The Witness for the Prosecution Read online

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  HARPER

  An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers

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  Published by HARPER 2016

  ‘The Witness for the Prosecution’, ‘The Fourth Man’, ‘The Mystery of the Blue Jar’, ‘The Red Signal’, ‘S.O.S.’ and ‘Wireless’ previously published in the UK in The Hound of Death (1933).

  ‘Accident’, ‘Mr Eastwood’s Aventure’, ‘Philomel Cottage’ and ‘Sing a Song of Sixpence’ previously published in the UK in The Listerdale Mystery (1934).

  ‘The Second Gong’ previously published in the UK in Problem at Pollensa Bay (1991).

  ‘Poirot and the Regatta Mystery’ previously published in the UK in Hercule Poirot: The Complete Short Stories (2008).

  Witness for the Prosecution®, Agatha Christie®, Poirot® and the Agatha Christie Signature are registered trade marks of Agatha Christie Limited in the UK and elsewhere.

  This collection copyright © Agatha Christie Limited 2016

  All rights reserved.

  www.agathachristie.com

  Cover layout design © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2016

  Cover photographs by Todd Anthony (Kim Cattrall) and Robert Viglasky © Agatha Christie Productions and Mammoth Screen 2016

  From the major BBC series The Witness for the Prosecution starring Kim Cattrall, Billy Howle, Toby Jones and Andrea Riseborough

  Agatha Christie asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

  A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.

  This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

  Source ISBN: 9780008201258

  Ebook Edition © December 2016 ISBN: 9780008201265

  Version: 2016-11-21

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Introduction

  1. The Witness for the Prosecution

  2. Accident

  3. The Fourth Man

  4. The Mystery of the Blue Jar

  5. Mr Eastwood’s Adventure

  6. Philomel Cottage

  7. The Red Signal

  8. The Second Gong

  9. Sing a Song of Sixpence

  10. S.O.S.

  11. Wireless

  12. Poirot and the Regatta Mystery

  Footnote

  Also by Agatha Christie

  About the Publisher

  Introduction

  I should come clean from the start. Until a few years ago, I had never read anything by Agatha Christie, nor had I ever watched one of the many adaptations of her novels. I’d seen bits of them, yes, but watched them from beginning to end, no. I’d walked past the St Martin’s Theatre, where The Mousetrap has been running for over 60 years, hundreds of times, stepping into the street to avoid the queues on the pavement. The name Agatha Christie was wholly familiar to me and so I thought I knew what she was all about: vicarages and village greens, the Orient Express and the Nile, country houses, clipped accents and a corpse on the floor. ‘Murder!’ somebody shrieks, but the murder really serves as catalyst for the ludic delights of the mystery and an abundance of cryptic clues that only the outsiders – such as the sharp-eyed and sharp-tongued spinster Miss Jane Marple or the extravagantly moustachioed Belgian detective Hercule Poirot – can unravel. It’s entertainment. Cosy. The epitome of a particular nostalgia-laden Englishness. The mystery is satisfactorily resolved, the villain is identified and the status quo restored. Everything is alright in The End. That is what I thought.

  Then I was asked to read And Then There Were None to adapt it for the BBC, and the savagery of the novel knocked me sideways. Ten strangers are invited to a remote island by a mysterious host. Archetypal characters: the Doctor, the General, the Detective, the Judge, the Schoolmistress, the Spinster, the Butler, like pieces set out for a board game. A recorded voice accuses them all of murder and names their victims. One by one, the characters die, the manner of their deaths in keeping with a chilling nursery rhyme. They search for the murderer but there is no one else on the island. The killer is one of them. But which one?

  And Then There Were None is many things: the ultimate locked-room mystery; a nerve-shredding psychological thriller; a forensic disquisition on the nature of guilt; a portrait of a psychopath … and despite the flashes of mordant wit, it is terrifying. Ten isolated and paranoid characters, facing a brutal and remorseless reckoning from which there is no possible mitigation, no chance to plead and nowhere to hide. No sleuth will arrive to interpret the clues, apprehend the villain and restore order, and the only thing you can do is try desperately to survive. Cosy is the very last thing it is. It also struck me that this is a novel of its time. Written and published in 1939, as the world was about to be precipitated into another cataclysmic war, the story felt on the very edge of the chaos and slaughter of the Second World War and, simultaneously, shockingly contemporary. It also felt profoundly subversive.

  Following And Then There Were None, I was asked to read The Witness for the Prosecution for a two-hour BBC adaptation. It is a story of sex, money, deceit, performance and murder with the most glorious, sleight-of-hand twist. It has all the elements of classic Noir – murky motives, an enigmatic femme fatale and a seemingly decent man drawn deep into the web. It is set (as are many of the stories in this collection) in the deeply divided 1920s, an era of giddy hedonistic excess, champagne, shingled hair, the sizzle and thrill of jazz for some but grinding penury and want for most. It’s a world of grimy boarding houses, dank streets thick with chill fog, flickering gaslights and the cold clear light of the courtroom. The shadow of the First World War, with its seismic upheavals, ruptured certainties, scars and horrors, looms darkly. In the TV adaptation Leonard Vole, the penniless young man accused of seducing and manipulating the wealthy, indulgent Emily French into making her will in his favour, and then murdering her, tells his pedantic solicitor John Mayhew* that he hadn’t been able to ‘settle to anything, not since service’. This detail thrums with battle trauma. Romaine, a Viennese actress and the only person who can speak in Vole’s defence, is considered to have got her ‘hooks’ into Vole to get herself out of the scorched ruins of Europe. She is a ‘dangerous woman’, thinks Mayhew, ‘very dangerous.’ He has no idea.

  The story is rife with the bat-squeaks of transgression. The relationship between Emily French and Leonard Vole that Vole describes as motherly could equally be perceived as sexual. Janet the maid is described as so consumed with loathing and jealousy that you wonder at the dynamic of the household that Vole becomes a part of. Even Mayhew, with his dry little cough and his pince-nez and his adherence to ‘normal procedure’, isn’t immune to transgression. He is fascinated by Romaine to the point of obsession. His stuffy legal language is abandoned for eroticism during her very public humiliation; her ‘exquisite body’, how she flames and flaunts herself ‘like a tropical flower’. You can’t help but
feel how much he’s enjoying watching Romaine break while the rest of the court judges her. The scarlet woman – not so dangerous now. The twist, when it comes, explodes like a bomb. The law is flawed. Justice is entirely fallible, driven by emotion, and emotions are easily manipulated. It’s not the truth that matters, Christie seems to suggest, but performance. Performance is everything.

  Running throughout Christie’s work is the theme of performance, and the identities people inhabit to hide their true selves and their motives. The characters in And Then There Were None look at each other, the familiar archetypes, and wonder with horror who they really are and what they are capable of, now that they see behind the facade of wealth, sex, faith and status. The same is true of the characters in these short stories. All human interactions, between men and women, between parents and children, between old friends, are loaded with menace. ‘Philomel Cottage’, the idyllic home of passionate newlyweds, slowly turns into Bluebeard’s Castle with a young wife living in fear of her new husband. The forceful bonhomie of the family atmosphere in ‘S.O.S.’ is taut with threat. Ordinary objects and daily rituals shimmer with malevolence. Goodness and human decency are no protection, rather they mark you out as vulnerable and easy prey. In one of the cruellest stories, ‘The Mystery of the Blue Jar’, a cheerful young man and avid golfer spirals into madness and hallucination because he believes he has heard a woman’s helpless scream of ‘Murder!’ He meets people whom he trusts to help him and who instead are the architects of his despair and dislocation. In ‘The Red Signal’ one of the characters observes that ‘the man […] or woman who is to all appearance perfectly normal may be in reality a poignant source of danger to the community.’ In other words, trust no one. Not a single soul. You do not know who anyone really is.

  ‘Perfectly normal.’ Your neighbours. The people you see every day. Your family. The woman sitting next to you on the train. They look like you. They talk like you. They pass. They fit in but they could change at any moment and you don’t know when. And they are sizing you up to see what they can gain and how they’re going to get away with it.

  What I find astonishing about this is the pervasive queasy tensions, the paranoia and simmering violence. Yes, as murder mysteries they should be tense and have the edge of violence, but there’s something else going on here too. All writers absorb the preoccupations of their times, we can’t help it, and what gives Christie’s best novels and stories their contemporary urgency for me is the way she takes the pulse of her times and finds it thready, anxious and febrile. Englishness itself is being dissected. The old certainties are crumbling. The status quo is not restored, everything is not going to be alright in The End. Faith, the law, status, privilege and profession are thin disguises and they are no protection against smiling predators, spilled blood and lives lost. We are all capable of terrible things. Danger is everywhere. You do not know who anyone truly is, if the cocktail they’re handing you is safe to drink, if the candlestick they’re polishing could be used as a weapon, if they will consider your life a fair trade-off for their ambition … You just do not know. So trust no one. Not even yourself …

  Because the predator might even be you.

  SARAH PHELPS

  2016

  The Witness for the Prosecution

  Mr Mayherne adjusted his pince-nez and cleared his throat with a little dry-as-dust cough that was wholly typical of him. Then he looked again at the man opposite him, the man charged with wilful murder.

  Mr Mayherne was a small man precise in manner, neatly, not to say foppishly dressed, with a pair of very shrewd and piercing grey eyes. By no means a fool. Indeed, as a solicitor, Mr Mayherne’s reputation stood very high. His voice, when he spoke to his client, was dry but not unsympathetic.

  ‘I must impress upon you again that you are in very grave danger, and that the utmost frankness is necessary.’

  Leonard Vole, who had been staring in a dazed fashion at the blank wall in front of him, transferred his glance to the solicitor.

  ‘I know,’ he said hopelessly. ‘You keep telling me so. But I can’t seem to realize yet that I’m charged with murder—murder. And such a dastardly crime too.’

  Mr Mayherne was practical, not emotional. He coughed again, took off his pince-nez, polished them carefully, and replaced them on his nose. Then he said:

  ‘Yes, yes, yes. Now, my dear Mr Vole, we’re going to make a determined effort to get you off—and we shall succeed—we shall succeed. But I must have all the facts. I must know just how damaging the case against you is likely to be. Then we can fix upon the best line of defence.’

  Still the young man looked at him in the same dazed, hopeless fashion. To Mr Mayherne the case had seemed black enough, and the guilt of the prisoner assured. Now, for the first time, he felt a doubt.

  ‘You think I’m guilty,’ said Leonard Vole, in a low voice. ‘But, by God, I swear I’m not! It looks pretty black against me, I know that. I’m like a man caught in a net—the meshes of it all round me, entangling me whichever way I turn. But I didn’t do it, Mr Mayherne, I didn’t do it!’

  In such a position a man was bound to protest his innocence. Mr Mayherne knew that. Yet, in spite of himself, he was impressed. It might be, after all, that Leonard Vole was innocent.

  ‘You are right, Mr Vole,’ he said gravely. ‘The case does look very black against you. Nevertheless, I accept your assurance. Now, let us get to facts. I want you to tell me in your own words exactly how you came to make the acquaintance of Miss Emily French.’

  ‘It was one day in Oxford Street. I saw an elderly lady crossing the road. She was carrying a lot of parcels. In the middle of the street she dropped them, tried to recover them, found a bus was almost on top of her and just managed to reach the kerb safely, dazed and bewildered by people having shouted at her. I recovered the parcels, wiped the mud off them as best I could, re-tied the string of one, and returned them to her.’

  ‘There was no question of your having saved her life?’

  ‘Oh! dear me, no. All I did was to perform a common act of courtesy. She was extremely grateful, thanked me warmly, and said something about my manners not being those of most of the younger generation—I can’t remember the exact words. Then I lifted my hat and went on. I never expected to see her again. But life is full of coincidences. That very evening I came across her at a party at a friend’s house. She recognized me at once and asked that I should be introduced to her. I then found out that she was a Miss Emily French and that she lived at Cricklewood. I talked to her for some time. She was, I imagine, an old lady who took sudden violent fancies to people. She took one to me on the strength of a perfectly simple action which anyone might have performed. On leaving, she shook me warmly by the hand, and asked me to come and see her. I replied, of course, that I should be very pleased to do so, and she then urged me to name a day. I did not want particularly to go, but it would have seemed churlish to refuse, so I fixed on the following Saturday. After she had gone, I learned something about her from my friends. That she was rich, eccentric, lived alone with one maid and owned no less than eight cats.’

  ‘I see,’ said Mr Mayherne. ‘The question of her being well off came up as early as that?’

  ‘If you mean that I inquired—’ began Leonard Vole hotly, but Mr Mayherne stilled him with a gesture.

  ‘I have to look at the case as it will be presented by the other side. An ordinary observer would not have supposed Miss French to be a lady of means. She lived poorly, almost humbly. Unless you had been told the contrary, you would in all probability have considered her to be in poor circumstances—at any rate to begin with. Who was it exactly who told you that she was well off?’

  ‘My friend, George Harvey, at whose house the party took place.’

  ‘Is he likely to remember having done so?’

  ‘I really don’t know. Of course it is some time ago now.’

  ‘Quite so, Mr Vole. You see, the first aim of the prosecution will be to establish that you wer
e in low water financially—that is true, is it not?’

  Leonard Vole flushed.

  ‘Yes,’ he said, in a low voice. ‘I’d been having a run of infernal bad luck just then.’

  ‘Quite so,’ said Mr Mayherne again. ‘That being, as I say, in low water financially, you met this rich old lady and cultivated her acquaintance assiduously. Now if we are in a position to say that you had no idea she was well off, and that you visited her out of pure kindness of heart—’

  ‘Which is the case.’

  ‘I dare say. I am not disputing the point. I am looking at it from the outside point of view. A great deal depends on the memory of Mr Harvey. Is he likely to remember that conversation or is he not? Could he be confused by counsel into believing that it took place later?’

  Leonard Vole reflected for some minutes. Then he said steadily enough, but with a rather paler face:

  ‘I do not think that that line would be successful, Mr Mayherne. Several of those present heard his remark, and one or two of them chaffed me about my conquest of a rich old lady.’

  The solicitor endeavoured to hide his disappointment with a wave of the hand.

  ‘Unfortunately,’ he said. ‘But I congratulate you upon your plain speaking, Mr Vole. It is to you I look to guide me. Your judgement is quite right. To persist in the line I spoke of would have been disastrous. We must leave that point. You made the acquaintance of Miss French, you called upon her, the acquaintanceship progressed. We want a clear reason for all this. Why did you, a young man of thirty-three, good-looking, fond of sport, popular with your friends, devote so much time to an elderly woman with whom you could hardly have anything in common?’

  Leonard Vole flung out his hands in a nervous gesture.

  ‘I can’t tell you—I really can’t tell you. After the first visit, she pressed me to come again, spoke of being lonely and unhappy. She made it difficult for me to refuse. She showed so plainly her fondness and affection for me that I was placed in an awkward position. You see, Mr Mayherne, I’ve got a weak nature—I drift—I’m one of those people who can’t say “No.” And believe me or not, as you like, after the third or fourth visit I paid her I found myself getting genuinely fond of the old thing. My mother died when I was young, an aunt brought me up, and she too died before I was fifteen. If I told you that I genuinely enjoyed being mothered and pampered, I dare say you’d only laugh.’