Postern of Fate Read online

  'Got to try and find out things just to satisfy your wife, I suppose. Yes, I've heard of her. I've never had the pleasure of meeting her, I don't think. Rather wonderful person, isn't she?'

  'I think so,' said Tommy.

  'That's good hearing. I like people who stick together and enjoy their marriage and go on enjoying it.'

  'Really, I'm like the tortoise, I suppose. I mean, there we are. We're old and we're tired, and although we've got very good health for our age, we don't want to be mixed up in anything nowadays. We're not trying to butt into anything. We just -'

  'I know. I know,' said Mr Robinson. 'Don't keep apologizing for it. You want to know. Like the mongoose, you want to know. And Mrs Beresford, she wants to know. Moreover, I should say from all I've heard of her and been told of her, I should say she will get to know somehow.'

  'You think she's more likely to do it than I am?'

  'Well, I don't think perhaps you're quite as keen on finding out things as she is, but I think you're just as likely to get on to it because I think you're rather good at finding sources. It's not easy to find sources for something as long ago as that.'

  'That's why I feel awful about having come and disturbed you. But I wouldn't have done it on my own. It was only Mutton-Chop. I mean -'

  'I know who you mean. Had mutton-chop whiskers and was rather pleased with them at one time. That's why he was called that. A nice chap. Done good work in his time. Yes. He sent you to me because he knew that I am interested in anything like that. I started quite early, you know. Poking about, I mean and finding out things.'

  'And now,' said Tommy, 'now you're the tops.'

  'Now who told you that?' said Mr Robinson. 'All nonsense.'

  'I don't think it is,' said Tommy.

  'Well,' said Mr Robinson, 'some get to the tops and some have the tops forced upon them. I would say the latter applies to me, more or less. I've had a few things of surpassing interest forced upon me.'

  'That business connected with - Frankfurt, wasn't it?'

  'Ah, you've heard rumours, have you? Ah well, don't think about them any more. They're not supposed to be known much. Don't think I'm going to rebuff you for coming here asking me questions. I probably can answer some of the things you want to know. If I said there was something that happened years ago that might result in something being known that would be - possibly - interesting nowadays, something that would give one a bit of information about things that might be going on nowadays, that might be true enough. I wouldn't put it past anyone or anything. I don't know what I can suggest to you, though. It's a question of worry about, listen to people, find out what you can about bygone years. If anything comes along that you think might be interesting to me, just give me a ring or something. We'll find some code words, you know. Just to make ourselves feel excited again, feel as though we really mattered. Crab-apple jelly, how would that be? You know, you say your wife's made some jars of crab-apple jelly and would I like a pot. I'll know what you mean.'

  'You mean that - that I would have found out something about Mary Jordan. I don't see there's any point in going on with that. After all, she's dead.'

  'Yes. She's dead. But - well, you see, sometimes one has the wrong ideas about people because of what you've been told. Or because of what's been written.'

  'You mean we have wrong ideas about Mary Jordan. You mean, she wasn't important at all?'

  'Oh yes, she could have been very important.' Mr Robinson looked at his watch. 'I have to push you off now. There's a chap coming in, in ten minutes. An awful bore, but he's high up in government circles, and you know what life is nowadays. Government, government, you've got to stand it everywhere. In the office, in the home, in the supermarkets, on the television. Private life. That's what we want more of nowadays. Now this little fun and games that you and your wife are having, you're in private life and you can look at it from the background of private life. Who knows, you might find out something. Something that would be interesting. Yes. You may and you may not.

  'I can't tell you anything more about it. I know some of the facts that probably nobody else can tell you and in due course I might be able to tell them to you. But as they're all dead and done with, that's not really practical.

  'I'll tell you one thing that will help you perhaps in your investigations. You read about this case, the trial of Commander whatever-he-was - I've forgotten his name now - and he was tried for espionage, did a sentence for it and richly deserved it. He was a traitor to his country and that's that. But Mary Jordan -'

  'Yes?'

  'You want to know something about Mary Jordan. Well, I'll tell you one thing that might, as I say, help your point of view. Mary Jordan was - well, you can call it a spy but she wasn't a German spy. She wasn't an enemy spy. Listen to this, my boy. I can't help calling you "my boy".'

  Mr Robinson dropped his voice and leaned forward over his desk.

  'She was one of our lot.'

  Book III

  Chapter 1

  MARY JORDAN

  'But that alters everything,' said Tuppence.

  'Yes,' said Tommy. 'Yes. It was - it was quite a shock.'

  'Why did he tell you?'

  'I don't know,' said Tommy. 'I thought - well, two or three different things.'

  'Did he - what's he like, Tommy? You haven't really told me.'

  'Well, he's yellow,' said Tommy. 'Yellow and big and fat and very, very ordinary, but at the same time, if you know what I mean, he isn't ordinary at all. He's - well, he's what my friend said he was. He's one of the tops.'

  'You sound like someone talking about pop singers.'

  'Well, one gets used to using these terms.'

  'Yes, but why? Surely that was revealing something that he wouldn't have wanted to reveal, you'd think.'

  'It was a long time ago,' said Tommy. 'It's all over, you see. I suppose none of it matters nowadays. I mean, look at all the things they're releasing now. Off the record. You know, not hushing up things any more. Letting it all come out, what really happened. What one person wrote and what another person said and what one row was about and how something else was all hushed up because of something you never heard about.'

  'You make me feel horribly confused,' said Tuppence, 'when you say things like that. It makes everything wrong, too, doesn't it?'

  'How do you mean, makes everything wrong?'

  'Well, I mean, the way we've been looking at it. I mean - what do I mean?'

  'Go on,' said Tommy. 'You must know what you mean.'

  'Well, what I said. It's all wrong. I mean, we found this thing in The Black Arrow, and it was all clear enough. Somebody had written it in there, probably this boy Alexander, and it meant that somebody - one of them, he said, at least, one of us - I mean he put it that way but that's what he meant - one of the family or somebody in the house or something, had arranged to bring about the death of Mary Jordan, and we didn't know who Mary Jordan was, which was very baffling.'

  'Goodness knows it's been baffling,' said Tommy.

  'Well, it hasn't baffled you as much as me. It's baffled me a great deal. I haven't really found out anything about her. At least -'

  'What you found out about her was that she had been apparently a German spy, isn't that what you mean? You found out that?'

  'Yes, that is what was believed about her, and I supposed it was true. Only now -'

  'Yes,' said Tommy, 'only now we know that it wasn't true. She was the opposite to a German spy.'

  'She was a sort of English spy.'

  'Well, she must have been in the English espionage or security whatever it was called. And she came here in some capacity to find out something. To find out something about - about - what's his name now? I wish I could remember names better. I mean the naval officer or the Army officer or whatever he was. The one who sold the secret of the submarine or something like that. Yes, I suppose there was a little cluster of German agents here, rather like in N or M all over again, all busy preparing things.'

&nb
sp; 'It would seem so, yes.'

  'And she was sent here in that case, presumably, to find out all about it.'

  'I see.'

  'So "one of us" didn't mean what we thought it meant. "One of us" meant - well, it had to be someone who was in this neighbourhood. And somebody who had something to do with this house, or was in this house for a special occasion. And so, when she died, her death wasn't a natural one because somebody got wise to what she was doing. And Alexander found out about it.'

  'She was pretending to spy, perhaps,' said Tuppence, 'for Germany. Making friends with Commander - whoever it was.'

  'Call him Commander X,' said Tommy, 'if you can't remember.'

  'All right, all right. Commander X. She was getting friendly with him.'

  'There was also,' said Tommy, 'an enemy agent living down here. The head of a big organization. He lived in a cottage somewhere, down near the quay I think it was, and he wrote a lot of propaganda, and used to say that really our best plan would be to join in with Germany and get together with them - and things like that.'

  'It is all so confusing,' said Tuppence. 'All these things - plans, and secret papers and plots and espionage - have been so confusing. Well, anyway, we've probably been looking in all the wrong places.'

  'Not really,' said Tommy, 'I don't think so.'

  'Why don't you think so?'

  'Well, because if she, Mary Jordan, was here to find out something, and if she did find out something, then perhaps when they - I mean Commander X or other people - there must have been other people too in it - when they found out that she'd found out something -'

  'Now don't get me muddled again,' said Tuppence. 'If you say things like that, it's very muddling. Yes. Go on.'

  'All right. Well, when they found out that she'd found out a lot of things, well, then they had to -'

  'To silence her,' said Tuppence.

  'You make it sound like Phillips Oppenheim now,' said Tommy. 'And he was before 1914, surely.'

  'Well, anyway, they had to silence Mary before she could report what she'd found out.'

  'There must be a little more to it than that,' said Tommy. 'Perhaps she'd got hold of something important. Some kind of papers or written document. Letters that might have been sent or passed to someone.'

  'Yes. I see what you mean. We've got to look among a different lot of people. But if she was one of the ones to die because of a mistake that had been made about the vegetables, then I don't see quite how it could be what Alexander called "one of us". It presumably wasn't one of his family.'

  'It could have been like this,' said Tommy. 'It needn't have been actually someone in the house. It's very easy to pick wrong leaves looking alike, bunch 'em all up together and take them into the kitchen; you wouldn't, I think, make them really - I mean, not really - too lethal. Just the people at one particular meal would get rather ill after it and they'd send for a doctor and the doctor would get the food analysed and he'd realize somebody'd made a mistake over vegetables. He wouldn't think anyone had done it on purpose.'

  'But then everybody at that meal would have died" said Tuppence. 'Or everybody would have been ill but not died.'

  'Not necessarily,' said Tommy. 'Suppose they wanted a certain person - Mary J. - to die, and they were going to give a dose of poison to her, oh, in a cocktail before the lunch or dinner or whatever it was or in coffee or something after the meal - actual digitalin, or aconite or whatever it is in foxgloves -'

  'Aconite's in monkshood. I think,' said Tuppence.

  'Don't be so knowledgeable.' said Tommy. 'The point is everyone gets a mild dose by what is clearly a mistake, so everyone gets mildly ill - but one person dies. Don't you see, if most people were taken ill after whatever it was - dinner or lunch one day and it was looked into, and they found out about the mistake, well, things do happen like that. You know, people eat fungus instead of mushrooms, and deadly nightshade berries children eat by mistake because the berries look like fruit. Just a mistake and people are ill, but they don't usually all die. Just one of them does, and the one that did die would be assumed to have been particularly allergic to whatever it was and so she had died but the others hadn't. You see. It would pass off as really due to the mistake and they wouldn't have looked to see or even suspected there was some other way in which it happened -'

  'She might have got a little ill like the others and then the real dose might have been put in her early tea the next morning,' said Tuppence.

  'I'm sure, Tuppence, that you've lots of ideas.'

  'About that part of it, yes,' said Tuppence. 'But what about the other things? I mean who and what and why? Who was the "one of us" - "one of them" as we'd better say now - who had the opportunity? Someone staying down here, friends of other people perhaps? People who brought a letter, forged perhaps, from a friend saying "Do be kind to my friend, Mr or Mrs Murray Wilson, or some name, who is down here. She is so anxious to see your pretty garden," or something. All that would be easy enough.'

  'Yes, I think it would.'

  'In that case.' said Tuppence. 'there's perhaps something still here in the house that would explain what happened to me today and yesterday, too.'

  'What happened to you yesterday, Tuppence?'

  'The wheels came off that beastly little cart and horse I was going down the hill in the other day, and so I came a terrible cropper right down behind the monkey puzzle and into it. And I very nearly - well, I might have had a serious accident. That silly old man Isaac ought to have seen that the thing was safe. He said he did look at it. He told me it was quite all right before I started.'

  'And it wasn't?'

  'No. He said afterwards that he thought someone had been playing about with it, tampering with the wheels or something, so that they came off.'

  'Tuppence,' said Tommy, 'do you think that's the second or third thing that's happened here to us? You know that other thing that nearly came down on the top of me in the book-room?'

  'You mean somebody wants to get rid of us? But that would mean -'

  'That would mean" said Tommy, 'that there must be something. Something that's here - in the house.'

  Tommy looked at Tuppence and Tuppence looked at Tommy. It was the moment for consideration. Tuppence opened her mouth three times but checked herself each time, frowning, as she considered. It was Tommy who spoke at last.

  'What did he think? What did he say about Truelove? Old Isaac, I mean.'

  'That it was only to be expected, that the thing was pretty rotten anyway.'

  'But he said somebody had been monkeying about with it?'

  'Yes,' said Tuppence, 'very definitely. "Ah," he said. "these youngsters have been in tryin' it out, you know. Enjoy pulling wheels off things, they do, young monkeys." Not that I've seen anyone about. But then I suppose they'd be sure that I didn't catch them at it. They'd wait till I'm away from home, I expect.

  'I asked him if he thought it was just - just something mischievous,' said Tuppence.

  'What did he say to that?' said Tommy.

  'He didn't really know what to say.'

  'It could have been mischief, I suppose,' said Tommy, 'People do do those things.'

  'Are you trying to say you think that it was meant in some way so that I should go on playing the fool with the cart and that the wheel would come off and the thing would fall to pieces - oh, but that is nonsense, Tommy.'

  'Well, it sounds like nonsense,' said Tommy, 'but things aren't nonsense sometimes. It depends where and how they happen and why.'

  'I don't see what "why" there could be.'

  'One might make a guess - about the most likely thing,' said Tommy.

  'Now what do you mean by the most likely?'

  'I mean perhaps people want us to go away from here.'

  'Why should they? If somebody wants the house for themselves, they could make us an offer for it.'

  'Yes, they could.'

  'Well, I wondered - Nobody else has wanted this house as far as we know. I mean, there was nobody else l
ooking at it when we were. It seemed to be generally regarded as if it had come into the market rather cheap but not for any other reason, except that it was out of date and needed a lot doing to it.'

  'I can't believe they wanted to do away with us, maybe it's because you've been nosing about, asking too many questions, copying things out of books.'

  'You mean that I'm stirring up things that somebody doesn't want to be stirred up?'

  'That sort of thing,' said Tommy. 'I mean, if we suddenly were meant to feel that we didn't like living here, and put the house up for sale and went away, that would be quite all right. They'd be satisfied with that. I don't think that they -'