The Mysterious Mr Quin. Agatha Christie
the cheese.’
He stumped from the room bearing empty dishes. The storm, which had been quitening down, suddenly broke out with redoubled vigour. A flash of forked lightning and a great clap of thunder close upon each other made little Mr Satterthwaite jump, and before the last echoes of the thunder had died away, a girl came into the room carrying the advertised cheese.
She was tall and dark, and handsome in a sullen fashion of her own. Her likeness to the landlord of the ‘Bells and Motley’ was apparent enough to proclaim her his daughter.
‘Good evening, Mary,’ said Mr Quin. ‘A stormy night.’
She nodded.
‘I hate these stormy nights,’ she muttered.
‘You are afraid of thunder, perhaps?’ said Mr Satterthwaite kindly.
‘Afraid of thunder? Not me! There’s little that I’m afraid of. No, but the storm sets them off. Talking, talking, the same thing over and over again, like a lot of parrots. Father begins it. “It reminds me, this does, of the night poor Captain Harwell…” And so on, and so on.’ She turned on Mr Quin. ‘You’ve heard how he goes on. What’s the sense of it? Can’t anyone let past things be?’
‘A thing is only past when it is done with,’ said Mr Quin.
‘Isn’t this done with? Suppose he wanted to disappear? These fine gentlemen do sometimes.’
‘You think he disappeared of his own free will?’
‘Why not? It would make better sense than to suppose a kind-hearted creature like Stephen Grant murdered him. What should he murder him for, I should like to know? Stephen had had a drop too much one day and spoke to him saucy like, and got the sack for it. But what of it? He got another place just as good. Is that a reason to murder a man in cold blood?’
‘But surely,’ said Mr Satterthwaite, ‘the police were quite satisfied of his innocence?’
‘The police! What do the police matter? When Stephen comes into the bar of an evening, every man looks at him queer like. They don’t really believe he murdered Harwell, but they’re not sure, and so they look at him sideways and edge away. Nice life for a man, to see people shrink away from you, as though you were something different from the rest of folks. Why won’t Father hear of our getting married, Stephen and I? “You can take your pigs to a better market, my girl. I’ve nothing against Stephen, but–well, we don’t know, do we?”’
She stopped, her breast heaving with the violence of her resentment.
‘It’s cruel, cruel, that’s what it is,’ she burst out. ‘Stephen, that wouldn’t hurt a fly! And all through life there’ll be people who’ll think he did. It’s turning him queer and bitter like. I don’t wonder, I’m sure. And the more he’s like that, the more people think there must have been something in it.’
Again she stopped. Her eyes were fixed on Mr Quin’s face, as though something in it was drawing this outburst from her.
‘Can nothing be done?’ said Mr Satterthwaite.
He was genuinely distressed. The thing was, he saw, inevitable. The very vagueness and unsatisfactoriness of the evidence against Stephen Grant made it the more difficult for him to disprove the accusation.
The girl whirled round on him.
‘Nothing but the truth can help him,’ she cried. ‘If Captain Harwell were to be found, if he was to come back. If the true rights of it were only known–’
She broke off with something very like a sob, and hurried quickly from the room.
‘A fine-looking girl,’ said Mr Satterthwaite. ‘A sad case altogether. I wish–I very much wish that something could be done about it.’
His kind heart was troubled.
‘We are doing what we can,’ said Mr Quin. ‘There is still nearly half an hour before your car can be ready.’
Mr Satterthwaite stared at him.
‘You think we can come at the truth just by–talking it over like this?’
‘You have seen much of life,’ said Mr Quin gravely. ‘More than most people.’
‘Life has passed me by,’ said Mr Satterthwaite bitterly.
‘But in so doing has sharpened your vision. Where others are blind you can see.’
‘It is true,’ said Mr Satterthwaite. ‘I am a great observer.’
He plumed himself complacently. The moment of bitterness was passed.
‘I look at it like this,’ he said after a minute or two. ‘To get at the cause for a thing, we must study the effect.’
‘Very good,’ said Mr Quin approvingly.
‘The effect in this case is that Miss Le Couteau–Mrs Harwell, I mean, is a wife and yet not a wife. She is not free–she cannot marry again. And look at it as we will, we see Richard Harwell as a sinister figure, a man from nowhere with a mysterious past.’
‘I agree,’ said Mr Quin. ‘You see what all are bound to see, what cannot be missed, Captain Harwell in the limelight, a suspicious figure.’
Mr Satterthwaite looked at him doubtfully. The words seemed somehow to suggest a faintly different picture to his mind.
‘We have studied the effect,’ he said. ‘Or call it the result. We can now pass–’
Mr Quin interrupted him.
‘You have not touched on the result on the strictly material side.’
‘You are right,’ said Mr Satterthwaite, after a moment or two for consideration. ‘One should do the thing thoroughly. Let us say then that the result of the tragedy is that Mrs Harwell is a wife and not a wife, unable to marry again, that Mr Cyrus Bradburn has been able to buy Ashley Grange and its contents for–sixty thousand pounds, was it?–and that somebody in Essex has been able to secure John Mathias as a gardener! For all that we do not suspect “somebody in Essex” or Mr Cyrus Bradburn of having engineered the disappearance of Captain Harwell.’
‘You are sarcastic,’ said Mr Quin.
Mr Satterthwaite looked sharply at him.
‘But surely you agree–?’
‘Oh! I agree,’ said Mr Quin. ‘The idea is absurd. What next?’
‘Let us imagine ourselves back on the fatal day. The disappearance has taken place, let us say, this very morning.’
‘No, no,’ said Mr Quin, smiling. ‘Since, in our imagination, at least, we have power over time, let us turn it the other way. Let us say the disappearance of Captain Harwell took place a hundred years ago. That we, in the year two thousand twenty-five are looking back.’
‘You are a strange man,’ said Mr Satterthwaite slowly. ‘You believe in the past, not the present. Why?’
‘You used, not long ago, the word atmosphere. There is no atmosphere in the present.’
‘That is true, perhaps,’ said Mr Satterthwaite thoughtfully. ‘Yes, it is true. The present is apt to be–parochial.’
‘A good word,’ said Mr Quin.
Mr Satterthwaite gave a funny little bow.
‘You are too kind,’ he said.
‘Let us take–not this present year, that would be too difficult, but say–last year,’ continued the other. ‘Sum it up for me, you who have the gift of the neat phrase.’
Mr Satterthwaite thought for a minute. He was jealous of his reputation.
‘A hundred years ago we have the age of powder and patches,’ he said. ‘Shall we say that 1924 was the age of Crossword Puzzles