The Christie Affair(55)
‘There was a mark,’ the coroner explained in Lippincott’s office, the door for once closed. Both Lippincott and Chilton had elected not to see the body again. ‘A tiny mark on the man’s hip. It was injected, is my thought, right through his trousers. This was not a natural death.’
‘What about the wife?’ asked Chilton.
‘Strychnine,’ said the coroner. ‘A lethal dose. Ingested, not injected.’
‘Both poisons easy enough to obtain,’ said Lippincott. ‘Any housewife with a wasp or rat problem knows their uses.’
‘Indeed.’ Chilton pictured the couple, perfectly ordinary in every way. Who on earth would want those two dead? ‘It had to have been someone in the dining room, then.’
The coroner nodded in agreement.
‘I’d say this points to the wife.’ Lippincott was naturally protective of his cousin’s livelihood and nothing would empty out the hotel for years to come like a double murder. ‘She offed her husband by injecting him with potassium cyanide, then killed herself with the strychnine. Did she seem particularly troubled to you,’ he asked Chilton, ‘before her husband’s death, of course?’
‘Quite the contrary. She seemed like someone who’d never known a moment’s trouble. Rather jolly. Oblivious. Annoying, really.’
‘There, there,’ said Lippincott. ‘Don’t make yourself a suspect.’
The three of them laughed, forgetting themselves and the sombre nature of their discussion.
‘But why would she want to kill her husband?’ Chilton said.
‘Clearly,’ said the coroner, whose wife greeted him nightly with a burned dinner and a new list of grievances, ‘you’ve never been married.’
‘Do the murderous feelings generally begin on a honeymoon? The woman can’t have been more vocal in her adoration.’
‘All the more suspicious,’ said Lippincott. ‘Protesting too much and all that. It’s rather clear to me, but as long as you’re already there you may as well poke around a bit to confirm my theory. Discreetly. Don’t make a fuss about it. See if Mrs Marston confided anything useful to the other ladies. It’s a good way for us to get our money’s worth out of you.’
Chilton nodded, but instead of driving directly to the hotel to start conducting interviews, he drove down a back road or two, eyes on the winter landscape. The deciduous trees provided a view into the wood. No signs of the young Irishman, or Mrs O’Dea, or Agatha. When his search yielded nothing, he gave up and went to the hotel. He would have a massage, he decided, so long as he was there, and send his mother a postcard telling her he had done so. It would please her to think of him relaxed and happy.
Mrs Leech presided over the front desk, her cheerfulness seeming an effort. Chilton gathered that more guests had precipitously checked out following Mrs Marston’s death. Of course, any of those departed guests could be the killer, but now that he thought on it, Chilton tended to agree with Lippincott: the death of the couple was almost certain to have been a family affair.
‘I thought I’d book a massage,’ he told Mrs Leech.
She smiled warmly, taking up her pen, and said, ‘I’m sure you know that won’t be included in your gratis accommodation.’
Suddenly the idea of a stranger kneading his naked skin seemed less appealing. Chilton went instead to the baths. He had the place to himself, but despite the solitude and the restorative waters he did not relax a bit. His mind stayed on the roads he’d driven down, frozen and empty, no sign of the black automobile, all the houses with smoke rising from their chimneys inhabited by their rightful owners. It panicked Chilton the way a miscalculation can. He’d had her right before his eyes and had allowed her to slip away. Lippincott had tasked him with finding Agatha Christie as a lark. But what would he say if he knew that Chilton had found her, yet managed to daydream the quarry away? Could he do nothing right with the days he had left on earth?
After dinner Chilton took his pipe into the hotel’s small library so he could turn to the matter of confirming Lippincott’s theory regarding the Marstons. Ladies often complained about cigarettes but seldom pipes – a man with a pipe reminded them of their fathers – and it satisfied his craving while also making him look like he had something to do. The books on the shelves were mostly from the previous century. He perused the spines and landed on Bleak House, then settled onto the couch, where anyone who came in would have to sit beside him or across from him in one of the generous and well-worn armchairs. He’d seen Mrs O’Dea carrying a book, and a reader on holiday is soon in need of a new one. If she should venture in, he might also begin to discover her connection to Agatha Christie, killing two birds with one stone.
Before long a young dark-haired woman entered the library, with a cosy pink shawl over her shoulders. Miss Armstrong, Chilton reminded himself, the girl he’d dined with the other evening. She smiled at him perfunctorily and went straight to the bookshelves.
‘Not much contemporary fodder,’ he said, as she examined the spines. ‘You won’t find the new Dorothy Sayers, I’m afraid.’
‘Oh,’ she said. ‘I’m not much for detective novels. I like a love story.’ She pulled out a dusty copy of Jane Eyre, brushed off the cover and sat down, as he’d hoped, in the seat opposite him.