Agatha Christie - While the light lasts

And lastly, he found her diary. With it was a scrap of paper: "To be read after my death by Alan Everard. He has often reproached me with not speaking the truth. The truth is all here."

So he came to know at last, finding the one place where Jane had dared to be honest. It was a record, very simple and unforced, of her love for him.

There was very little sentiment about it - no fine language. But there was no blinking of facts.

"I know you are often irritated by me," she had written. "Everything I do or say seems to make you angry sometimes. I do not know why this should be, for I try so hard to please you; but I do believe, all the same, that I mean something real to you. One isn't angry with the people who don't count."

It was not Jane's fault that Alan found other matters. Jane was loyal - but she was also untidy; she filled her drawers too full. She had, shortly before her death, burned carefully all Isobel's letters. The one Alan found was wedged behind a drawer. When he had read it, the meaning of certain cabalistic signs on the counterfoils of Jane's cheque book became clear to him. In this particular letter Isobel had hardly troubled to keep up the pretence of the money being required for Winnie.

Alan sat in front of the desk staring with unseeing eyes out of the window for a long time. Finally he slipped the cheque book into his pocket and left the flat. He walked back to Chelsea, conscious of an anger that grew rapidly stronger.

Isobel was out when he got back, and he was sorry. He had so clearly in his mind what he wanted to say. Instead, he went up to the studio and pulled out the unfinished portrait of Jane. He set it on an easel near the portrait of Isobel in pink satin.

The Lemprière woman had been right: there was life in Jane's portrait. He looked at her, the eager eyes, the beauty that he had tried so unsuccessfully to deny her. That was Jane - the aliveness, more than anything else, was Jane. She was, he thought, the most alive person he had ever met, so much so, that even now he could not think of her as dead.

And he thought of his other pictures - Color, Romance, Sir Rufus Herschman. They had all, in a way, been pictures of Jane. She had kindled the spark for each one of them - had sent him away fuming and fretting - to show her! And now? Jane was dead. Would he ever paint a picture - a real picture - again? He looked again at the eager face on the canvas. Perhaps. Jane wasn't very far away.

A sound made him wheel round. Isobel had come into the studio. She was dressed for dinner in a straight white gown that showed up the pure gold of her hair.

She stopped dead and checked the words on her lips. Eyeing him warily, she went over to the divan and sat down. She had every appearance of calm.

Alan took the cheque book from his pocket.

"I've been going through Jane's papers."

"Yes?"

He tried to imitate her calm, to keep his voice from shaking.

"For the last four years she's been supplying you with money."

"Yes. For Winnie."

"No, not for Winnie," shouted Everard. "You pretended, both of you, that it was for Winnie, but you both knew that that wasn't so. Do you realize that Jane has been selling her securities, living from hand to mouth, to supply you with clothes - clothes that you didn't really need?"

Isobel never took her eyes from his face. She settled her body more comfortably on the cushions as a white Persian cat might do.

"I can't help it if Jane denuded herself more than she should have done," she said. "I supposed she could afford the money. She was always crazy about you - I could see that, of course. Some wives would have kicked up a fuss about the way you were always rushing off to see her, and spending hours there. I didn't."

"No," said Alan, very white in the face. "You made her pay instead."

"You are saying very offensive things, Alan. Be careful."

"Aren't they true? Why did you find it so easy to get money out of Jane?"

"Not for love of me, certainly. It must have been for love of you."

"That's just what it was," said Alan simply. "She paid for my freedom - freedom to work in my own way. So long as you had a sufficiency of money, you'd leave me alone - not badger me to paint a crowd of awful women."

Isobel said nothing.

"Well?" cried Alan angrily.

Her quiescence infuriated him.

Isobel was looking at the floor. Presently she raised her head and said quietly:

"Come here, Alan."

She touched the divan at her side. Uneasily, unwillingly, he came and sat there, not looking at her. But he knew that he was afraid.

"Alan," said Isobel presently.

"Well?"

He was irritable, nervous.

"All that you say may be true. It doesn't matter. I'm like that. I want things - clothes, money, you. Jane's dead, Alan."

"What do you mean?"

"Jane's dead. You belong to me altogether now. You never did before - not quite."

He looked at her - saw the light in her eyes, acquisitive, possessive - was revolted yet fascinated.

"Now you shall be all mine."

He understood Isobel then as he had never understood her before.

"You want me as a slave? I'm to paint what you tell me to paint, live as you tell me to live, be dragged at your chariot wheels."

"Put it like that if you please. What are words?"

He felt her arms round his neck, white, smooth, firm as a wall. Words danced through his brain. "A wall as white as milk.

" Already he was inside the wall. Could he still escape? Did he want to escape?

He heard her voice close against his ear - poppy and mandragora.

"What else is there to live for? Isn't this enough? Love - happiness - success - love -"

The wall was growing up all around him now - "the curtain soft as silk," the curtain wrapping him round, stifling him a little, but so soft, so sweet! Now they were drifting together, at peace, out on the crystal sea. The wall was very high now, shutting out all those other things - those dangerous, disturbing things that hurt - that always hurt. Out on the sea of crystal, the golden apple between their hands.

The light faded from Jane's picture.

The words made a catchy headline, and I said as much to my friend, Hercule Poirot. I knew none of the parties. My interest was merely the dispassionate one of the man in the street. Poirot agreed.

"Yes, it has a flavor of the Oriental, of the mysterious. The chest may very well have been a sham Jacobean one from the Tottenham Court Road; none the less the reporter who thought of naming it the Baghdad Chest was happily inspired. The word 'mystery' is also thoughtfully placed in juxtaposition, though I understand there is very little mystery about the case."

"Exactly. It is all rather horrible and macabre, but it is not mysterious."

"Horrible and macabre," repeated Poirot thoughtfully.

"The whole idea is revolting," I said, rising to my feet and pacing up and down the room. "The murderer kills this man - his friend - shoves him into the chest, and half an hour later is dancing in that same room with the wife of his victim. Think! If she had imagined for one moment -"

"True," said Poirot thoughtfully. "That much-vaunted possession, a woman's intuition - it does not seem to have been working."

"The party seems to have gone off very merrily,'' I said with a slight shiver. "And all that time, as they danced and played poker, there was a dead man in the room with them. One could write a play about such an idea."

"It has been done," said Poirot. "But console yourself, Hastings," he added kindly. "Because a theme has been used once, there is no reason why it should not be used again. Compose your drama.

"I had picked up the paper and was studying the rather blurred reproduction of a photograph.