Three Act Tragedy

by Agatha Christie

  “I saw you in London, sir, I did. I was up with the wife. Lord Aintree’s Dilemma—that’s what the play was. In the pit, I was—and the house was crowded out—we had to stand two hours beforehand. But nothing else would do for the wife. ‘I must see Sir Charles Cartwright in Lord Aintree’s Dilemma,’ she said. At the Pall Mall Theatre, it was.”

  “Well,” said Sir Charles, “I’ve retired from the stage now, as you know. But they still know my name at the Pall Mall.” He took out a card and wrote a few words on it. “You give this to the people at the box office next time you and Mrs. Crossfield are having a jaunt to town, and they’ll give you a couple of the best seats going.”

  “I take that very kindly of you, Sir Charles—very kindly, indeed. My wife will be all worked up when I tell her about this.”

  After this Superintendent Crossfield was as wax in the exactor’s hands.

  “It’s an odd case, sir. Never come across a case of nicotine poisoning before in all my experience. No more has our Doctor Davis.”

  “I always thought it was a kind of disease you got from oversmoking.”

  “To tell the truth, so did I, sir. But the doctor says that the pure alkaloid is an odourless liquid, and that a few drops of it are enough to kill a man almost instantaneously.”

  Sir Charles whistled.

  “Potent stuff.”

  “As you say, sir. And yet it’s in common use, as you might say. Solutions are used to spray roses with. And of course it can be extracted from ordinary tobacco.”

  “Roses,” said Sir Charles. “Now, where have I heard—?”

  He frowned, then shook his head.

  “Anything fresh to report, Crossfield?” asked Colonel Johnson.

  “Nothing definite, sir. We’ve had reports that our man Ellis has been seen at Durham, at Ipswich, at Balham, at Land’s End, and a dozen other places. That’s all got to be sifted out for what it’s worth.” He turned to the other two. “The moment a man’s description is circulated as wanted, he’s seen by someone all over England.”

  “What is the man’s description?” asked Sir Charles.

  Johnson took up a paper.

  “John Ellis, medium height, say five-foot seven, stoops slightly, grey hair, small side whiskers, dark eyes, husky voice, tooth missing in upper jaw, visible when he smiles, no special marks or characteristics.”

  “H’m,” said Sir Charles. “Very nondescript, bar the side whiskers and the tooth, and the first will be off by now, and you can’t rely on his smiling.”

  “The trouble is,” said Crossfield, “that nobody observes anything. The difficulty I had in getting anything but the vaguest description out of the maids at the Abbey. It’s always the same. I’ve had descriptions of one and the same man, and he’s been called tall, thin, short, stout, medium height, thickset, slender—not one in fifty really uses their eyes properly.”

  “You’re satisfied in your own mind, Superintendent, that Ellis is the man?…”

  “Why else did he bolt, sir? You can’t get away from that.”

  “That’s the stumbling block,” said Sir Charles thoughtfully.

  Crossfield turned to Colonel Johnson and reported the measures that were being taken. The Colonel nodded approval and then asked the Superintendent for the list of inmates of the Abbey on the night of the crime. This was handed to the two new inquirers. It ran as follows:

  MARTHA LECKIE, cook.

  BEATRICE CHURCH, upper-housemaid.

  DORIS COKER, under-housemaid.

  VICTORIA BALL, between-maid.

  ALICE WEST, parlourmaid.

  VIOLET BASSINGTON, kitchenmaid.

  (Above have all been in service of deceased for some time and bear good character. Mrs. Leckie has been there for fifteen years.)

  GLADYS LYNDON—secretary, thirty-three, has been secretary to Sir Bartholomew Strange for three years, can give no information as to likely motive.

  Guests:

  LORD AND LADY EDEN, 187 Cadogan Square.

  SIR JOCELYN and LADY CAMPBELL, 1256 Harley Street.

  MISS ANGELA SUTCLIFFE, 28 Cantrell Mansions, S.W.3.

  CAPTAIN and MRS. DACRES, 3 St. John’s House, W.1.

  (Mrs. Dacres carries on business as Ambrosine, Ltd, Brook Street.)

  LADY MARY and MISS HERMIONE LYTTON GORE, Rose Cottage, Loomouth.

  MISS MURIEL WILLS, 5 Upper Cathcart Road, Tooting.

  MR. OLIVER MANDERS, Messrs Speier & Ross, Old Broad Street, E.C.2.

  “H’m,” said Sir Charles. “The Tooting touch was omitted by the papers. I see young Manders was there, too.”

  “That’s by way of being an accident, sir,” said Superintendent Crossfield. “The young gentleman ran his car into a wall just by the Abbey, and Sir Bartholomew, who I understood was slightly acquainted with him, asked him to stay the night.”

  “Careless thing to do,” said Sir Charles cheerfully.

  “It was that, sir,” said the Superintendent. “In fact, I fancy myself the young gentleman must have had one over the eight, as the saying goes. What made him ram the wall just where he did I can’t imagine, if he was sober at the time.”

  “Just high spirits, I expect,” said Sir Charles.

  “Spirits it was, in my opinion, sir.”

  “Well, thank you very much, Superintendent. Any objection to our going and having a look at the Abbey, Colonel Johnson?”

  “Of course not, my dear sir. Though I’m afraid you won’t learn much more there than I can tell you.”

  “Anybody there?”

  “Only the domestic staff, sir,” said Crossfield. “The house party left immediately after the inquest, and Miss Lyndon has returned to Harley Street.”

  “We might, perhaps, see Dr.—er—Davis, too?” suggested Mr. Satterthwaite.

  “Good idea.”

  They obtained the doctor’s address, and having thanked Colonel Johnson warmly for his kindness, they left.

  Three

  WHICH OF THEM?

  As they walked along the street, Sir Charles said:

  “Any ideas, Satterthwaite?”

  “What about you?” asked Mr. Satterthwaite. He liked to reserve judgment until the last possible moment.

  Not so Sir Charles. He spoke emphatically:

  “They’re wrong, Satterthwaite. They’re all wrong. They’ve got the butler on the brain. The butler’s done a bunk—ergo, the butler’s the murderer. It doesn’t fit. No, it doesn’t fit. You can’t leave that other death out of account—the one down at my place.”

  “You’re still of the opinion that the two are connected?”

  Mr. Satterthwaite asked the question, though he had already answered it in the affirmative in his own mind.

  “Man, they must be connected. Everything points to it…We’ve got to find the common factor—someone who was present on both occasions—”

  “Yes,” said Mr. Satterthwaite. “And that’s not going to be as simple a matter as one might think, on the face of it. We’ve got too many common factors. Do you realize, Cartwright, that practically every person who was present at the dinner at your house was present here?”

  Sir Charles nodded.

  “Of course I’ve realized that—but do you realize what deduction one can draw from it?”

  “I don’t quite follow you, Cartwright?”

  “Dash it all, man, do you suppose that’s coincidence? No, it was meant. Why are all the people who were at the first death present at the second? Accident? Not on your life. It was plan—design—Tollie’s plan.”

  “Oh!” said Mr. Satterthwaite. “Yes, it’s possible….”

  “It’s certain. You didn’t know Tollie as well as I did, Satterthwaite. He was a man who kept his own counsel, and a very patient man. In all the years I’ve known him I’ve never known Tollie give utterance to a rash opinion or judgment.

  “Look at it this way: Babbington’s murdered—yes, murdered—I’m not going to hedge, or mince terms—murdered one evening in my house. Tollie ridicules m
e gently for my suspicions in the matter, but all the time he’s got suspicions of his own. He doesn’t talk about them—that’s not his way. But quietly, in his own mind, he’s building up a case. I don’t know what he had to build upon. It can’t, I think, be a case against any one particular person. He believed that one of those people was responsible for the crime, and he made a plan, a test of some kind to find out which person it was.”

  “What about the other guests, the Edens and the Campbells?”

  “Camouflage. It made the whole thing less obvious.”

  “What do you think the plan was?”

  Sir Charles shrugged his shoulders—an exaggerated foreign gesture. He was Aristide Duval, that mastermind of the Secret Service. His left foot limped as he walked.

  “How can we know? I am not a magician. I cannot guess. But there was a plan…It went wrong, because the murderer was just one degree cleverer than Tollie thought…He struck first….”

  “He?”

  “Or she. Poison is as much a woman’s weapon as a man’s—more so.”

  Mr. Satterthwaite was silent. Sir Charles said:

  “Come now, don’t you agree? Or are you on the side of public opinion? ‘The butler’s the man. He done it.’”

  “What’s your explanation of the butler?”

  “I haven’t thought about him. In my view he doesn’t matter…I could suggest an explanation.”

  “Such as?”

  “Well, say that the police are right so far—Ellis is a professional criminal, working in, shall we say, with a gang of burglars. Ellis obtains this post with false credentials. Then Tollie is murdered. What is Ellis’s position? A man is killed, and in the house is a man whose fingerprints are at Scotland Yard, and who is known to the police. Naturally he gets the wind up and bolts.”

  “By the secret passage?”

  “Secret passage be damned. He dodged out of the house while one of the fatheaded constables who were watching the house was taking forty winks.”

  “It certainly seems more probable.”

  “Well, Satterthwaite, what’s your view?”

  “Mine?” said Mr. Satterthwaite. “Oh, it’s the same as yours. It has been all along. The butler seems to me a very clumsy red herring. I believe that Sir Bartholomew and poor old Babbington were killed by the same person.”

  “One of the house party?”

  “One of the house party.”

  There was silence for a minute or two, and then Mr. Satterthwaite asked casually:

  “Which of them do you think it was?”

  “My God, Satterthwaite, how can I tell?”

  “You can’t tell, of course,” said Mr. Satterthwaite mildly. “I just thought you might have some idea—you know, nothing scientific or reasoned. Just an ordinary guess.”

  “Well, I haven’t…” He thought for a minute and then burst out: “You know, Satterthwaite, the moment you begin to think it seems impossible that any of them did it.”

  “I suppose your theory is right,” mused Mr. Satterthwaite. “As to the assembling of the suspects, I mean. We’ve got to take it into account that there were certain definite exclusions. Yourself and myself and Mrs. Babbington, for instance. Young Manders, too, he was out of it.”

  “Manders?”

  “Yes, his arrival on the scene was an accident. He wasn’t asked or expected. That lets him out of the circle of suspects.”

  “The dramatist woman, too—Anthony Astor.”

  “No, no, she was there. Miss Muriel Wills of Tooting.”

  “So she was—I’d forgotten the woman’s name was Wills.”

  He frowned. Mr. Satterthwaite was fairly good at reading people’s thoughts. He estimated with fair accuracy what was passing through the actor’s mind. When the other spoke, Mr. Satterthwaite mentally patted himself on the back.

  “You know, Satterthwaite, you’re right. I don’t think it was definitely suspected people that he asked—because, after all, Lady Mary and Egg were there…No, he wanted to stage some reproduction of the first business, perhaps…He suspected someone, but he wanted other eyewitnesses there to confirm matters. Something of that kind….”

  “Something of the kind,” agreed Mr. Satterthwaite. “One can only generalize at this stage. Very well, the Lytton Gores are out of it, you and I and Mrs. Babbington and Oliver Manders are out of it. Who is left? Angela Sutcliffe?”

  “Angie? My dear fellow. She’s been a friend of Tollie’s for years.”

  “Then it boils down to the Dacres…In fact, Cartwright, you suspect the Dacres. You might just as well have said so when I asked you.”

  Sir Charles looked at him. Mr. Satterthwaite had a mildly triumphant air.

  “I suppose,” said Cartwright slowly, “that I do. At least, I don’t suspect them…They just seem rather more possible than anyone else. I don’t know them very well, for one thing. But for the life of me, I can’t see why Freddie Dacres, who spends his life on the racecourse, or Cynthia, who spends her time designing fabulously expensive clothes for women, should have any desire to remove a dear, insignificant old clergyman….”

  He shook his head, then his face brightened.

  “There’s the Wills woman. I forgot her again. What is there about her that continually makes you forget her? She’s the most damnably nondescript creature I’ve ever seen.”

  Mr. Satterthwaite smiled.

  “I rather fancy she might embody Burns’s famous line—‘A chiel’s amang ye takin’ notes.’ I rather fancy that Miss Wills spends her time taking notes. There are sharp eyes behind that pair of glasses. I think you’ll find that anything worth noticing in this affair has been noticed by Miss Wills.”

  “Do you?” said Sir Charles doubtfully.

  “The next thing to do,” said Mr. Satterthwaite, “is to have some lunch. After that, we’ll go out to the Abbey and see what we can discover on the spot.”

  “You seem to be taking very kindly to this, Satterthwaite,” said Sir Charles, with a twinkle of amusement.

  “The investigation of crime is not new to me,” said Mr. Satterthwaite. “Once when my car broke down and I was staying at a lonely inn—”

  He got no further.

  “I remember,” said Sir Charles, in his high, clear carrying actor’s voice, “when I was touring in 1921….”

  Sir Charles won.

  Four

  THE EVIDENCE OF THE SERVANTS

  Nothing could have been more peaceful than the grounds and building of Melfort Abbey as the two men saw it that afternoon in the September sunshine. Portions of the Abbey were fifteenth century. It had been restored and a new wing added onto it. The new Sanatorium was out of sight of the house, with grounds of its own.

  Sir Charles and Mr. Satterthwaite were received by Mrs. Leckie, the cook, a portly lady, decorously gowned in black, who was tearful and voluble. Sir Charles she already knew, and it was to him she addressed most of her conversation.

  “You’ll understand, I’m sure, sir, what it’s meant to me. The master’s death and all. Policemen all over the place, poking their noses here and there—would you believe it, even the dustbins they had to have their noses in, and questions!—they wouldn’t have done with asking questions. Oh, that I should have lived to see such a thing—the doctor, such a quiet gentleman as he always was, and made Sir Bartholomew, too, which a proud day it was to all of us, as Beatrice and I well remember, though she’s been here two years less than I have. And such questions as that police fellow (for gentleman I will not call him, having been accustomed to gentlemen and their ways and knowing what’s what), fellow, I say, whether or not he is a superintendent—” Mrs. Leckie paused, took breath and extricated herself from the somewhat complicated conversational morass into which she had fallen. “Questions, that’s what I say, about all the maids in the house, and good girls they are, every one of them—not that I’d say that Doris gets up when she should do in the morning. I have to speak about it at least once a week, and Vickie, she’s inclined to be imper
tinent, but, there, with the young ones you can’t expect the training—their mothers don’t give it to them nowadays—but good girls they are, and no police superintendent shall make me say otherwise. ‘Yes,’ I said to him, ‘you needn’t think I’m going to say anything against my girls. They’re good girls, they are, and as to having anything to do with murder, why it’s right down wicked to suggest such a thing.’”

  Mrs. Leckie paused.

  “Mr. Ellis, now—that’s different. I don’t know anything about Mr. Ellis, and couldn’t answer for him in any way, he having been brought from London, and strange to the place, while Mr. Baker was on holiday.”

  “Baker?” asked Mr. Satterthwaite.

  “Mr. Baker had been Sir Bartholomew’s butler for the last seven years, sir. He was in London most of the time, in Harley Street. You’ll remember him, sir?” She appealed to Sir Charles, who nodded. “Sir Bartholomew used to bring him up here when he had a party. But he hadn’t been so well in his health, so Sir Bartholomew said, and he gave him a couple of months’ holiday, paid for him, too, in a place near the sea down near Brighton—a real kind gentleman the doctor was—and he took Mr. Ellis on temporary for the time being, and so, as I said to that superintendent, I can’t say anything about Mr. Ellis, though, from all he said himself, he seems to have been with the best families, and he certainly had a gentlemanly way with him.”

  “You didn’t find anything—unusual about him?” asked Sir Charles hopefully.

  “Well, it’s odd your saying that, sir, because, if you know what I mean, I did and I didn’t.”

  Sir Charles looked encouraging, and Mrs. Leckie went on:

  “I couldn’t exactly say what it was, sir, but there was something—”

  There always is—after the event—thought Mr. Satterthwaite to himself grimly. However much Mrs. Leckie had despised the police, she was not proof against suggestion. If Ellis turned out to be the criminal, well, Mrs. Leckie would have noticed something.