Detectives and Young Adventurers: The Complete Short Stories. Agatha Christie

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ was deep in thought and refused to be drawn.

      ‘What were the Sessles like?’ she asked suddenly. ‘What sort of things did people say about them?’

      ‘As far as I can make out, they were very popular. He and his wife were supposed to be devoted to one another. That’s what makes the business of the girl so odd. It’s the last thing you’d have expected of a man like Sessle. He was an ex-soldier, you know. Came into a good bit of money, retired, and went into this Insurance business. The last man in the world, apparently, whom you would have suspected of being a crook.’

      ‘It is absolutely certain that he was the crook? Couldn’t it have been the other two who took the money?’

      ‘The Hollabys? They say they’re ruined.’

      ‘Oh, they say! Perhaps they’ve got it all in a bank under another name. I put it foolishly, I dare say, but you know what I mean. Suppose they’d been speculating with the money for some time, unbeknownst to Sessle, and lost it all. It might be jolly convenient for them that Sessle died just when he did.’

      Tommy tapped the photograph of Mr Hollaby senior with his fingernail.

      ‘So you’re accusing this respectable gentleman of murdering his friend and partner? You forget that he parted from Sessle on the links in full view of Barnard and Lecky, and spent the evening in the Dormy House. Besides, there’s the hatpin.’

      ‘Bother the hatpin,’ said Tuppence impatiently. ‘That hatpin, you think, points to the crime having been committed by a woman?’

      ‘Naturally. Don’t you agree?’

      ‘No. Men are notoriously old-fashioned. It takes them ages to rid themselves of preconceived ideas. They associate hatpins and hairpins with the female sex, and call them “women’s weapons.” They may have been in the past, but they’re both rather out of date now. Why, I haven’t had a hatpin or a hairpin for the last four years.’

      ‘Then you think –?’

      ‘That it was a man killed Sessle. The hatpin was used to make it seem a woman’s crime.’

      ‘There’s something in what you say, Tuppence,’ said Tommy slowly. ‘It’s extraordinary how things seem to straighten themselves out when you talk a thing over.’

      Tuppence nodded.

      ‘Everything must be logical – if you look at it the right way. And remember what Marriot once said about the amateur point of view – that it had the intimacy. We know something about people like Captain Sessle and his wife. We know what they’re likely to do – and what they’re not likely to do. And we’ve each got our special knowledge.’

      Tommy smiled.

      ‘You mean,’ he said, ‘that you are an authority on what people with bobbed and shingled heads are likely to have in their possession, and that you have an intimate acquaintance with what wives are likely to feel and do?’

      ‘Something of the sort.’

      ‘And what about me? What is my special knowledge? Do husbands pick up girls, etc?’

      ‘No,’ said Tuppence gravely. ‘You know the course – you’ve been on it – not as a detective searching for clues, but as a golfer. You know about golf, and what’s likely to put a man off his game.’

      ‘It must have been something pretty serious to put Sessle off his game. His handicap’s two, and from the seventh tee on he played like a child, so they say.’

      ‘Who say?’

      ‘Barnard and Lecky. They were playing just behind him, you remember.’

      ‘That was after he met the woman – the tall woman in brown. They saw him speaking to her, didn’t they?’

      ‘Yes – at least –’

      Tommy broke off. Tuppence looked up at him and was puzzled. He was staring at the piece of string in his fingers, but staring with the eyes of one who sees something very different.

      ‘Tommy – what is it?’

      ‘Be quiet, Tuppence. I’m playing the sixth hole at Sunningdale. Sessle and old Hollaby are holing out on the sixth green ahead of me. It’s getting dusk, but I can see that bright blue coat of Sessle’s clearly enough. And on the footpath to the left of me there’s a woman coming along. She hasn’t crossed from the ladies’ course – that’s on the right – I should have seen her if she had done so. And it’s odd I didn’t see her on the footpath before – from the fifth tee, for instance.‘

      He paused.

      ‘You said just now I knew the course, Tuppence. Just behind the sixth tee there’s a little hut or shelter made of turf. Any one could wait in there until – the right moment came. They could change their appearance there. I mean – tell me, Tuppence, this is where your special knowledge comes in again – would it be very difficult for a man to look like a woman, and then change back to being a man again? Could he wear a skirt over plus-fours, for instance?’

      ‘Certainly he could. The woman would look a bit bulky, that would be all. A longish brown skirt, say a brown sweater of the kind both men and women wear, and a woman’s felt hat with a bunch of side curls attached each side. That would be all that was needed – I’m speaking, of course, of what would pass at a distance, which I take to be what you are driving at. Switch off the skirt, take off the hat and curls, and put on a man’s cap which you can carry rolled up in your hand, and there you’d be – back as a man again.’

      ‘And the time required for the transformation?’

      ‘From woman to man, a minute and a half at the outside, probably a good deal less. The other way about would take longer, you’d have to arrange the hat and curls a bit, and the skirt would stick getting it on over the plus fours.’

      ‘That doesn’t worry me. It’s the time for the first that matters. As I tell you, I’m playing the sixth hole. The woman in brown has reached the seventh tee now. She crosses it and waits. Sessle in his blue coat goes towards her. They stand together a minute, and then they follow the path round the trees out of sight. Hollaby is on the tee alone. Two or three minutes pass. I’m on the green now. The man in the blue coat comes back and drives off, foozling badly. The light’s getting worse. I and my partner go on. Ahead of us are those two, Sessle slicing and topping and doing everything he shouldn’t do. At the eighth green, I see him stride off and vanish down the slip. What happened to him to make him play like a different man?’

      ‘The woman in brown – or the man, if you think it was a man.’

      ‘Exactly, and where they were standing – out of sight, remember, of those coming after them – there’s a deep tangle of furze bushes. You could thrust a body in there, and it would be pretty certain to lie hidden until the morning.’

      ‘Tommy! You think it was then. – But someone would have heard –’

      ‘Heard what? The doctors agreed death must have been instantaneous. I’ve seen men killed instantaneously in the war. They don’t cry out as a rule – just a gurgle, or a moan – perhaps just a sigh, or a funny little cough. Sessle comes towards the seventh tee, and the woman СКАЧАТЬ