Sleeping Murder - Christie Agatha. Страница 23

Gwenda said: ‘She was afraid of something, wasn’t she? Or of someone? My stepmother, I mean.’

‘I do remember-now that you say that-’

‘Yes?’

‘Lily came into the kitchen one day. She’d been dusting the stairs, and she said, “Ructions!” she said. She had a very common way of talking sometimes, Lily had, so you must excuse me.

‘So I asked her what she meant and she said that the missus had come in from the garden with the master into the drawing-room and the door to the hall being open, Lily heard what they said.

‘ “I’m afraid of you,” that’s what Mrs Halliday had said.

‘ “And she sounded scared too,” Lily said. “I’ve been afraid of you for a long time. You’re mad. You’re not normal. Go away and leave me alone. You must leave me alone. I’m frightened. I think, underneath, I’ve always been frightened of you…”

‘Something of that kind-of course I can’t say now to the exact words. But Lily, she took it very seriously, and that’s why, after it all happened, she-’

Edith Pagett stopped dead. A curious frightened look came over her face.

‘I didn’t mean, I’m sure-’ she began. ‘Excuse me, madam, my tongue runs away with me.’

Giles said gently: ‘Please tell us, Edith. It’s really important, you see, that we should know. It’s all a long time ago now, but we’ve got toknow.’

‘I couldn’t say, I’m sure,’ said Edith helplessly.

Miss Marple asked: ‘What was it Lily didn’t believe-or did believe?’

Edith Pagett said apologetically: ‘Lily was always one to get ideas in her head. I never took no notice of them. She was always one for going to the pictures and she got a lot of silly melodramatic ideas that way. She was out at the pictures the night it happened-and what’s more she took Layonee with her-and very wrongthat was, and I told her so. “Oh, that’s all right,” she said. “It’s not leaving the child alone in the house. You’re down in the kitchen and the master and the missus will be in later and anyway that child never wakes once she’s off to sleep.” But it was wrong, and I told her so, though of course I never knew about Layonee going till afterwards. If I had, I’d have run up to see she-you, I mean, Miss Gwenda-were quite all right. You can’t hear a thing from the kitchen when the baize door’s shut.’

Edith Pagett paused and then went on: ‘I was doing some ironing. The evening passed ever so quick and the first thing I knew Dr Kennedy came out in the kitchen and asked me where Lily was and I said it was her night off but she’d be in any minute now and sure enough she came in that very minute and he took her upstairs to the mistress’s room. Wanted to know if she’d taken any clothes away with her, and what. So Lily looked about and told him and then she come down to me. All agog she was. “She’s hooked it,” she said. “Gone off with someone. The master’s all in. Had a stroke or something. Apparently it’s been a terrible shock to him. More fool he. He ought to have seen it coming.” “You shouldn’t speak like that,” I said. “How do you know she’s gone off with anybody? Maybe she had a telegram from a sick relation.” “Sick relation my foot,” Lily says (always a common way of speaking, as I said). “She left a note.” “Who’s she gone off with?” I said. “Who do you think?” Lily said. “Not likely to be Mr Sobersides Fane, for all his sheep’s eyes and the way he follows her round like a dog.” So I said, “You think it’s Captain-whatever his name was.” And she said, “He’s my bet. Unless it’s our mystery man in the flashy car.” (That’s just a silly joke we had.) And I said, “I don’t believe it. Not Mrs Halliday. She wouldn’t do a thing like that.” And Lily says, “Well, it seems she’s done it.”

‘All this was at first, you understand. But later on, up in our bedroom, Lily woke me up. “Look here,” she says. “It’s all wrong.” “What’s wrong?” I said. And she said, “Those clothes.” “Whatever are you talking about?” I said. “Listen, Edie,” she said. “I went through her clothes because the doctor asked me to. And there’s a suitcase gone and enough to fill it-but they’re thewrong things.” “What do you mean?” I said. And Lily said, “She took an evening dress, her grey and silver-but she didn’t take her evening belt and brassiere, nor the slip that goes with it, and she took her gold brocade evening shoes, not the silver strap ones. And she took her green tweed-which she never wears until late on in the autumn, but she didn’t take that fancy pullover and she took her lace blouses that she only wears with a town suit. Oh and her undies, too, they were a job lot. You mark my words, Edie,” Lily said. “She’s not gone away at all. The master’s done her in.”

‘Well, that made me wide awake. I sat right up and asked her what on earth she was talking about.

‘ “Just like it was in theNews of the World last week,” Lily says. “The master found she’d been carrying on and he killed her and put her down in the cellar and buried her under the floor.You’d never hear anything because it’s under the front hall. That’s what he’s done, and then he packed a suitcase to make it look as though she’d gone away. But that’s where she is-under the cellar floor.She never left this house alive.” I gave her a piece of my mind then, saying such awful things. But I’ll admit I slipped down to the cellar the next morning. But there, it was all just as usual and nothing disturbed and no digging been done-and I went and told Lily she’d just been making a fool of herself, but she stuck to it as the master had done her in. “Remember,” she says, “she was scared to death of him. I heard her telling him so.” “And that’s just where you’re wrong, my girl,” I said, “because it wasn’t the master at all. Just after you’d told me, that day, I looked out of the window and there was the master coming down the hill with his golf-clubs, so it couldn’t have been him who was with the mistress in the drawing-room. It was someone else.”’

The words echoed lingeringly in the comfortable common-place sitting-room.

Giles said softly under his breath,‘It was someone else…’