you think so?"
Poirot said slowly, "It could all have happened as she said."
Inspector Grange shrugged his shoulders.
"It could have - yes. But it's a thin story. And they all think she killed him! They know something we don't." He looked curiously at his companion. "You thought she'd done it all right, didn't you, when you arrived on the scene?"
Poirot half closed his eyes. Coming along the path... Gudgeon stepping aside... Gerda Christow standing over her husband with the revolver in her hand and that blank look on her face. Yes, as Grange had said, he had thought she had done it... had thought, at least, that that was the impression he was meant to have...
Yes, but that was not the same thing...
A scene staged - set to deceive...
Had Gerda Christow looked like a woman who had just shot her husband? That was what Inspector Grange wanted to know.
And with a sudden shock of surprise, Hercule Poirot realized that in all his long experience of deeds of violence he had never actually come face to face with a woman who had just killed her husband... What would a woman look like in such circumstances? Triumphant, horrified satisfied dazed, incredulous, empty? "
Any one of these things, he thought...
Inspector Grange was talking. Poirot caught the end of his speech.
"- once you get all the facts behind the case, and you can usually get all that from the servants."
"Mrs. Christow is going back to London?"
"Yes. There're a couple of kids there. Have to let her go. Of course, we keep a sharp eye on her, but she won't know that. She thinks she's got away with it all right. Looks rather a stupid kind of woman to me..."
Did Gerda Christow realize, Poirot wondered what the police thought - and what the Angkatells thought? She had looked as though she did not realize anything at all - she had looked like a woman whose reactions were slow and who was completely dazed and heartbroken by her husband's death...
They had come out into the lane.
Poirot stopped by his gate. Grange said:
"This your little place? Nice and snug. Well, good-bye for the present, M. Poirot. Thanks for your cooperation. I'll drop in sometime and give you the lowdown on how we're getting on."
His eye travelled up the lane.
"Who's your neighbour? That's not where our new celebrity hangs out, is it?"
"Miss Veronica Cray, the actress, comes there for weekends, I believe."
"Of course. Dovecotes. I liked her in Lady Rides on Tiger but she's a bit highbrow for my taste. Give me Deanna Durbin or Hedy Lamarr."
He turned away.
"Well, I must get back to the job. So long, M. Poirot."
"You recognize this, Sir Henry?"
Inspector Grange laid the revolver on the desk in front of Sir Henry and looked at him expectantly.
"I can handle it?" Sir Henry's hand hesitated over the revolver as he asked the question.
Grange nodded.
"It's been in the pool. Destroyed whatever fingerprints there were on it. A pity, if I may say so, that Miss Savernake let it slip out of her hand."
"Yes, yes - but, of course, it was a very tense moment for all of us. Women are apt to get flustered and - er - drop things."
Again Inspector Grange nodded. He said:
"Miss Savernake seems a cool, capable young lady on the whole."
The words were devoid of emphasis, yet something in them made Sir Henry look up sharply. Grange went on:
"Now, do you recognize it, sir?"
Sir Henry picked up the revolver and examined it. He noted the number and compared it with a list in a small leatherbound book. Then closing the book with a sigh, he said:
"Yes, Inspector, this comes from my collection here."
"When did you see it last?"
"Yesterday afternoon. We were doing some shooting in the garden with a target, and this was one of the firearms we were using."
"Who actually fired this revolver on that occasion?"
"I think everybody had at least one shot with it."
"Including Mrs. Christow?"
"Including Mrs. Christow."
"And after you had finished shooting?"
"I put the revolver away in its usual place. Here."
He pulled out the drawer of a big bureau. It was half full of guns.
"You've got a big collection of firearms, Sir Henry."
"It's been a hobby of mine for many years."
Inspector Grange's eyes rested thoughtfully on the ex-Governor of the Hollowene Islands. A good-looking distinguished man, the kind of man he would be quite pleased to serve under himself - in fact, a man he would much prefer to his own present Chief Constable. Inspector Grange did not think much of the Chief Constable of Wealdshire - a fussy despot and a tuft-hunter - he brought his mind back to the job in hand.
"The revolver was not, of course, loaded when you put it away, Sir Henry?"
"Certainly not."
"And you keep your ammunition - where?"
"Here." Sir Henry took a key from a pigeonhole and unlocked one of the lower drawers of the desk.
Simple enough, thought Grange. The Christow woman had seen where it was kept. She'd only got to come along and help herself. Jealousy, he thought, plays the dickens with women. He'd lay ten to one it was jealousy. The thing would come clear enough when he'd finished the routine here and got onto the Harley Street end. But you'd got to do things in their proper order.
He got up and said:
"Well, thank you, Sir Henry. I'll let you know about the inquest."
Chapter 13
They had the cold ducks for supper. After the ducks there was a caramel custard which, Lady Angkatell said, showed just the right feeling on the part of Mrs. Medway.
Cooking, she said, really gave great scope to delicacy of feeling.
"We are only, as she knows, moderately fond of caramel custard. There would be something very gross, just after the death of a friend, in eating one's favourite pudding. But caramel custard is so easy - slippery if you know what I mean - and then one leaves a little on one's plate."
She sighed and said that she hoped they had done right in letting Gerda go back to London.
"But quite correct of Henry to go with her."
For Sir Henry had insisted on driving Gerda to Harley Street.
"She will come back here for the inquest, of course," went on Lady Angkatell, meditatively eating caramel custard. "But, naturally, she wanted to break it to the children - they might see it in the papers and with only a Frenchwoman in the house - one knows how excitable - a crise de nerfs, possibly. But Henry will deal with her, and I really think Gerda will be quite all right. She will probably send for some relations - sisters perhaps. Gerda is the sort of person who is sure to have sisters - three or four, I should think, probably living at Tunbridge Wells."
"What extraordinary things you do say, Lucy," said Midge.
"Well, darling, Torquay if you prefer it - no, not Torquay. They would be at least sixty-five if they were living at Torquay - Eastboune, perhaps, or St. Leonard's."
Lady Angkatell looked at the last spoonful of caramel custard, seemed to condole with it, and laid it down very gently uneaten.
David, who liked only savouries, looked down gloomily at his empty plate.
Lady Angkatell got up.
"I think we shall all want to go to bed early tonight," she said. "So much has happened, hasn't it? One has no idea, from reading about these things in the paper, how tiring they are. I feel, you know, as though I had walked about fifteen miles... instead of actually having done nothing but sit about - but that is tiring, too, because one does not like to read a book or a newspaper, it looks so heartless. Though I think perhaps the leading article in the Observer would have been all right - but not the News of the World. Don't you agree with me, David? I like to know what the young people think; it keeps one from losing touch."
David said in a gruff voice that he never read the News of the World.
"I always do," said Lady Angkatell. "We pretend we get it for the servants, but Gudgeon is very understanding and never takes it out until after tea. It is a most interesting paper, all about women who put their heads in gas ovens - an incredible number of them!"
"What will they do in the houses of the future which are all electric?" asked Edward Angkatell with a faint smile.
"I suppose they will just have to decide to make the best of things - so much more sensible."
"I disagree with you, sir," said David, "about the houses of the future being all electric. There can be communal heating laid on from a central supply. Every working-class house should be completely labour-saving -"
Edward Angkatell said hastily that he was afraid that was a subject he was not very well up in. David's lip curled with scorn.
Gudgeon brought in coffee on a tray, moving a little slower than usual to convey a sense of mourning.
"Oh, Gudgeon," said Lady Angkatell, "about those eggs, I meant to write the date in pencil on them as usual. Will you ask Mrs. Medway to see to it?"
"I think you will find, m'lady, that everything has been attended to quite satisfactorily." He cleared his throat. "I have seen to things myself."
"Oh, thank you, Gudgeon."
As Gudgeon went out she murmured, "Really, Gudgeon is wonderful. The servants are all being marvellous. And one does so sympathize with them having the police here - it must be dreadful for them. By the way, are there any left?"
"Police, do you mean?" asked Midge.
"Yes. Don't they usually leave one standing in the hall? Or perhaps he's watching the front door from the shrubbery outside."
"Why should he watch the front door?"
"I don't know, I'm sure. They do in books. And then somebody else is murdered in the night."
"Oh, Lucy, don't," said Midge.
Lady Angkatell looked at her curiously.
"Darling, I am so sorry. Stupid of me. And, of course, nobody else could be murdered. Gerda's gone home - I mean, oh, Henrietta dear, I am sorry. I didn't mean to say that."
But Henrietta did not answer. She was standing by the round table staring down at the bridge score she had kept last night.
She said, rousing herself, "Sorry, Lucy, what did you say?"
