Agatha Christie: The Mysterious Mr. Quin

"If you will tell me," said Mr. Quin, smiling, "what it is all about?"

Mr. Satterthwaite looked at him reproachfully.

"You know. I am perfectly certain that you know. But I will tell you."

He poured out the story of his stay at Abbot's Mede and, as always with Mr. Quin, he found himself taking pleasure in his narrative. He was eloquent and subtle and meticulous as to detail.

"So you see," he ended, "there must be an explanation."

He looked hopefully at Mr. Quin as a dog looks at his master.

"But it is you who must solve the problem, not I," said Mr. Quin. "I do not know these people. You do."

"I knew the Barron girls forty years ago," said Mr. Satterthwaite with pride.

Mr. Quin nodded and looked sympathetic, so much so that the other went on dreamily.

"That time at Brighton now, Botticetti-Boatsupsetty, quite a silly joke but how we laughed. Dear, dear, I was young then. Did a lot of foolish things. I remember the maid they had with them. Alice, her name was, a little bit of a thing― very ingenuous. I kissed her in the passage of the hotel, I remember, and one of the girls nearly caught me doing it. Dear, dear, how long ago that all was."

He shook his head again and sighed. Then he looked at Mr. Quin.

"So you can't help me? " he said wistfully. "On other occasions―――"

"On other occasions you have proved successful owing entirely to your own efforts," said Mr. Quin gravely. "I think it will be the same this time. If I were you, I should go to Abbot's Mede now."

"Quite so, quite so," said Mr. Satterthwaite, "as a matter of fact that is what I thought of doing. I can't persuade you to come with me?"

Mr. Quin shook his head.

"No," he said, "my work here is done. I am leaving almost immediately."

At Abbot's Mede, Mr. Satterthwaite was taken at once to Margery Gale. She was sitting dry-eyed at a desk in the morning-room on which was strewn various papers. Something in her greeting touched him. She seemed so very pleased to see him.

"Roley and Marcia have just left. Mr. Satterthwaite, it is not as the doctors think. I am convinced, absolutely convinced, that Mother was pushed under the water and held there. She was murdered, and whoever murdered her wants to murder me too. I am sure of that. That is why―――" she indicated the document in front of her.

"I have been making my will," she explained. "A lot of the money and some of the property does not go with the title, and there is my father's money as well. I am leaving everything I can to Noel. I know he will make a good use of it and I do not trust Roley, he has always been out for what he can get. Will you sign it as a witness?"

"My dear young lady," said Mr. Satterthwaite, "you should sign a will in the presence of two witnesses and they should then sign themselves at the same time." Margery brushed aside this legal pronouncement. "I don't see that it matters in the least," she declared. "Clayton saw me sign and then she signed her name. I was going to ring for the butler, but you will do instead."

Mr. Satterthwaite uttered no fresh protest, he unscrewed his fountain pen and then, as he was about to append his signature, he paused suddenly. The name, written just above his own, recalled a flow of memories. Alice Clayton.

Something seemed to be struggling very hard to get through to him. Alice Clayton, there was some significance about that Something to do with Mr. Quin was mixed up with it. Something he had said to Mr. Quin only a very short time ago.

Ah, he had it now. Alice Clayton, that was her name. The little bit of a thing. People changed―yes, bat not like that. And the Alice Clayton he knew had had brown eyes. The room seemed whirling round him. He felt for a chair and presently, as though from a great distance, he heard Margery's voice speaking to him anxiously." Are you ill? Oh, what is it? I am sure you are ill. " he was himself again. He took her hand.

"My dear, I see it all now. You must prepare yourself for a great shock. The woman upstairs whom you call Clayton is not Clayton at all. The real Alice Clayton was drowned on the Uralia. Margery was staring at him." Who―who is she then?"

"I am not mistaken, I cannot be mistaken. The woman you call Clayton is your mother's sister, Beatrice Barren. You remember telling me that she was struck on the head by a spar? I should imagine that that blow destroyed her memory, and that being the case, your mother saw the chance―――"

"Of pinching the title, you mean?" asked Margery bitterly. "Yes, she would do that. It seems dreadful to say that now she is dead, but she was like that"

"Beatrice was the elder sister," said Mr. Satterthwaite. "By your uncle's death she would inherit everything and your mother would get nothing. Your mother claimed the wounded girl as her maid, not as her sister. The girl recovered from the blow and believed, of course, what was told her, that she was Alice Clayton, your mother's maid. I should imagine that just lately her memory had begun to return, but that the blow on the head, given all these years ago, has at last caused mischief on the brain."

Margery was looking at him with eyes of horror.

"She killed Mother and she wanted to kill me," she breathed.

"It seems so," said Mr. Satterthwaite. "In her brain there was just one muddled idea―that her inheritance had been stolen and was being kept from her by you and your mother."

"But―but Clayton is so old."

Mr. Satterthwaite was silent for a minute as a vision rose up before him―the faded old woman with grey hair, and the radiant golden-haired creature sitting in the sunshine at Cannes. Sisters! Could it really be so? He remembered the Barren girls and their likeness to each other. Just because two lives had developed on different tracks――-

He shook his head sharply, obsessed by the wonder and pity of life...

He turned to Margery and said gently―"We had better go upstairs and see her."

They found Clayton sitting in the little workroom where she sewed. She did not turn her head as they came in for a reason that Mr. Satterthwaite soon found out.

"heart failure," he murmured, as he touched the cold rigid shoulder." Perhaps it is best that way."

MR. SATTERTHWAITE was at the Opera and sat alone in his big box on the first tier outside the door was a printed card bearing his name. An appreciator and a connoisseur of all the arts, Mr. Satterthwaite was especially fond of good music, and was a regular subscriber to Covent Garden every year, reserving a box for Tuesdays and Fridays throughout the season.

But it was not often that he sat in it alone. He was a gregarious little gentleman, and he liked filling his box with the elite of the great world to which he belonged, and also with the aristocracy of the artistic world in which he was equally at home. He was alone tonight because a Countess had disappointed him. The Countess, besides being a beautiful and celebrated woman, was also a good mother. Her children had been attacked by that common and distressing disease, the mumps, and the Countess remained at home in tearful confabulation with exquisitely starched nurses. Her husband, who had supplied her with the aforementioned children and a title, but who was otherwise a complete nonentity, had seized at the chance to escape. Nothing bored him more than music.

So Mr. Satterthwaite sat alone. Cavalier Rusticate and Pagliacci were being given that night, and since the first had never appealed to him, he arrived just after the curtain went down, on Santuzza's death agony, in time to glance round the house with practised eyes, before everyone streamed out, bent on paying visits or fighting for coffee or lemonade. Mr. Satterthwaite adjusted his opera glasses, looked round the house, marked down his prey and sallied forth with a well mapped out plan of campaign ahead of him. A plan, however, which he did not put into execution, for just outside his box he cannoned into a tall dark man, and recognised him with a pleasurable thrill of excitement.