He turned at last from the telephone to say with a sigh of relief:
‘Caught him. He lives just across the Square. He’ll be here in a couple of minutes.’
‘—but I must know what has happened! Is Iris ill?’
It was a final wail from Lucilla.
Anthony said:
‘She was in her room. Door locked. Her head in the gas fire and the gas full on.’
‘Iris?’ Mrs Drake gave a piercing shriek. ‘Iris has committed suicide? I can’t believe it. I don’t believe it!’
A faint ghost of Anthony’s grin returned to him.
‘You don’t need to believe it,’ he said. ‘It isn’t true.’
Chapter 14
‘And now, please, Tony, will you tell me all about it?’
Iris was lying on a sofa, and the valiant November sunshine was making a brave show outside the windows of Little Priors.
Anthony looked across at Colonel Race who was sitting on the window-sill, and grinned engagingly:
‘I don’t mind admitting, Iris, that I’ve been waiting for this moment. If I don’t explain to someone soon how clever I’ve been, I shall burst. There will be no modesty in this recital. It will be shameless blowing of my own trumpet with suitable pauses to enable you to say “Anthony, how clever of you” or “Tony, how wonderful” or some phrase of a like nature. Ahem! The performance will now begin. Here we go.
‘The thing as a whole looked simple enough. What I mean is, that it looked like a clear case of cause and effect. Rosemary’s death, accepted at the time as suicide, was not suicide. George became suspicious, started investigating, was presumably getting near the truth, and before he could unmask the murderer was, in his turn, murdered. The sequence, if I may put it that way, seems perfectly clear.
‘But almost at once we came across some apparent contradictions. Such as: A. George could not be poisoned. B. George was poisoned. And: A. Nobody touched George’s glass. B. George’s glass was tampered with.
‘Actually I was overlooking a very significant fact—the varied use of the possessive case. George’s ear is George’s ear indisputably because it is attached to his head and cannot be removed without a surgical operation! But by George’s watch, I only mean the watch that George is wearing—the question might arise whether it is his or maybe one lent him by someone else. And when I come to George’s glass, or George’s teacup, I begin to realize that I mean something very vague indeed. All I actually mean is the glass or cup out of which George has lately been drinking—and which has nothing to distinguish it from several other cups and glasses of the same pattern.
‘To illustrate this, I tried an experiment. Race was drinking tea without sugar, Kemp was drinking tea with sugar, and I was drinking coffee. In appearance the three fluids were of much the same colour. We were sitting round a small marble-topped table among several other round marble-topped tables. On the pretext of an urgent brainwave I urged the other two out of their seats and out into the vestibule, pushing the chairs aside as we went, and also managing to move Kemp’s pipe which was lying by his plate to a similar position by my plate but without letting him see me do it. As soon as we were outside I made an excuse and we returned, Kemp slightly ahead. He pulled the chair to the table and sat down opposite the plate that was marked by the pipe he had left behind him. Race sat on his right as before and I on his left—but mark what had happened—a new A. and B. contradiction! A. Kemp’s cup has sugared tea in it. B. Kemp’s cup has coffee in it. Two conflicting statements that cannot both be true—But they are both true. The misleading term is Kemp’s cup. Kemp’s cup when he left the table and Kemp’s cup when he returned to the table are not the same.
‘And that, Iris, is what happened at the Luxembourg that night. After the cabaret, when you all went to dance, you dropped your bag. A waiter picked it up—not the waiter, the waiter attending on that table who knew just where you had been sitting—but a waiter, an anxious hurried little waiter with everybody bullying him, running along with a sauce, and who quickly stooped, picked up the bag and placed it by a plate—actually by the plate one place to the left of where you had been sitting. You and George came back first and you went without a thought straight to the place marked by your bag—just as Kemp did to the place marked by his pipe. George sat down in what he thought to be his place, on your right. And when he proposed his toast in memory of Rosemary, he drank from what he thought was his glass but was in reality your glass—the glass that can quite easily have been poisoned without needing a conjuring trick to explain it, because the only person who did not drink after the cabaret, was necessarily the person whose health was being drunk!
‘Now go over the whole business again and the set-up is entirely different! You are the intended victim, not George! So it looks, doesn’t it, as though George is being used. What, if things had not gone wrong, would have been the story as the world would see it? A repetition of the party a year ago—and a repetition of—suicide! Clearly, people would say, a suicidal streak in that family! Bit of paper which has contained cyanide found in your bag. Clear case! Poor girl has been brooding over her sister’s death. Very sad—but these rich girls are sometimes very neurotic!’
Iris interrupted him. She cried out:
‘But why should anyone want to kill me? Why? Why?’
‘All that lovely money, angel. Money, money, money! Rosemary’s money went to you on her death. Now suppose you were to die—unmarried. What would happen to that money? The answer was it would go to your next of kin—to your aunt, Lucilla Drake. Now from all accounts of the dear lady, I could hardly see Lucilla Drake as First Murderess. But is there anyone else who would benefit? Yes, indeed. Victor Drake. If Lucilla has money, it will be exactly the same as Victor having it—Victor will see to that! He has always been able to do what he likes with his mother. And there is nothing difficult about seeing Victor as First Murderer. All along, from the very start of the case, there have been references to Victor, mentions of Victor. He has been in the offing, a shadowy, unsubstantial, evil figure.’
‘But Victor’s in the Argentine! He’s been in South America for over a year.’
‘Has he? We’re coming now to what has been said to be the fundamental plot of every story. “Girl meets Boy!” When Victor met Ruth Lessing, this particular story started. He got hold of her. I think she must have fallen for him pretty badly. Those quiet, level-headed, law-abiding women are the kind that often fall for a real bad lot.
‘Think a minute and you’ll realize that all the evidence for Victor’s being in South America depends on Ruth’s word. None of it was verified because it was never a main issue! Ruth said that she had seen Victor off on the S.S. Cristobal before Rosemary’s death! It was Ruth who suggested putting a call through to Buenos Aires on the day of George’s death—and later sacked the telephone girl who might have inadvertantly let out that she did no such thing.
‘Of course it’s been easy to check up now! Victor Drake arrived in Buenos Aires by a boat leaving England the day after Rosemary’s death a year ago. Ogilvie, in Buenos Aires, had no telephone conversation with Ruth on the subject of Victor Drake on the day of George’s death. And Victor Drake left Buenos Aires for New York some weeks ago. Easy enough for him to arrange for a cable to be sent off in his name on a certain day—one of those well-known cables asking for money that seemed proof positive that he was many thousands of miles away. Instead of which—’
‘Yes, Anthony?’
‘Instead of which,’ said Anthony, leading up to his climax with intense pleasure, ‘he was sitting at the next table to ours at the Luxembourg with a not so dumb blonde!’
‘Not that awful looking man?’
‘A yellow blotchy complexion and bloodshot eyes are easy things to assume, and they make a lot of difference to a man. Actually, of our party, I was the only person (apart from Ruth Lessing) who had ever seen Victor Drake—and I had never known him under that name! In any case I was sitting with my back to him. I did think I
recognized, in the cocktail lounge outside, as we came in, a man I had known in my prison days—Monkey Coleman. But as I was now leading a highly respectable life I was not too anxious that he should recognize me. I never for one moment suspected that Monkey Coleman had had anything to do with the crime—much less that he and Victor Drake were one and the same.’
‘But I don’t see now how he did it?’
Colonel Race took up the tale.
‘In the easiest way in the world. During the cabaret he went out to telephone, passing our table. Drake had been an actor and he had been something more important—a waiter. To assume the make-up and play the part of Pedro Morales was child’s play to an actor, but to move deftly round a table, with the step and gait of a waiter, filling up the champagne glasses, needed the definite knowledge and technique of a man who had actually been a waiter. A clumsy action or movement would have drawn your attention to him, but as a bona fide waiter none of you noticed or saw him. You were looking at the Cabaret, not noticing that portion of the restaurant’s furnishings—the waiter!’
Iris said in a hesitating voice:
‘And Ruth?’
Anthony said:
‘It was Ruth, of course, who put the cyanide paper in your bag—probably in the cloak-room at the beginning of the evening. The same technique she had adopted a year ago—with Rosemary.’
‘I always thought it odd,’ said Iris, ‘that George hadn’t told Ruth about those letters. He consulted her about everything.’
Anthony gave a short laugh.
‘Of course he told her—first thing. She knew he would. That’s why she wrote them. Then she arranged all his “plan” for him—having first got him well worked up. And so she had the stage set—all nicely arranged for suicide No. 2—and if George chose to believe that you had killed Ròsemary and were committing suicide out of remorse or panic—well, that wouldn’t make any difference to Ruth!’
‘And to think I liked her—liked her very much! And actually wanted her to marry George.’
‘She’d probably have made him a very good wife, if she hadn’t come across Victor,’ said Anthony. ‘Moral: every murderess was a nice girl once.’
Iris shivered. ‘All that for money!’
‘You innocent, money is what these things are done for! Victor certainly did it for money. Ruth partly for money, partly for Victor, and partly, I think, because she hated Rosemary. Yes, she’d travelled a long way by the time she deliberately tried to run you down in a car, and still further when she left Lucilla in the drawing-room, banged the front door and then ran up to your bedroom. What did she seem like? Excited at all?’
Iris considered.
‘I don’t think so. She just tapped on the door, came in and said everything was fixed up and she hoped I was feeling all right. I said yes, I was just a bit tired. And then she picked up my big rubber-covered torch and said what a nice torch that was and after that I don’t seem to remember anything.’
‘No, dear,’ said Anthony. ‘Because she hit you a nice little crack, not too hard, on the back of the neck with your nice torch. Then she arranged you artistically by the gas fire, shut the windows tight, turned on the gas, went out, locking the door and passing the key underneath it, pushed the woolly mat close up against the crack so as to shut out any draught and tripped gently down the stairs. Kemp and I just got into the bathroom in time. I raced on up to you and Kemp followed Miss Ruth Lessing unbeknownst to where she had left that car parked—you know, I felt at the time there was something fishy and uncharacteristic about the way Ruth tried to force it on our minds that she had come by bus and tube!’
Iris gave a shudder.
‘It’s horrible—to think anyone was as determined to kill me as all that. Did she hate me too by then?’
‘Oh, I shouldn’t think so. But Miss Ruth Lessing is a very efficient young woman. She’d already been an accessory in two murders and she didn’t fancy having risked her neck for nothing. I’ve no doubt Lucilla Drake bleated out your decision to marry me at a moment’s notice, and in that case there was no time to lose. Once married, I should be your next of kin and not Lucilla.’
‘Poor Lucilla. I’m so terribly sorry for her.’
‘I think we all are. She’s a harmless, kindly soul.’
‘Is he really arrested?’
Anthony looked at Race, who nodded and said:
‘This morning, when he landed in New York.’
‘Was he going to marry Ruth—afterwards?’
‘That was Ruth’s idea. I think she would have brought it off too.’
‘Anthony—I don’t think I like my money very much.’
‘All right, sweet—we’ll do something noble with it if you like. I’ve got enough money to live on—and to keep a wife in reasonable comfort. We’ll give it all away if you like—endow homes for children, or provide free tobacco for old men, or—how about a campaign for serving better coffee all over England?’
‘I shall keep a little,’ said Iris. ‘So that if I ever wanted to, I could be grand and walk out and leave you.’
‘I don’t think, Iris, that is the right spirit in which to enter upon married life. And, by the way, you didn’t once say “Tony, how wonderful” or “Anthony, how clever of you”!’
Colonel Race smiled and got up.
‘Going over to the Farradays for tea,’ he exclaimed. There was a faint twinkle in his eye as he said to Anthony: ‘Don’t suppose you’re coming?’
Anthony shook his head and Race went out of the room. He paused in the doorway to say, over his shoulder:
‘Good show.’
‘That,’ said Anthony as the door closed behind him, ‘denotes supreme British approval.’
Iris asked in a calm voice:
‘He thought I’d done it, didn’t he?’
‘You mustn’t hold that against him,’ said Anthony. ‘You see, he’s known so many beautiful spies, all stealing secret formulas and wheedling secrets out of major-generals, that it’s soured his nature and warped his judgement. He thinks it’s just got to be the beautiful girl in the case!’
‘Why did you know I hadn’t, Tony?’
‘Just love, I suppose,’ said Anthony lightly.
Then his face changed, grew suddenly serious. He touched a little vase by Iris’s side in which was a single sprig of grey-green with a mauve-flower.
‘What’s that doing in flower at this time of year?’
‘It does sometimes—just an odd sprig—if it’s a mild autumn.’
Anthony took it out of the glass and held it for a moment against his cheek. He half-closed his eyes and saw rich chestnut hair, laughing blue eyes and a red passionate mouth…
He said in a quiet conversational tone:
‘She’s not around now any longer, is she?’
‘Who do you mean?’
‘You know who I mean. Rosemary…I think she knew, Iris, that you were in danger.’
He touched the sprig of fragrant green with his lips and threw it lightly out of the window.
‘Good-bye, Rosemary, thank you…’
Iris said softly:
‘That’s for remembrance…’
And more softly still:
‘Pray love remember…’
SPARKLING CYANIDE by Agatha Christie
Copyright © 1945 Agatha Christie Limited (a Chorion company)
“Essay by Charles Osborne” excerpted from The Life and Crimes of Agatha Christie. Copyright © 1982, 1999 by Charles Osborne. Reprinted with permission.
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Sparkling Cyanide Page 21