The Collected Works. Josephine Tey
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She was in Le Touquet, just across the channel, when Christine died.
“If parents would only study their children’s horoscopes with the same diligence that they use to study their diets,” Lydia was saying, shrill as a sparrow and about as impressive, “the world would be a much happier place.”
“Le Touquet! Le Touquet!” exulted Jammy’s mind. Now he was getting somewhere! Marta Hallard was not only within reach of Christine on that fatal morning, but she had the means to cover the distance easily. Le Touquet had opened the doors of his memory. Clements and she and Jammy in that far corner by the cocktail cupboard, and she answering Clements’s idle questions. She had flown over, it appeared, with someone in a private plane, and had come back by the same method. And the plane had been an amphibian!
On that misty morning a plane had landed either on the downs or on the sea, had stayed a little, and had gone again without having entered into the consciousness of any but one lonely swimmer. Jammy was so sure of it that he could see the thing come out of the fog like a great bird and drop on to the water.
Who had piloted that plane? Not Harmer. Harmer hadn’t been out of England. That was why the police were taking such an interest in him. Harmer had been only too much on the spot. He had an alibi of sorts, but Jammy didn’t know whether it was a good one or not. The police were so damned secretive. Well, he was on the track of something that the police, for all their vaunted efficiency, had missed. Marta was a friend of Grant’s: it was natural that he should overlook her: he had never seen her look at Harmer, as Jammy was seeing her now; and he didn’t know about that plane, Jammy would take his oath. And the plane made all the difference.
And if it was a case of a plane, then there were two in the business. The pilot, if not an accomplice, was certainly an accessory before the fact.
At this point Jammy mentally stopped to draw breath. He looked surprisedly along the well-dressed silent rows to the smart black-and-white figure in the middle distance. What connection had that familiar presence with the person his mind had drawn? There was the real Marta Hallard, her soigné, gracious, serene self. How had he let his mind make her into something so tortured, so desperate?
But she was still looking every now and then at Jason, her eyes resting longer on him than they did on Lydia. And there was something in that unguarded face that joined the real Marta to that shadowy one that his imagination had created. Whatever she might be, Marta Hallard was after all capable of strong feeling.
A patter like rain fell into Jammy’s thoughts; the polite percussion of gloved hand on gloved hand. Lydia had apparently reached her peroration. Jammy sighed happily and felt for his hat. He wanted to get out into the air and think what his next move was to be. He hadn’t been so excited since Old Man Willingdon had given him the exclusive story of how and why he had beaten his wife into pulp.
But there was going to be a question time, it would seem. Miss Keats, sipping water and smiling benevolently between sips, was waiting for the audience to collect its wits. Then some bold spirit began, and presently questions were raining round her. Some were amusing; and the audience, a little tired by the warm air, Lydia’s voice, and the dullish lecture, laughed easily in relief. Presently the questions grew more intimate, and then—so inevitably that half the audience could see it coming—the query came:
Was it true that Miss Keats accurately foretold the manner of Christine Clay’s death?
There was a shocked and eager silence. Lydia said, simply and with more dignity than she usually possessed, that it was true; that she had often foretold the future truly from a horoscope. She gave some instances.
Emboldened by the growing intimacy of the atmosphere, someone asked if she was helped in her reading of horoscopes by second-sight. She waited so long before answering that stillness fell back on the moving heads and hands; their eyes watched her expectantly.
“Yes,” she said, at length. “Yes. It is not a matter that I like to discuss. But there are times when I have known, beyond reason, that a thing is so.” She paused a moment, as if in doubt, and then took three steps forward to the edge of the platform with such impetuosity that it seemed that she meant to walk forward on to thin air. “And one thing I have known ever since I stepped on the platform. The murderer of Christine Clay is here in this hall.”
It is said that ninety-nine people out of a hundred, receiving a telegram reading: All is discovered: fly, will snatch a toothbrush and make for the garage. Lydia’s words were so unexpected, and their meaning when understood so horrifying, that there was a moment of blank silence. And then the rush began, like the first breath of a hurricane through palm trees. Above the rising babel, chairs shrieked like human beings as they were thrust out of the way. And the more they were thrust aside, the greater the chaos and the more frantic the anxiety of the escapers to reach the door. Not one in the crowd knew what they were escaping from. With most of them it began as a desire to escape from a tense situation; they belonged, as a class, to people who hate “awkwardness.” But the difficulty of reaching the door through the scattered chairs and the densely packed crowd increased their natural desire to escape, into something like panic.
The chairman was saying something that was meant to be reassuring, to tide over the situation; but he was quite inaudible. Someone had gone to Lydia, and Jammy heard her say:
“What made me say that? Oh, what made me say that?”
He had moved forward to mount the platform, all the journalist in him tingling with anticipation. But as he laid his hand on the platform edge to vault, he recognised Lydia’s escort. It was the fellow from the Courier. She was practically the Courier’s property, he remembered. It was a million to one against his getting a word with her, and, at these odds, it wasn’t worth the effort. There was better game, after all. When Lydia had made that incredible statement, Jammy, having abruptly pulled his own jaw into place, had turned to see how two people took the shock.
Marta had gone quite white, and a look of something like fury had come into her face. She had been one of the first to get to her feet, moving so abruptly that Lejeune was taken by surprise and had to fish his hat from under her heels. She had made for the door without a second glance at the platform or Lydia, but since she had had a seat in the front rows had become firmly wedged halfway down the hall, where confusion became worse confounded by someone having violent hysteria.
Jason Harmer, on the other hand, had not moved a muscle. He had gone on looking at Lydia with the same pleased interest during and after her staggering announcement as he had shown before. He had made no move to get up until people began to walk over him. Then he rose leisurely, helped a woman to climb over a chair that was blocking her path, patted his pocket to assure himself that something or other was there (his gloves probably), and turned to the door.
It took Jammy several minutes of scientific shoving to reach Marta, wedged in an alcove between two radiators.
“The silly fools!” she said viciously, when Jammy had reminded her who he was. And she glared, with most un-Hallard-like lack of poise, at her fellow beings.
“Nicer with an orchestra pit between, aren’t they?”
Marta remembered that these were her public, and he could see her automatically pull herself together. But she was still what Jammy called “het up.”
“Amazing business,” he said, prompting. And in explanation: “Miss Keats.”
“An utterly disgusting exhibition!”
“Disgusting?” said Jammy, at a loss.
“Why doesn’t she turn cartwheels in the Strand?”
“You think this was just a publicity stunt?”
“What do you call it? A sign from Heaven?”
“But you said yourself, Miss Hallard, that night you were so kind as to put up with me, that she isn’t a quack. That she really—”
“Of course she isn’t a quack! She has done some amazing horoscopes. But that is a very different matter from this finding of murderers at a penny a time. If Lydia doesn’t take