Agatha Christie – Lord Edgware Dies

There was a knock at the door, and a waiter entered with supper dishes. Jane Wilkinson continued to discuss her problem with no appreciation of his presence.

‘But I don’t want you to kill him for me, M. Poirot.’

‘Merci, Madame.’

‘I thought perhaps you might argue with him in some clever way. Get him to give in to the idea of divorce. I’m sure you could.’

‘I think you overrate my persuasive powers, Madame.’

‘Oh! but you can surely think of something, M. Poirot.’ She leaned forward. Her blue eyes opened wide again. ‘You’d like me to be happy, wouldn’t you?’

Her voice was soft, low and deliciously seductive.

‘I should like everybody to be happy,’ said Poirot cautiously.

‘Yes, but I wasn’t thinking of everybody. I was thinking of just me.’

‘I should say you always do that, Madame.’

He smiled.

‘You think I’m selfish?’

‘Oh! I did not say so, Madame.’

‘I dare say I am. But, you see, I do so hate being unhappy. It affects my acting, even. And I’m going to be ever so unhappy unless he agrees to a divorce—or dies.

‘On the whole,’ she continued thoughtfully, ‘it would be much better if he died, I mean, I’d feel more finally quit of him.’

She looked at Poirot for sympathy.

‘You will help me, won’t you, M. Poirot?’ She rose, picking up the white wrap, and stood looking appealingly into his face. I heard the noise of voices outside in the corridor. The door was ajar. ‘If you don’t—’ she went on.

‘If I don’t, Madame?’

She laughed.

‘I’ll have to call a taxi to go round and bump him off myself.’

Laughing, she disappeared through a door to an adjoining room just as Bryan Martin came in with the American girl, Carlotta Adams, and her escort, and the two people who had been supping with him and Jane Wilkinson. They were introduced to me as Mr and Mrs Widburn.

‘Hello!’ said Bryan. ‘Where’s Jane? I want to tell her I’ve succeeded in the commission she gave me.’

Jane appeared in the doorway of the bedroom. She held a lipstick in one hand.

‘Have you got her? How marvellous. Miss Adams, I do admire your performance so. I felt I just had to know you. Come in here and talk to me while I fix my face. It’s looking too perfectly frightful.’

Carlotta Adams accepted the invitation. Bryan Martin flung himself down in a chair.

‘Well, M. Poirot,’ he said. ‘You were duly captured. Has our Jane persuaded you to fight her battles? You might as well give in sooner as later. She doesn’t understand the word “No.”’

‘She has not come across it, perhaps.’

‘A very interesting character, Jane,’ said Bryan Martin. He lay back in his hair and puffed cigarette smoke idly towards the ceiling. ‘Taboos have no meaning for her. No morals whatever. I don’t mean she’s exactly immoral—she isn’t. Amoral is the word, I believe. Just sees one thing only in life—what Jane wants.’

He laughed.

‘I believe she’d kill somebody quite cheerfully—and feel injured if they caught her and wanted to hang her for it. The trouble is that she would be caught. She hasn’t any brains. Her idea of a murder would be to drive up in a taxi, sail in under her own name and shoot.’

‘Now, I wonder what makes you say that?’ murmured Poirot.

‘Eh?’

‘You know her well, Monsieur?’

‘I should say I did.’

He laughed again, and it struck me that his laugh was unusually bitter.

‘You agree, don’t you?’ he flung out to the others.

‘Oh! Jane’s an egoist,’ agreed Mrs Widburn. ‘An actress has got to be, though. That is, if she wants to express her personality.’

Poirot did not speak. His eyes were resting on Bryan Martin’s face, dwelling there with a curious speculative expression that I could not quite understand.

At that moment Jane sailed in from the next room, Carlotta Adams behind her. I presume that Jane had now ‘fixed her face’, whatever that term denoted, to her own satisfaction. It looked to me exactly the same as before and quite incapable of improvement.

The supper party that followed was quite a merry one, yet I sometimes had the feeling that there were undercurrents which I was incapable of appreciating.