Richard took her to the door and put her into a taxi.
‘Theo!’
Vincent Easton sprang up in incredulous delight. She stood in the doorway. Her wrap of white ermine was hanging from her shoulders. Never, Easton thought, had she looked so beautiful.
‘You’ve come after all.’
She put out a hand to stop him as he came towards her.
‘No, Vincent, this isn’t what you think.’
She spoke in a low, hurried voice.
‘I’m here from my husband. He thinks there are some papers which may—do him harm. I have come to ask you to give them to me.’
Vincent stood very still, looking at her. Then he gave a short laugh.
‘So that’s it, is it? I thought Hobson, Jekyll and Lucas sounded familiar the other day, but I couldn’t place them at the minute. Didn’t know your husband was connected with the firm. Things have been going wrong there for some time. I was commissioned to look into the matter. I suspected some underling. Never thought of the man at the top.’
Theo said nothing. Vincent looked at her curiously.
‘It makes no difference to you, this?’ he asked. ‘That—well, to put it plainly, that your husband’s a swindler?’
She shook her head.
‘It beats me,’ said Vincent. Then he added quietly: ‘Will you wait a minute or two? I will get the papers.’
Theo sat down in a chair. He went into the other room. Presently he returned and delivered a small package into her hand.
‘Thank you,’ said Theo. ‘Have you a match?’
Taking the matchbox he proffered, she knelt down by the fireplace. When the papers were reduced to a pile of ashes, she stood up.
‘Thank you,’ she said again.
‘Not at all,’ he answered formally. ‘Let me get you a taxi.’
He put her into it, saw her drive away. A strange, formal little interview. After the first, they had not even dared look at each other. Well, that was that, the end. He would go away, abroad, try and forget.
Theo leaned her head out of the window and spoke to the taxi driver. She could not go back at once to the house in Chelsea. She must have a breathing space. Seeing Vincent again had shaken her horribly. If only—if only. But she pulled herself up. Love for her husband she had none—but she owed him loyalty. He was down, she must stick by him. Whatever else he might have done, he loved her; his offence had been committed against society, not against her.
The taxi meandered on through the wide streets of Hampstead. They came out on the heath, and a breath of cool, invigorating air fanned Theo’s cheeks. She had herself in hand again now. The taxi sped back towards Chelsea.
Richard came out to meet her in the hall.
‘Well,’ he demanded, ‘you’ve been a long time.’
‘Have I?’
‘Yes—a very long time. Is it—all right?’
He followed her, a cunning look in his eyes. His hands were shaking.
‘It’s—it’s all right, eh?’ he said again.
‘I burnt them myself.’
‘Oh!’
She went on into the study, sinking into a big armchair. Her face was dead white and her whole body drooped with fatigue. She thought to herself: ‘If only I could go to sleep now and never, never wake up again!’
Richard was watching her. His glance, shy, furtive, kept coming and going. She noticed nothing. She was beyond noticing.
‘It went off quite all right, eh?’
‘I’ve told you so.’
‘You’re sure they were the right papers? Did you look?’
‘No.’
‘But then—’
‘I’m sure, I tell you. Don’t bother me, Richard. I can’t bear any more tonight.’
Richard shifted nervously.
‘No, no. I see.’
He fidgeted about the room. Presently he came over to her, laid a hand on her shoulder. She shook it off.
‘Don’t touch me.’ She tried to laugh. ‘I’m sorry, Richard. My nerves are on edge. I feel I can’t bear to be touched.’
‘I know. I understand.’
Again he wandered up and down.
‘Theo,’ he burst out suddenly. ‘I’m damned sorry.’
‘What?’ She looked up, vaguely startled.
‘I oughtn’t to have let you go there at this time of night. I never dreamed that you’d be subjected to any—unpleasantness.’
‘Unpleasantness?’ She laughed. The word seemed to amuse her. ‘You don’t know! Oh, Richard, you don’t know!’
‘I don’t know what?’
She said very gravely, looking straight in front of her: ‘What this night has cost me.’
‘My God! Theo! I never meant—You—you did that, for me? The swine! Theo—Theo—I couldn’t have known. I couldn’t have guessed. My God!’
He was kneeling by her now stammering, his arms round her, and she turned and looked at him with faint surprise, as though his words had at last really penetrated to her attention.
‘I—I never meant—’
‘You never meant what, Richard?’
Her voice startled him.
‘Tell me. What was it that you never meant?’
‘Theo, don’t let us speak of it. I don’t want to know. I want never to think of it.’
She was staring at him, wide awake now, with every faculty alert. Her words came clear and distinct:
‘It didn’t happen, Theo. Let’s say it didn’t happen.’
And still she stared, till the truth began to come to her.
‘You think that—’
‘I don’t want—’
She interrupted him: ‘You think that Vincent Easton asked a price for those letters? You think that I—paid him?’
Richard said weakly and unconvincingly: ‘I—I never dreamed he was that kind of man.’
‘Didn’t you?’ She looked at him searchingly. His eyes fell before hers. ‘Why did you ask me to put on this dress this evening? Why did you send me there alone at this time of night? You guessed he—cared for me. You wanted to save your skin—save it at any cost—even at the cost of my honour.’ She got up.
‘I see now. You meant that from the beginning—or at least you saw it as a possibility, and it didn’t deter you.’
‘Theo—’
‘You can’t deny it. Richard, I thought I knew all there was to know about you years ago. I’ve known almost from the first that you weren’t straight as regards the world. But I thought you were straight with me.’
‘Theo—’
‘Can you deny what I’ve just been saying?’
He was silent, in spite of himself.
‘Listen, Richard. There is something I must tell you. Three days ago when this blow fell on you, the servants told you I was away—gone to the country. That was only partly true. I had gone away with Vincent Easton—’
Richard made an inarticulate sound. She held out a hand to stop him.
‘Wait. We were at Dover. I saw a paper—I realized what had happened. Then, as you know, I came back.’
She paused.
Richard caught her by the wrist. His eyes burnt into hers.
‘You came back—in time?’
Theo gave a short, bitter laugh.
‘Yes, I came back, as you say, “in time”, Richard.’
Her husband relinquished his hold on her arm. He stood by the mantelpiece, his head thrown back. He looked handsome and rather noble.
‘In that case,’ he said, ‘I can forgive.’
‘I cannot.’
The two words came crisply. They had the semblance and the effect of a bomb in the quiet room. Richard started forward, staring, his jaw dropped with an almost ludicrous effect.
‘You—er—what did you say, Theo?’
‘I said I cannot forgive! In leaving you for another man. I sinned—not technically, perhaps, but in intention, which is the same thing. But if I sinned, I sinne
d through love. You, too, have not been faithful to me since our marriage. Oh, yes, I know. That I forgave, because I really believed in your love for me. But the thing you have done tonight is different. It is an ugly thing, Richard—a thing no woman should forgive. You sold me, your own wife, to purchase safety!’
She picked up her wrap and turned towards the door.
‘Theo,’ he stammered out, ‘where are you going?’
She looked back over her shoulder at him.
‘We all have to pay in this life, Richard. For my sin I must pay in loneliness. For yours—well, you gambled with the thing you love, and you have lost it!’
‘You are going?’
She drew a long breath.
‘To freedom. There is nothing to bind me here.’
He heard the door shut. Ages passed, or was it a few minutes? Something fluttered down outside the window—the last of the magnolia petals, soft, fragrant.
ALSO BY AGATHA CHRISTIE
Mysteries
The Man in the Brown Suit
The Secret of Chimneys
The Seven Dials Mystery
The Mysterious Mr Quin
The Sittaford Mystery
The Hound of Death
The Listerdale Mystery
Why Didn’t They Ask Evans?
Parker Pyne Investigates
Murder Is Easy
And Then There Were None
Towards Zero
Death Comes as the End
Sparkling Cyanide
Crooked House
They Came to Baghdad
Destination Unknown
Spider’s Web *
The Unexpected Guest *
Ordeal by Innocence
The Pale Horse
Endless Night
Passenger To Frankfurt
Problem at Pollensa Bay
While the Light Lasts
Poirot
The Mysterious Affair at Styles
The Murder on the Links
Poirot Investigates
The Murder of Roger Ackroyd
The Big Four
The Mystery of the Blue Train
Black Coffee *
Peril at End House
Lord Edgware Dies
Murder on the Orient Express
Three-Act Tragedy
Death in the Clouds
The ABC Murders
Murder in Mesopotamia
Cards on the Table
Murder in the Mews
Dumb Witness
Death on the Nile
Appointment with Death
Hercule Poirot’s Christmas
Sad Cypress
One, Two, Buckle My Shoe
Evil Under the Sun
Five Little Pigs
The Hollow
The Labours of Hercules
Taken at the Flood
Mrs McGinty’s Dead
After the Funeral
Hickory Dickory Dock
Dead Man’s Folly
Cat Among the Pigeons
The Adventure of the Christmas Pudding
The Clocks
Third Girl
Hallowe’en Party
Elephants Can Remember
Poirot’s Early Cases
Curtain: Poirot’s Last Case
Marple
The Murder at the Vicarage
The Thirteen Problems
The Body in the Library
The Moving Finger
A Murder Is Announced
They Do It with Mirrors
A Pocket Full of Rye
4.50 from Paddington
The Mirror Crack’d from Side to Side
A Caribbean Mystery
At Bertram’s Hotel
Nemesis
Sleeping Murder
Miss Marple’s Final Cases
Tommy & Tuppence
The Secret Adversary
Partners in Crime
N or M?
By the Pricking of My Thumbs
Postern of Fate
Published as Mary Westmacott
Giant’s Bread
Unfinished Portrait
Absent in the Spring
The Rose and the Yew Tree
A Daughter’s a Daughter
The Burden
Memoirs
An Autobiography
Come, Tell Me How You Live
The Grand Tour
Play and Stories
Akhnaton
The Mousetrap and Other Plays
The Floating Admiral †
Star Over Bethlehem
Hercule Poirot and the Greenshore Folly
* novelized by Charles Osborne
† contributor
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