The Witness for the Prosecution

by Agatha Christie

  Mortimer interposed. ‘Is Johnnie different?’ he asked.

  Magdalen looked at him, a dawning appreciation in her eyes. ‘No,’ she said, ‘now I come to think of it, Johnnie is not different. He is the only one who’s—who’s untouched by it all. He was untouched last night at tea.’

  ‘And you?’ asked Mortimer.

  ‘I was afraid—horribly afraid, just like a child—without knowing what it was I was afraid of. And father was—queer, there’s no other word for it, queer. He talked about miracles and then I prayed—actually prayed for a miracle, and you knocked on the door.’

  She stopped abruptly, staring at him.

  ‘I seem mad to you, I suppose,’ she said defiantly.

  ‘No,’ said Mortimer, ‘on the contrary you seem extremely sane. All sane people have a premonition of danger if it is near them.’

  ‘You don’t understand,’ said Magdalen. ‘I was not afraid—for myself.’

  ‘For whom, then?’

  But again Magdalen shook her head in a puzzled fashion. ‘I don’t know.’

  She went on:

  ‘I wrote S.O.S. on an impulse. I had an idea—absurd, no doubt, that they would not let me speak to you—the rest of them, I mean. I don’t know what it was I meant to ask you to do. I don’t know now.’

  ‘Never mind,’ said Mortimer. ‘I shall do it.’

  ‘What can you do?’

  Mortimer smiled a little.

  ‘I can think.’

  She looked at him doubtfully.

  ‘Yes,’ said Mortimer, ‘a lot can be done that way, more than you would ever believe. Tell me, was there any chance word or phrase that attracted your attention just before the meal last evening?’

  Magdalen frowned. ‘I don’t think so,’ she said. ‘At least I heard Father say something to Mother about Charlotte being the living image of her, and he laughed in a very queer way, but—there’s nothing odd in that, is there?’

  ‘No,’ said Mortimer slowly, ‘except that Charlotte is not like your mother.’

  He remained lost in thought for a minute or two, then looked up to find Magdalen watching him uncertainly.

  ‘Go home, child,’ he said, ‘and don’t worry; leave it in my hands.’

  She went obediently up the path towards the cottage. Mortimer strolled on a little further, then threw himself down on the green turf. He closed his eyes, detached himself from conscious thought or effort, and let a series of pictures flit at will across his mind.

  Johnnie! He always came back to Johnnie. Johnnie, completely innocent, utterly free from all the network of suspicion and intrigue, but nevertheless the pivot round which everything turned. He remembered the crash of Mrs Dinsmead’s cup on her saucer at breakfast that morning. What had caused her agitation? A chance reference on his part to the lad’s fondness for chemicals? At the moment he had not been conscious of Mr Dinsmead, but he saw him now clearly, as he sat, his teacup poised halfway to his lips.

  That took him back to Charlotte, as he had seen her when the door opened last night. She had sat staring at him over the rim of her teacup. And swiftly on that followed another memory. Mr Dinsmead emptying teacups one after the other, and saying ‘this tea is cold’.

  He remembered the steam that went up. Surely the tea had not been so very cold after all?

  Something began to stir in his brain. A memory of something read not so very long ago, within a month perhaps. Some account of a whole family poisoned by a lad’s carelessness. A packet of arsenic left in the larder had all dripped through on the bread below. He had read it in the paper. Probably Mr Dinsmead had read it too.

  Things began to grow clearer …

  Half an hour later, Mortimer Cleveland rose briskly to his feet.

  It was evening once more in the cottage. The eggs were poached tonight and there was a tin of brawn. Presently Mrs Dinsmead came in from the kitchen bearing the big teapot. The family took their places round the table.

  ‘A contrast to last night’s weather,’ said Mrs Dinsmead, glancing towards the window.

  ‘Yes,’ said Mr Dinsmead, ‘it’s so still tonight that you could hear a pin drop. Now then, Mother, pour out, will you?’

  Mrs Dinsmead filled the cups and handed them round the table. Then, as she put the teapot down, she gave a sudden little cry and pressed her hand to her heart. Mr Dinsmead swung round his chair, following the direction of her terrified eyes. Mortimer Cleveland was standing in the doorway.

  He came forward. His manner was pleasant and apologetic.

  ‘I’m afraid I startled you,’ he said. ‘I had to come back for something.’

  ‘Back for something,’ cried Mr Dinsmead. His face was purple, his veins swelling. ‘Back for what, I should like to know?’

  ‘Some tea,’ said Mortimer.

  With a swift gesture he took something from his pocket, and, taking up one of the teacups from the table, emptied some of its contents into a little test-tube he held in his left hand.

  ‘What—what are you doing?’ gasped Mr Dinsmead. His face had gone chalky-white, the purple dying out as if by magic. Mrs Dinsmead gave a thin, high, frightened cry.

  ‘You read the papers, I think, Mr Dinsmead? I am sure you do. Sometimes one reads accounts of a whole family being poisoned, some of them recover, some do not. In this case, one would not. The first explanation would be the tinned brawn you were eating, but supposing the doctor to be a suspicious man, not easily taken in by the tinned food theory? There is a packet of arsenic in your larder. On the shelf below it is a packet of tea. There is a convenient hole in the top shelf, what more natural to suppose then that the arsenic found its way into the tea by accident? Your son Johnnie might be blamed for carelessness, nothing more.’

  ‘I—I don’t know what you mean,’ gasped Dinsmead.

  ‘I think you do,’ Mortimer took up a second teacup and filled a second test-tube. He fixed a red label to one and a blue label to the other.

  ‘The red-labelled one,’ he said, ‘contains tea from your daughter Charlotte’s cup, the other from your daughter Magdalen’s. I am prepared to swear that in the first I shall find four or five times the amount of arsenic than in the latter.’

  ‘You are mad,’ said Dinsmead.

  ‘Oh! dear me, no. I am nothing of the kind. You told me today, Mr Dinsmead, that Magdalen is your daughter. Charlotte was the child you adopted, the child who was so like her mother that when I held a miniature of that mother in my hand today I mistook it for one of Charlotte herself. Your own daughter was to inherit the fortune, and since it might be impossible to keep your supposed daughter Charlotte out of sight, and someone who knew the mother might have realized the truth of the resemblance, you decided on, well—a pinch of white arsenic at the bottom of a teacup.’

  Mrs Dinsmead gave a sudden high cackle, rocking herself to and fro in violent hysterics.

  ‘Tea,’ she squeaked, ‘that’s what he said, tea, not lemonade.’

  ‘Hold your tongue, can’t you?’ roared her husband wrathfully.

  Mortimer saw Charlotte looking at him, wide-eyed, wondering, across the table. Then he felt a hand on his arm, and Magdalen dragged him out of earshot.

  ‘Those,’ she pointed at the phials—‘Daddy. You won’t—’

  Mortimer laid his hand on her shoulder. ‘My child,’ he said, ‘you don’t believe in the past. I do. I believe in the atmosphere of this house. If he had not come to it, perhaps—I say perhaps—your father might not have conceived the plan he did. I keep these two test-tubes to safeguard Charlotte now and in the future. Apart from that, I shall do nothing, in gratitude, if you will, to that hand that wrote S.O.S.’

  Wireless

  ‘Above all, avoid worry and excitement,’ said Dr Meynell, in the comfortable fashion affected by doctors.

  Mrs Harter, as is often the case with people hearing these soothing but meaningless words, seemed more doubtful than relieved.

  ‘There is a certain cardiac weakness,’ continued the doctor fluen
tly, ‘but nothing to be alarmed about. I can assure you of that.

  ‘All the same,’ he added, ‘it might be as well to have a lift installed. Eh? What about it?’

  Mrs Harter looked worried.

  Dr Meynell, on the contrary, looked pleased with himself. The reason he liked attending rich patients rather than poor ones was that he could exercise his active imagination in prescribing for their ailments.

  ‘Yes, a lift,’ said Dr Meynell, trying to think of something else even more dashing—and failing. ‘Then we shall avoid all undue exertion. Daily exercise on the level on a fine day, but avoid walking up hills. And above all,’ he added happily, ‘plenty of distraction for the mind. Don’t dwell on your health.’

  To the old lady’s nephew, Charles Ridgeway, the doctor was slightly more explicit.

  ‘Do not misunderstand me,’ he said. ‘Your aunt may live for years, probably will. At the same time shock or overexertion might carry her off like that!’ He snapped his fingers. ‘She must lead a very quiet life. No exertion. No fatigue. But, of course, she must not be allowed to brood. She must be kept cheerful and the mind well distracted.’

  ‘Distracted,’ said Charles Ridgeway thoughtfully.

  Charles was a thoughtful young man. He was also a young man who believed in furthering his own inclinations whenever possible.

  That evening he suggested the installation of a wireless set.

  Mrs Harter, already seriously upset at the thought of the lift, was disturbed and unwilling. Charles was fluent and persuasive.

  ‘I do not know that I care for these new-fangled things.’ said Mrs Harter piteously. ‘The waves, you know—the electric waves. They might affect me.’

  Charles in a superior and kindly fashion pointed out the futility of this idea.

  Mrs Harter, whose knowledge of the subject was of the vaguest, but who was tenacious of her own opinion, remained unconvinced.

  ‘All that electricity,’ she murmured timorously. ‘You may say what you like, Charles, but some people are affected by electricity. I always have a terrible headache before a thunderstorm. I know that.’

  She nodded her head triumphantly.

  Charles was a patient young man. He was also persistent.

  ‘My dear Aunt Mary,’ he said, ‘let me make the thing clear to you.’

  He was something of an authority on the subject. He delivered now quite a lecture on the theme; warming to his task, he spoke of bright-emitter valves, of dull-emitter valves, of high frequency and low frequency, of amplification and of condensers.

  Mrs Harter, submerged in a sea of words that she did not understand, surrendered.

  ‘Of course, Charles,’ she murmured, ‘if you really think—’

  ‘My dear Aunt Mary,’ said Charles enthusiastically. ‘It is the very thing for you, to keep you from moping and all that.’

  The lift prescribed by Dr Meynell was installed shortly afterwards and was very nearly the death of Mrs Harter since, like many other old ladies, she had a rooted objection to strange men in the house. She suspected them one and all of having designs on her old silver.

  After the lift the wireless set arrived. Mrs Harter was left to contemplate the, to her, repellent object—a large ungainly-looking box, studded with knobs.

  It took all Charles’ enthusiasm to reconcile her to it.

  Charles was in his element, he turned knobs, discoursing eloquently the while.

  Mrs Harter sat in her high-backed chair, patient and polite, with a rooted conviction in her own mind that these new-fangled notions were neither more nor less than unmitigated nuisances.

  ‘Listen, Aunt Mary, we are on to Berlin, isn’t that splendid? Can you hear the fellow?’

  ‘I can’t hear anything except a good deal of buzzing and clicking,’ said Mrs Harter.

  Charles continued to twirl knobs. ‘Brussels,’ he announced with enthusiasm.

  ‘Is it really?’ said Mrs Harter with no more than a trace of interest.

  Charles again turned knobs and an unearthly howl echoed forth into the room.

  ‘Now we seem to be on to the Dogs’ Home,’ said Mrs Harter, who was an old lady with a certain amount of spirit.

  ‘Ha, ha!’ said Charles, ‘you will have your joke, won’t you, Aunt Mary? Very good that!’

  Mrs Harter could not help smiling at him. She was very fond of Charles. For some years a niece, Miriam Harter, had lived with her. She had intended to make the girl her heiress, but Miriam had not been a success. She was impatient and obviously bored by her aunt’s society. She was always out, ‘gadding about’ as Mrs Harter called it. In the end, she had entangled herself with a young man of whom her aunt thoroughly disapproved. Miriam had been returned to her mother with a curt note much as if she had been goods on approval. She had married the young man in question and Mrs Harter usually sent her a handkerchief case or a table-centre at Christmas.

  Having found nieces disappointing, Mrs Harter turned her attention to nephews. Charles, from the first, had been an unqualified success. He was always pleasantly deferential to his aunt, and listened with an appearance of intense interest to the reminiscences of her youth. In this he was a great contrast to Miriam, who had been frankly bored and showed it. Charles was never bored, he was always good-tempered, always gay. He told his aunt many times a day that she was a perfectly marvellous old lady.

  Highly satisfied with her new acquisition, Mrs Harter had written to her lawyer with instructions as to the making of a new will. This was sent to her, duly approved by her and signed.

  And now even in the matter of the wireless, Charles was soon proved to have won fresh laurels.

  Mrs Harter, at first antagonistic, became tolerant and finally fascinated. She enjoyed it very much better when Charles was out. The trouble with Charles was that he could not leave the thing alone. Mrs Harter would be seated in her chair comfortably listening to a symphony concert or a lecture on Lucrezia Borgia or Pond Life, quite happy and at peace with the world. Not so Charles. The harmony would be shattered by discordant shrieks while he enthusiastically attempted to get foreign stations. But on those evenings when Charles was dining out with friends Mrs Harter enjoyed the wireless very much indeed. She would turn on two switches, sit in her high-backed chair and enjoy the programme of the evening.

  It was about three months after the wireless had been installed that the first eerie happening occurred. Charles was absent at a bridge party.

  The programme for that evening was a ballad concert. A well-known soprano was singing ‘Annie Laurie,’ and in the middle of ‘Annie Laurie’ a strange thing happened. There was a sudden break, the music ceased for a moment, the buzzing, clicking noise continued and then that too died away. There was dead silence, and then very faintly a low buzzing sound was heard.

  Mrs Harter got the impression, why she did not know, that the machine was tuned into somewhere very far away, and then clearly and distinctly a voice spoke, a man’s voice with a faint Irish accent.

  ‘Mary—can you hear me, Mary? It is Patrick speaking … I am coming for you soon. You will be ready, won’t you, Mary?’

  Then, almost immediately, the strains of ‘Annie Laurie’ once more filled the room.

  Mrs Harter sat rigid in her chair, her hands clenched on each arm of it. Had she been dreaming? Patrick! Patrick’s voice! Patrick’s voice in this very room, speaking to her. No, it must be a dream, a hallucination perhaps. She must just have dropped off to sleep for a minute or two. A curious thing to have dreamed—that her dead husband’s voice should speak to her over the ether. It frightened her just a little. What were the words he had said?

  ‘I am coming for you soon, Mary. You will be ready, won’t you?’

  Was it, could it be a premonition? Cardiac weakness. Her heart. After all, she was getting on in years.

  ‘It’s a warning—that’s what it is,’ said Mrs Harter, rising slowly and painfully from her chair, and added characteristically:

  ‘All that money wasted on pu
tting in a lift!’

  She said nothing of her experience to anyone, but for the next day or two she was thoughtful and a little pre-occupied.

  And then came the second occasion. Again she was alone in the room. The wireless, which had been playing an orchestral selection, died away with the same suddenness as before. Again there was silence, the sense of distance, and finally Patrick’s voice, not as it had been in life—but a voice rarefied, far away, with a strange unearthly quality.

  ‘Patrick speaking to you, Mary. I will be coming for you very soon now …’

  Then click, buzz, and the orchestral selection was in full swing again.

  Mrs Harter glanced at the clock. No, she had not been asleep this time. Awake and in full possession of her faculties, she had heard Patrick’s voice speaking. It was no hallucination, she was sure of that. In a confused way she tried to think over all that Charles had explained to her of the theory of ether waves.

  Could it be Patrick had really spoken to her? That his actual voice had been wafted through space? There were missing wave lengths or something of that kind. She remembered Charles speaking of ‘gaps in the scale’. Perhaps the missing waves explained all the so-called psychological phenomena? No, there was nothing inherently impossible in the idea. Patrick had spoken to her. He had availed himself of modern science to prepare her for what must soon be coming.

  Mrs Harter rang the bell for her maid, Elizabeth.

  Elizabeth was a tall gaunt woman of sixty. Beneath an unbending exterior she concealed a wealth of affection and tenderness for her mistress.

  ‘Elizabeth,’ said Mrs Harter when her faithful retainer had appeared, ‘you remember what I told you? The top left-hand drawer of my bureau. It is locked, the long key with the white label. Everything is there ready.’