The Witness for the Prosecution

by Agatha Christie

  But she was interrupted. Gerald Martin, his face suffused with blood, half-choking, was pointing a shaking forefinger at her.

  ‘The coffee—my God! the coffee!’

  She stared at him.

  ‘I understand now why it was bitter. You devil! You’ve been up to your tricks again.’

  His hands gripped the arms of his chair. He was ready to spring upon her.

  ‘You’ve poisoned me.’

  Alix had retreated from him to the fireplace. Now, terrified, she opened her lips to deny—and then paused. In another minute he would spring upon her. She summoned all her strength. Her eyes held his steamy, compellingly.

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I poisoned you. Already the poison is working. At this minute you can’t move from your chair—you can’t move—’

  If she could keep him there—even a few minutes …

  Ah! what was that? Footsteps on the road. The creak of the gate. Then footsteps on the path outside. The outer door opening.

  ‘You can’t move,’ she said again.

  Then she slipped past him and fled headlong from the room to fall fainting into Dick Windyford’s arms.

  ‘My God! Alix,’ he cried.

  Then he turned to the man with him, a tall stalwart figure in policeman’s uniform.

  ‘Go and see what’s been happening in that room.’

  He laid Alix carefully down on a couch and bent over her.

  ‘My little girl,’ he murmured. ‘My poor little girl. What have they been doing to you?’

  Her eyelids fluttered and her lips just murmured his name.

  Dick was aroused by the policeman’s touching him on the arm.

  ‘There’s nothing in that room, sir, but a man sitting in a chair. Looks as though he’d had some kind of bad fright, and—’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Well, sir, he’s—dead.’

  They were startled by hearing Alix’s voice. She spoke as though in some kind of dream, her eyes still closed.

  ‘And presently,’ she said, almost as though she were quoting from something, ‘he died—’

  The Red Signal

  ‘No, but how too thrilling,’ said pretty Mrs Eversleigh, opening her lovely, but slightly vacant eyes very wide. ‘They always say women have a sixth sense; do you think it’s true, Sir Alington?’

  The famous alienist smiled sardonically. He had an unbounded contempt for the foolish pretty type, such as his fellow guest. Alington West was the supreme authority on mental disease, and he was fully alive to his own position and importance. A slightly pompous man of full figure.

  ‘A great deal of nonsense is talked, I know that, Mrs Eversleigh. What does the term mean—a sixth sense?’

  ‘You scientific men are always so severe. And it really is extraordinary the way one seems to positively know things sometimes—just know them, feel them, I mean—quite uncanny—it really is. Claire knows what I mean, don’t you, Claire?’

  She appealed to her hostess with a slight pout, and a tilted shoulder.

  Claire Trent did not reply at once. It was a small dinner party, she and her husband, Violet Eversleigh, Sir Alington West, and his nephew, Dermot West, who was an old friend of Jack Trent’s. Jack Trent himself, a somewhat heavy florid man, with a good-humoured smile, and a pleasant lazy laugh, took up the thread.

  ‘Bunkum, Violet! Your best friend is killed in a railway accident. Straight away you remember that you dreamt of a black cat last Tuesday—marvellous, you felt all along that something was going to happen!’

  ‘Oh, no, Jack, you’re mixing up premonitions with intuition now. Come, now, Sir Alington, you must admit that premonitions are real?’

  ‘To a certain extent, perhaps,’ admitted the physician cautiously. ‘But coincidence accounts for a good deal, and then there is the invariable tendency to make the most of a story afterwards—you’ve always got to take that into account.’

  ‘I don’t think there is any such thing as premonition,’ said Claire Trent, rather abruptly. ‘Or intuition, or a sixth sense, or any of the things we talk about so glibly. We go through life like a train rushing through the darkness to an unknown destination.’

  ‘That’s hardly a good simile, Mrs Trent,’ said Dermot West, lifting his head for the first time and taking part in the discussion. There was a curious glitter in the clear grey eyes that shone out rather oddly from the deeply tanned face. ‘You’ve forgotten the signals, you see.’

  ‘The signals?’

  ‘Yes, green if it’s all right, and red—for danger!’

  ‘Red—for danger—how thrilling!’ breathed Violet Eversleigh.

  Dermot turned from her rather impatiently.

  ‘That’s just a way of describing it, of course. Danger ahead! The red signal! Look out!’

  Trent stared at him curiously.

  ‘You speak as though it were an actual experience, Dermot, old boy.’

  ‘So it is—has been, I mean.’

  ‘Give us the yarn.’

  ‘I can give you one instance. Out in Mesopotamia—just after the Armistice, I came into my tent one evening with the feeling strong upon me. Danger! Look out! Hadn’t the ghost of a notion what it was all about. I made a round of the camp, fussed unnecessarily, took all precautions against an attack by hostile Arabs. Then I went back to my tent. As soon as I got inside, the feeling popped up again stronger than ever. Danger! In the end, I took a blanket outside, rolled myself up in it and slept there.’

  ‘Well?’

  ‘The next morning, when I went inside the tent, first thing I saw was a great knife arrangement—about half a yard long—struck down through my bunk, just where I would have lain. I soon found out about it—one of the Arab servants. His son had been shot as a spy. What have you got to say to that, Uncle Alington, as an example of what I call the red signal?’

  The specialist smiled non-committally.

  ‘A very interesting story, my dear Dermot.’

  ‘But not one that you would accept unreservedly?’

  ‘Yes, yes, I have no doubt that you had the premonition of danger, just as you state. But it is the origin of the premonition I dispute. According to you, it came from without, impressed by some outside source upon your mentality. But nowadays we find that nearly everything comes from within—from our subconscious self.’

  ‘Good old subconscious,’ cried Jack Trent. ‘It’s the jack-of-all-trades nowadays.’

  Sir Alington continued without heeding the interruption.

  ‘I suggest that by some glance or look this Arab had betrayed himself. Your conscious self did not notice or remember, but with your subconscious self it was otherwise. The subconscious never forgets. We believe, too, that it can reason and deduce quite independently of the higher or conscious will. Your subconscious self, then, believed that an attempt might be made to assassinate you, and succeeded in forcing its fear upon your conscious realization.’

  ‘That sounds very convincing, I admit,’ said Dermot, smiling.

  ‘But not nearly so exciting,’ pouted Mrs Eversleigh.

  ‘It is also possible that you may have been subconsciously aware of the hate felt by the man towards you. What in old days used to be called telepathy certainly exists, though the conditions governing it are very little understood.’

  ‘Have there been any other instances?’ asked Claire of Dermot.

  ‘Oh! yes, but nothing very pictorial—and I suppose they could all be explained under the heading of coincidence. I refused an invitation to a country house once, for no other reason than the hoisting of the “red signal”. The place was burnt out during the week. By the way, Uncle Alington, where does the subconscious come in there?’

  ‘I’m afraid it doesn’t,’ said Alington, smiling.

  ‘But you’ve got an equally good explanation. Come, now. No need to be tactful with near relatives.’

  ‘Well, then, nephew, I venture to suggest that you refused the invitation for the ordinary reason that you didn’t much want to g
o, and that after the fire, you suggested to yourself that you had had a warning of danger, which explanation you now believe implicitly.’

  ‘It’s hopeless,’ laughed Dermot. ‘It’s heads you win, tails I lose.’

  ‘Never mind, Mr West,’ cried Violet Eversleigh. ‘I believe in your Red Signal implicitly. Is the time in Mesopotamia the last time you had it?’

  ‘Yes—until—’

  ‘I beg your pardon?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  Dermot sat silent. The words which had nearly left his lips were: ‘Yes, until tonight.’ They had come quite unbidden to his lips, voicing a thought which had as yet not been consciously realized, but he was aware at once that they were true. The Red Signal was looming up out of the darkness. Danger! Danger close at hand!

  But why? What conceivable danger could there be here? Here in the house of his friends? At least—well, yes, there was that kind of danger. He looked at Claire Trent—her whiteness, her slenderness, the exquisite droop of her golden head. But that danger had been there for some time—it was never likely to get acute. For Jack Trent was his best friend, and more than his best friend, the man who had saved his life in Flanders and had been recommended for the VC for doing so. A good fellow, Jack, one of the best. Damned bad luck that he should have fallen in love with Jack’s wife. He’d get over it some day, he supposed. A thing couldn’t go on hurting like this for ever. One could starve it out—that was it, starve it out. It was not as though she would ever guess—and if she did guess, there was no danger of her caring. A statue, a beautiful statue, a thing of gold and ivory and pale pink coral … a toy for a king, not a real woman …

  Claire … the very thought of her name, uttered silently, hurt him … He must get over it. He’d cared for women before … ‘But not like this!’ said something. ‘Not like this.’ Well, there it was. No danger there—heartache, yes, but not danger. Not the danger of the Red Signal. That was for something else.

  He looked round the table and it struck him for the first time that it was rather an unusual little gathering. His uncle, for instance, seldom dined out in this small, informal way. It was not as though the Trents were old friends; until this evening Dermot had not been aware that he knew them at all.

  To be sure, there was an excuse. A rather notorious medium was coming after dinner to give a séance. Sir Alington professed to be mildly interested in spiritualism. Yes, that was an excuse, certainly.

  The word forced itself on his notice. An excuse. Was the séance just an excuse to make the specialist’s presence at dinner natural? If so, what was the real object of his being here? A host of details came rushing into Dermot’s mind, trifles unnoticed at the time, or, as his uncle would have said, unnoticed by the conscious mind.

  The great physician had looked oddly, very oddly, at Claire more than once. He seemed to be watching her. She was uneasy under his scrutiny. She made little twitching motions with her hands. She was nervous, horribly nervous, and was it, could it be, frightened? Why was she frightened?

  With a jerk, he came back to the conversation round the table. Mrs Eversleigh had got the great man talking upon his own subject.

  ‘My dear lady,’ he was saying, ‘what is madness? I can assure you that the more we study the subject, the more difficult we find it to pronounce. We all practise a certain amount of self-deception, and when we carry it so far as to believe we are the Czar of Russia, we are shut up or restrained. But there is a long road before we reach that point. At what particular spot on it shall we erect a post and say, “On this side sanity, on the other madness?” It can’t be done, you know. And I will tell you this, if the man suffering from a delusion happened to hold his tongue about it, in all probability we should never be able to distinguish him from a normal individual. The extraordinary sanity of the insane is a most interesting subject.’

  Sir Alington sipped his wine with appreciation, and beamed upon the company.

  ‘I’ve always heard they are very cunning,’ remarked Mrs Eversleigh. ‘Loonies, I mean.’

  ‘Remarkably so. And suppression of one’s particular delusion has a disastrous effect very often. All suppressions are dangerous, as psychoanalysis has taught us. The man who has a harmless eccentricity, and can indulge it as such, seldom goes over the border line. But the man’—he paused—‘or woman who is to all appearance perfectly normal may be in reality a poignant source of danger to the community.’

  His gaze travelled gently down the table to Claire, and then back again. He sipped his wine once more.

  A horrible fear shook Dermot. Was that what he meant? Was that what he was driving at? Impossible, but—

  ‘And all from suppressing oneself,’ sighed Mrs Eversleigh. ‘I quite see that one should be very careful always to—to express one’s personality. The dangers of the other are frightful.’

  ‘My dear Mrs Eversleigh,’ expostulated the physician. ‘You have quite misunderstood me. The cause of the mischief is in the physical matter of the brain—sometimes arising from some outward agency such as a blow; sometimes, alas, congenital.’

  ‘Heredity is so sad,’ sighed the lady vaguely. ‘Consumption and all that.’

  ‘Tuberculosis is not hereditary,’ said Sir Alington drily.

  ‘Isn’t it? I always thought it was. But madness is! How dreadful. What else?’

  ‘Gout,’ said Sir Alington smiling. ‘And colour blindness—the latter is rather interesting. It is transmitted direct to males, but is latent in females. So, while there are many colour-blind men, for a woman to be colour-blind, it must have been latent in her mother as well as present in her father—rather an unusual state of things to occur. That is what is called sex-limited heredity.’

  ‘How interesting. But madness is not like that, is it?’

  ‘Madness can be handed down to men or women equally,’ said the physician gravely.

  Claire rose suddenly, pushing back her chair so abruptly that it overturned and fell to the ground. She was very pale and the nervous motions of her fingers were very apparent.

  ‘You—you will not be long, will you?’ she begged. ‘Mrs Thompson will be here in a few minutes now.’

  ‘One glass of port, and I will be with you, for one,’ declared Sir Alington. ‘To see this wonderful Mrs Thompson’s performance is what I have come for, is it not? Ha, ha! Not that I needed any inducement.’ He bowed.

  Claire gave a faint smile of acknowledgment and passed out of the room, her hand on Mrs Eversleigh’s shoulder.

  ‘Afraid I’ve been talking shop,’ remarked the physician as he resumed his seat. ‘Forgive me, my dear fellow.’

  ‘Not at all,’ said Trent perfunctorily.

  He looked strained and worried. For the first time Dermot felt an outsider in the company of his friend. Between these two was a secret that even an old friend might not share. And yet the whole thing was fantastic and incredible. What had he to go upon? Nothing but a couple of glances and a woman’s nervousness.

  They lingered over their wine but a very short time, and arrived up in the drawing-room just as Mrs Thompson was announced.

  The medium was a plump middle-aged woman, atrociously dressed in magenta velvet, with a loud rather common voice.

  ‘Hope I’m not late, Mrs Trent,’ she said cheerily. ‘You did say nine o’clock, didn’t you?’

  ‘You are quite punctual, Mrs Thompson,’ said Claire in her sweet, slightly husky voice. ‘This is our little circle.’

  No further introductions were made, as was evidently the custom. The medium swept them all with a shrewd, penetrating eye.

  ‘I hope we shall get some good results,’ she remarked briskly. ‘I can’t tell you how I hate it when I go out and I can’t give satisfaction, so to speak. It just makes me mad. But I think Shiromako (my Japanese control, you know) will be able to get through all right tonight. I’m feeling ever so fit, and I refused the welsh rabbit, fond of toasted cheese though I am.’

  Dermot listened, half amused, half disgusted. How p
rosaic the whole thing was! And yet, was he not judging foolishly? Everything, after all, was natural—the powers claimed by mediums were natural powers, as yet imperfectly understood. A great surgeon might be wary of indigestion on the eve of a delicate operation. Why not Mrs Thompson?

  Chairs were arranged in a circle, lights so that they could conveniently be raised or lowered. Dermot noticed that there was no question of tests, or of Sir Alington satisfying himself as to the conditions of the séance. No, this business of Mrs Thompson was only a blind. Sir Alington was here for quite another purpose. Claire’s mother, Dermot remembered, had died abroad. There had been some mystery about her … Hereditary …

  With a jerk he forced his mind back to the surroundings of the moment.

  Everyone took their places, and the lights were turned out, all but a small red-shaded one on a far table.

  For a while nothing was heard but the low even breathing of the medium. Gradually it grew more and more stertorous. Then, with a suddenness that made Dermot jump, a loud rap came from the far end of the room. It was repeated from the other side. Then a perfect crescendo of raps was heard. They died away, and a sudden high peal of mocking laughter rang through the room. Then silence, broken by a voice utterly unlike that of Mrs Thompson, a high-pitched quaintly inflected voice.

  ‘I am here, gentlemen,’ it said. ‘Yess, I am here. You wish to ask me things?’

  ‘Who are you? Shiromako?’

  ‘Yess. I Shiromako. I pass over long time ago. I work. I very happy.’

  Further details of Shiromako’s life followed. It was all very flat and uninteresting, and Dermot had heard it often before. Everyone was happy, very happy. Messages were given from vaguely described relatives, the description being so loosely worded as to fit almost any contingency. An elderly lady, the mother of someone present, held the floor for some time, imparting copy book maxims with an air of refreshing novelty hardly borne out by her subject matter.

  ‘Someone else want to get through now,’ announced Shiromako. ‘Got a very important message for one of the gentlemen.’