Midwinter Murder

by Agatha Christie

  The Duchess was seized with a whim for Corsica. Cannes bored her and she had a bitter argument with the hotel proprietor over the price of her rooms.

  ‘And you shall go with me, Satterthwaite,’ she said firmly. ‘We needn’t be afraid of scandal at our time of life.’

  Mr Satterthwaite was delicately flattered. No one had ever mentioned scandal in connection with him before. He was far too insignificant. Scandal—and a Duchess—delicious!

  ‘Picturesque you know,’ said the Duchess. ‘Brigands—all that sort of thing. And extremely cheap, so I’ve heard. Manuel was positively impudent this morning. These hotel proprietors need putting in their place. They can’t expect to get the best people if they go on like this. I told him so plainly.’

  ‘I believe,’ said Mr Satterthwaite, ‘that one can fly over quite comfortably. From Antibes.’

  ‘They probably charge you a pretty penny for it,’ said the Duchess sharply. ‘Find out, will you?’

  ‘Certainly, Duchess.’

  Mr Satterthwaite was still in a flutter of gratification despite the fact that his role was clearly to be that of a glorified courier.

  When she learned the price of a passage by Avion, the Duchess turned it down promptly.

  ‘They needn’t think I’m going to pay a ridiculous sum like that to go in one of their nasty dangerous things.’

  So they went by boat, and Mr Satterthwaite endured ten hours of acute discomfort. To begin with, as the boat sailed at seven, he took it for granted that there would be dinner on board. But there was no dinner. The boat was small and the sea was rough. Mr Satterthwaite was decanted at Ajaccio in the early hours of the morning more dead than alive.

  The Duchess, on the contrary, was perfectly fresh. She never minded discomfort if she could feel she was saving money. She waxed enthusiastic over the scene on the quay, with the palm trees and the rising sun. The whole population seemed to have turned out to watch the arrival of the boat, and the launching of the gangway was attended with excited cries and directions.

  ‘On dirait,’ said a stout Frenchman who stood beside them, ‘que jamais avant on n’a fait cette manoeuvre là!’

  ‘That maid of mine has been sick all night,’ said the Duchess. ‘The girl’s a perfect fool.’

  Mr Satterthwaite smiled in a pallid fashion.

  ‘A waste of good food, I call it,’ continued the Duchess robustly.

  ‘Did she get any food?’ asked Mr Satterthwaite enviously.

  ‘I happened to bring some biscuits and a stick of chocolate on board with me,’ said the Duchess. ‘When I found there was no dinner to be got, I gave the lot to her. The lower classes always make such a fuss about going without their meals.’

  With a cry of triumph the launching of the gangway was accomplished. A Musical Comedy chorus of brigands rushed aboard and wrested hand-luggage from the passengers by main force.

  ‘Come on, Satterthwaite,’ said the Duchess. ‘I want a hot bath and some coffee.’

  So did Mr Satterthwaite. He was not wholly successful, however. They were received at the hotel by a bowing manager and were shown to their rooms. The Duchess’s had a bathroom attached. Mr Satterthwaite, however, was directed to a bath that appeared to be situated in somebody else’s bedroom. To expect the water to be hot at that hour in the morning was, perhaps, unreasonable. Later he drank intensely black coffee, served in a pot without a lid. The shutters and the window of his room had been flung open, and the crisp morning air came in fragrantly. A day of dazzling blue and green.

  The waiter waved his hand with a flourish to call attention to the view.

  ‘Ajaccio,’ he said solemnly. ‘Le plus beau port du monde!’

  And he departed abruptly.

  Looking out over the deep blue of the bay, with the snowy mountains beyond, Mr Satterthwaite was almost inclined to agree with him. He finished his coffee, and lying down on the bed, fell fast asleep.

  At déjeuner the Duchess was in great spirits.

  ‘This is just what will be good for you, Satterthwaite,’ she said. ‘Get you out of all those dusty little old-maidish ways of yours.’ She swept a lorgnette round the room. ‘Upon my word, there’s Naomi Carlton Smith.’

  She indicated a girl sitting by herself at a table in the window. A round-shouldered girl, who slouched as she sat. Her dress appeared to be made of some kind of brown sacking. She had black hair, untidily bobbed.

  ‘An artist?’ asked Mr Satterthwaite.

  He was always good at placing people.

  ‘Quite right,’ said the Duchess. ‘Calls herself one anyway. I knew she was mooching around in some queer quarter of the globe. Poor as a church mouse, proud as Lucifer, and a bee in her bonnet like all the Carlton Smiths. Her mother was my first cousin.’

  ‘She’s one of the Knowlton lot then?’

  The Duchess nodded.

  ‘Been her own worst enemy,’ she volunteered. ‘Clever girl too. Mixed herself up with a most undesirable young man. One of that Chelsea crowd. Wrote plays or poems or something unhealthy. Nobody took ’em, of course. Then he stole somebody’s jewels and got caught out. I forget what they gave him. Five years, I think. But you must remember? It was last winter.’

  ‘Last winter I was in Egypt,’ explained Mr Satterthwaite. ‘I had ’flu very badly the end of January, and the doctors insisted on Egypt afterwards. I missed a lot.’

  His voice rang with a note of real regret.

  ‘That girl seems to me to be moping,’ said the Duchess, raising her lorgnette once more. ‘I can’t allow that.’

  On her way out, she stopped by Miss Carlton Smith’s table and tapped the girl on the shoulder.

  ‘Well, Naomi, you don’t seem to remember me?’

  Naomi rose rather unwillingly to her feet.

  ‘Yes, I do, Duchess. I saw you come in. I thought it was quite likely you mightn’t recognize me.’

  She drawled the words lazily, with a complete indifference of manner.

  ‘When you’ve finished your lunch, come and talk to me on the terrace,’ ordered the Duchess.

  ‘Very well.’

  Naomi yawned.

  ‘Shocking manners,’ said the Duchess, to Mr Satterthwaite, as she resumed her progress. ‘All the Carlton Smiths have.’

  They had their coffee outside in the sunshine. They had been there about six minutes when Naomi Carlton Smith lounged out from the hotel and joined them. She let herself fall slackly on to a chair with her legs stretched out ungracefully in front of her.

  An odd face, with its jutting chin and deep-set grey eyes. A clever, unhappy face—a face that only just missed being beautiful.

  ‘Well, Naomi,’ said the Duchess briskly. ‘And what are you doing with yourself?’

  ‘Oh, I dunno. Just marking time.’

  ‘Been painting?’

  ‘A bit.’

  ‘Show me your things.’

  Naomi grinned. She was not cowed by the autocrat. She was amused. She went into the hotel and came out again with a portfolio.

  ‘You won’t like ’em, Duchess,’ she said warningly. ‘Say what you like. You won’t hurt my feelings.’

  Mr Satterthwaite moved his chair a little nearer. He was interested. In another minute he was more interested still. The Duchess was frankly unsympathetic.

  ‘I can’t even see which way the things ought to be,’ she complained. ‘Good gracious, child, there was never a sky that colour—or a sea either.’

  ‘That’s the way I see ’em,’ said Naomi placidly.

  ‘Ugh!’ said the Duchess, inspecting another. ‘This gives me the creeps.’

  ‘It’s meant to,’ said Naomi. ‘You’re paying me a compliment without knowing it.’

  It was a queer vorticist study of a prickly pear—just recognizable as such. Grey-green with slodges of violent colour where the fruit glittered like jewels. A swirling mass of evil, fleshy—festering. Mr Satterthwaite shuddered and turned his head aside.

  He found Naomi looking at him and no
dding her head in comprehension.

  ‘I know,’ she said. ‘But it is beastly.’

  The Duchess cleared her throat.

  ‘It seems quite easy to be an artist nowadays,’ she observed witheringly. ‘There’s no attempt to copy things. You just shovel on some paint—I don’t know what with, not a brush, I’m sure—’

  ‘Palette knife,’ interposed Naomi, smiling broadly once more.

  ‘A good deal at a time,’ continued the Duchess. ‘In lumps. And there you are! Everyone says: ‘How clever.’ Well, I’ve no patience with that sort of thing. Give me—’

  ‘A nice picture of a dog or a horse, by Edwin Landseer.’

  ‘And why not?’ demanded the Duchess. ‘What’s wrong with Landseer?’

  ‘Nothing,’ said Naomi. ‘He’s all right. And you’re all right. The tops of things are always nice and shiny and smooth. I respect you, Duchess, you’ve got force. You’ve met life fair and square and you’ve come out on top. But the people who are underneath see the under side of things. And that’s interesting in a way.’

  The Duchess stared at her.

  ‘I haven’t the faintest idea what you’re talking about,’ she declared.

  Mr Satterthwaite was still examining the sketches. He realized, as the Duchess could not, the perfection of technique behind them. He was startled and delighted. He looked up at the girl.

  ‘Will you sell me one of these, Miss Carlton Smith?’ he asked.

  ‘You can have any one you like for five guineas,’ said the girl indifferently.

  Mr Satterthwaite hesitated a minute or two and then he selected a study of prickly pear and aloe. In the foreground was a vivid blur of yellow mimosa, the scarlet of the aloe flower danced in and out of the picture, and inexorable, mathematically underlying the whole, was the oblong pattern of the prickly pear and the sword motif of the aloe.

  He made a little bow to the girl.

  ‘I am very happy to have secured this, and I think I have made a bargain. Some day, Miss Carlton Smith, I shall be able to sell this sketch at a very good profit—if I want to!’

  The girl leant forward to see which one he had taken. He saw a new look come into her eyes. For the first time she was really aware of his existence, and there was respect in the quick glance she gave him.

  ‘You have chosen the best,’ she said. ‘I—I am glad.’

  ‘Well, I suppose you know what you’re doing,’ said the Duchess. ‘And I daresay you’re right. I’ve heard that you are quite a connoisseur. But you can’t tell me that all this new stuff is art, because it isn’t. Still, we needn’t go into that. Now I’m only going to be here a few days and I want to see something of the island. You’ve got a car, I suppose, Naomi?’

  The girl nodded.

  ‘Excellent,’ said the Duchess. ‘We’ll make a trip somewhere tomorrow.’

  ‘It’s only a two-seater.’

  ‘Nonsense, there’s a dickey, I suppose, that will do for Mr Satterthwaite?’

  A shuddering sigh went through Mr Satterthwaite. He had observed the Corsican roads that morning. Naomi was regarding him thoughtfully.

  ‘I’m afraid my car would be no good to you,’ she said. ‘It’s a terribly battered old bus. I bought it second-hand for a mere song. It will just get me up the hills—with coaxing. But I can’t take passengers. There’s quite a good garage, though, in the town. You can hire a car there.’

  ‘Hire a car?’ said the Duchess, scandalized. ‘What an idea. Who’s that nice-looking man who drove up in a four-seater just before lunch?’

  ‘I expect you mean Mr Tomlinson. He’s a retired Indian judge.’

  He seems quite a decent sort of man. I shall talk to him.’

  That evening, on coming down to dinner, Mr Satterthwaite found the Duchess resplendent in black velvet and diamonds, talking earnestly to the owner of the four-seater car. She beckoned authoritatively.

  ‘Come here, Mr Satterthwaite, Mr Tomlinson is telling me the most interesting things, and what do you think?—he is actually going to take us on an expedition tomorrow in his car.’

  Mr Satterthwaite regarded her with admiration.

  ‘We must go in to dinner,’ said the Duchess. ‘Do come and sit at our table, Mr Tomlinson, and then you can go on with what you were telling me.’

  ‘Quite a decent sort of man,’ the Duchess pronounced later.

  ‘With quite a decent sort of car,’ retorted Mr Satterthwaite.

  ‘Naughty,’ said the Duchess, and gave him a resounding blow on the knuckles with the dingy black fan she always carried. Mr Satterthwaite winced with pain.

  ‘Naomi is coming too,’ said the Duchess. ‘In her car. That girl wants taking out of herself. She’s very selfish. Not exactly self-centred, but totally indifferent to everyone and everything. Don’t you agree?’

  ‘I don’t think that’s possible,’ said Mr Satterthwaite, slowly. ‘I mean, everyone’s interest must go somewhere. There are, of course, the people who revolve round themselves—but I agree with you, she’s not one of that kind. She’s totally uninterested in herself. And yet she’s got a strong character—there must be something. I thought at first it was her art—but it isn’t. I’ve never met anyone so detached from life. That’s dangerous.’

  ‘Dangerous? What do you mean?’

  ‘Well, you see—it must mean an obsession of some kind, and obsessions are always dangerous.’

  ‘Satterthwaite,’ said the Duchess, ‘don’t be a fool. And listen to me. About tomorrow—’

  Mr Satterthwaite listened. It was very much his role in life.

  They started early the following morning, taking their lunch with them. Naomi, who had been six months in the island, was to be the pioneer. Mr Satterthwaite went over to her as she sat waiting to start.

  ‘You are sure that—I can’t come with you?’ he said wistfully.

  She shook her head.

  ‘You’ll be much more comfortable in the back of the other car. Nicely padded seats and all that. This is a regular old rattle trap. You’d leap in the air going over the bumps.’

  ‘And then, of course, the hills.’

  Naomi laughed.

  ‘Oh, I only said that to rescue you from the dickey. The Duchess could perfectly well afford to have hired a car. She’s the meanest woman in England. All the same, the old thing is rather a sport, and I can’t help liking her.’

  ‘Then I could come with you after all?’ said Mr Satterthwaite eagerly.

  She looked at him curiously.

  ‘Why are you so anxious to come with me?’

  ‘Can you ask?’ Mr Satterthwaite made his funny old-fashioned bow.

  She smiled, but shook her head.

  ‘That isn’t the reason,’ she said thoughtfully. ‘It’s odd . . . But you can’t come with me—not today.’

  ‘Another day, perhaps,’ suggested Mr Satterthwaite politely.

  ‘Oh, another day!’ she laughed suddenly, a very queer laugh, Mr Satterthwaite thought. ‘Another day! Well, we’ll see.’

  They started. They drove through the town, and then round the long curve of the bay, winding inland to cross a river and then back to the coast with its hundreds of little sandy coves. And then they began to climb. In and out, round nerve-shattering curves, upwards, ever upwards on the tortuous winding road. The blue bay was far below them, and on the other side of it Ajaccio sparkled in the sun, white, like a fairy city.

  In and out, in and out, with a precipice first one side of them, then the other. Mr Satterthwaite felt slightly giddy, he also felt slightly sick. The road was not very wide. And still they climbed.

  It was cold now. The wind came to them straight off the snow peaks. Mr Satterthwaite turned up his coat collar and buttoned it tightly under his chin.

  It was very cold. Across the water, Ajaccio was still bathed in sunlight, but up here thick grey clouds came drifting across the face of the sun. Mr Satterthwaite ceased to admire the view. He yearned for a steam-heated hotel and a comfortable armchair.<
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  Ahead of them Naomi’s little two-seater drove steadily forward. Up, still up. They were on top of the world now. On either side of them were lower hills, hills sloping down to valleys. They looked straight across to the snow peaks. And the wind came tearing over them, sharp, like a knife. Suddenly Naomi’s car stopped, and she looked back.

  ‘We’ve arrived,’ she said. ‘At the World’s End. And I don’t think it’s an awfully good day for it.’

  They all got out. They had arrived in a tiny village, with half a dozen stone cottages. An imposing name was printed in letters a foot high.

  ‘Coti Chiaveeri.’

  Naomi shrugged her shoulders.

  ‘That’s its official name, but I prefer to call it the World’s End.’

  She walked on a few steps, and Mr Satterthwaite joined her. They were beyond the houses now. The road stopped. As Naomi had said, this was the end, the back of beyond, the beginning of nowhere. Behind them the white ribbon of the road, in front of them—nothing. Only far, far below, the sea . . .

  Mr Satterthwaite drew a deep breath.

  ‘It’s an extraordinary place. One feels that anything might happen here, that one might meet—anyone—’

  He stopped, for just in front of them a man was sitting on a boulder, his face turned to the sea. They had not seen him till this moment, and his appearance had the suddenness of a conjuring trick. He might have sprung from the surrounding landscape.

  ‘I wonder—’ began Mr Satterthwaite.

  But at that minute the stranger turned, and Mr Satterthwaite saw his face.

  ‘Why, Mr Quin! How extraordinary. Miss Carlton Smith, I want to introduce my friend Mr Quin to you. He’s the most unusual fellow. You are, you know. You always turn up in the nick of time—’

  He stopped, with the feeling that he had said something awkwardly significant, and yet for the life of him he could not think what it was.