II

George Lee came into the room, accompanied by his wife.

Colonel Johnson said: ‘Good morning. Sit down, will you? There are a few questions I want to ask both of you. Something I’m not quite clear about.’

‘I shall be glad to give you any assistance I can,’ said George, somewhat pompously.

Magdalene said faintly: ‘Of course!’

The chief constable gave a slight nod to Sugden. The latter said: ‘About those telephone calls on the night of the crime. You put through a call to Westeringham, I think you said, Mr Lee?’

George said coldly: ‘Yes, I did. To my agent in the constituency. I can refer you to him and – ’

Superintendent Sugden held up his hand to stem the flow.

‘Quite so – quite so, Mr Lee. We’re not disputing that point. Your call went through at 8.59 exactly.’

‘Well – I – er – couldn’t say as to the exact time.’

‘Ah,’ said Sugden. ‘But we can! We always check up on these things very carefully. Very carefully indeed. The call was put through at 8.59 and it was terminated at 9.4. Your father, Mr Lee, was killed about 9.15. I must ask you once more for an account of your movements.’

‘I’ve told you – I was telephoning!’

‘No, Mr Lee, you weren’t.’

‘Nonsense – you must have made a mistake! Well, I may, perhaps, have just finished telephoning – I think I debated making another call – was just considering whether it was – er – worth – the expense – when I heard the noise upstairs.’

‘You would hardly debate whether or not to make a telephone call for ten minutes.’

George went purple. He began to splutter. ‘What do you mean? What the devil do you mean? Damned impudence! Are you doubting my word? Doubting the word of a man of my position? I – er – why should I have to account for every minute of my time?’

Superintendent Sugden said with a stolidness that Poirot admired: ‘It’s usual.’

George turned angrily on the chief constable. ‘Colonel Johnson. Do you countenance this – this unprecedented attitude?’

The chief constable said crisply: ‘In a murder case, Mr Lee, the questions must be asked – and answered.’

‘I have answered them! I had finished telephoning and was – er – debating a further call.’

‘You were in this room when the alarm was raised upstairs?’

‘I was – yes, I was.’

Johnson turned to Magdalene.

‘I think, Mrs Lee,’ he said, ‘that you stated that you were telephoning when the alarm broke out, and that at the time you were alone in this room?’

Magdalene was flustered. She caught her breath, looked sideways at George – at Sugden, then appealingly at Colonel Johnson. She said: ‘Oh, really – I don’t know – I don’t remember what I said… I was so upset…’

Sugden said: ‘We’ve got it all written down, you know.’

She turned her batteries on him – wide appealing eyes – quivering mouth. But she met in return the rigid aloofness of a man of stern respectability who didn’t approve of her type.

She said uncertainly: ‘I – I – of course I telephoned. I can’t be quite sure just when – ’

She stopped.

George said: ‘What’s all this? Where did you telephone from? Not in here.’

Superintendent Sugden said: ‘I suggest, Mrs Lee, that you didn’t telephone at all. In that case, where were you and what were you doing?’

Magdalene glanced distractedly about her and burst into tears. She sobbed: ‘George, don’t let them bully me! You know that if anyone frightens me and thunders questions at me, I can’t remember any thing at all! I – I don’t know what I was saying that night – it was all so horrible – and I was so upset – and they’re being so beastly to me…’

She jumped up and ran sobbing out of the room.

Springing up, George Lee blustered: ‘What d’you mean? I won’t have my wife bullied and frightened out of her life! She’s very sensitive. It’s disgraceful! I shall have a question asked in the House about the disgraceful bullying methods of the police. It’s absolutely disgraceful!’

He strode out of the room and banged the door.

Superintendent Sugden threw his head back and laughed. He said: ‘We’ve got them going properly! Now we’ll see!’

Johnson said frowning: ‘Extraordinary business! Looks fishy. We must get a further statement out of her.’

Sugden said easily: ‘Oh! She’ll be back in a minute or two. When she’s decided what to say. Eh, Mr Poirot?’

Poirot, who had been sitting in a dream, gave a start. ‘Pardon!’

‘I said she’ll be back.’

‘Probably – yes, possibly – oh, yes!’

Sugden said, staring at him: ‘What’s the matter, Mr Poirot? Seen a ghost?’

Poirot said slowly: ‘You know – I am not sure that I have not done just exactly that.’

Colonel Johnson said impatiently: ‘Well, Sugden, anything else?’

Sugden said: ‘I’ve been trying to check up on the order in which everyone arrived on the scene of the murder. It’s quite clear what must have happened. After the murder when the victim’s dying cry had given the alarm, the murderer slipped out, locked the door with pliers, or something of that kind, and a moment or two later became one of the people hurry ingto the scene of the crime. Unfortunately it’s not easy to check exactly whom everyone has seen because people’s memories aren’t very accurate on a point like that. Tressilian says he saw Harry and Alfred Lee cross the hall from the dining-room and race upstairs. That lets them out, but we don’t suspect them anyway. As far as I can make out, Miss Estravados got there late – one of the last. The general idea seems to be that Farr, Mrs George, and Mrs David were the first. Each of those three says one of the others was just ahead of them. That’s what’s so difficult, you can’t distinguish between a deliberate lie and a genuine haziness of recollection. Everybody ran there – that’s agreed, but in what order they ran isn’t so easy to get at.’

Poirot said slowly: ‘You think that important?’

Sugden said: ‘It’s the time element. The time, remember, was incredibly short.’

Poirot said: ‘I agree with you that the time element is very important in this case.’

Sugden went on: ‘What makes it more difficult is that there are two staircases. There’s the main one in the hall here about equidistant from the dining-room and the drawing-room doors. Then there’s one the other end of the house. Stephen Farr came up by the latter. Miss Estravados came along the upper landing from that end of the house (her room is right the other end). The others say they went up by this one.’

Poirot said: ‘It is a confusion, yes.’

The door opened and Magdalene came quickly in. She was breathing fast and had a bright spot of colour in each cheek. She came up to the table and said quietly: ‘My husband thinks I’m lying down. I slipped out of my room quietly. Colonel Johnson,’ she appealed to him with wide, distressed eyes, ‘if I tell you the truth you will keep quiet about it, won’t you? I mean you don’t have to make everything public?’

Colonel Johnson said: ‘You mean, I take it, Mrs Lee, something that has no connection with the crime?’

‘Yes, no connection at all. Just something in my – my private life.’

The chief constable said: ‘You’d better make a clean breast of it, Mrs Lee, and leave us to judge.’

Magdalene said, her eyes swimming: ‘Yes, I will trust you. I know I can. You look so kind. You see, it’s like this. There’s somebody – ’ She stopped.

‘Yes, Mrs Lee?’

‘I wanted to telephone to somebody last night – a man – a friend of mine, and I didn’t want George to know about it. I know it was very wrong of me – but well, it was like that. So I went to telephone after dinner when I thought George would be safely in the dining-room. But when I got here I heard him telephoning, so I waited.’

‘Where did you wait, madame?’ asked Poirot.

‘There’s a place for coats and things behind the stairs. It’s dark there. I slipped back there, where I could see George come out from this room. But he didn’t come out, and then all the noise happened and Mr Lee screamed, and I ran upstairs.’

‘So your husband did not leave this room until the moment of the murder?’

‘No.’

The chief constable said: ‘And you yourself from nine o’clock to nine-fifteen were waiting in the recess behind the stairs?’

‘Yes, but I couldn’t say so, you see! They’d want to know what I was doing there. It’s been very, very awkward for me, you do see that, don’t you?’

Johnson said dryly: ‘It was certainly awkward.’

She smiled at him sweetly. ‘I’m so relieved to have told you the truth. And you won’t tell my husband, will you? No, I’m sure you won’t! I can trust you, all of you.’

She included them all in her final pleading look, then she slipped quickly out of the room.

Colonel Johnson drew a deep breath. ‘Well,’ he said. ‘It might be like that! It’s a perfectly plausible story. On the other hand – ’

‘It might not,’ finished Sugden. ‘That’s just it. We don’t know.’