The Pale Horse by Agatha Christie
“Oh that! It’s all right. Don’t worry.”
“But your voice?”
“I’ve just got a bit of a sore throat or something, that’s all.”
“Ginger!”
“Now look, Mark, anyone can have a sore throat. I’m starting a cold, I expect. Or a touch of ’flu.”
“’Flu? Look here, don’t evade the point. Are you all right, or aren’t you?”
“Don’t fuss. I’m all right.”
“Tell me exactly how you’re feeling. Do you feel as though you might be starting ’flu?”
“Well—perhaps… Aching a bit all over, you know the kind of thing—”
“Temperature?”
“Well, perhaps a bit of a temperature….”
I sat there, a horrible cold sort of feeling stealing over me. I was frightened. I knew, too, that however much Ginger might refuse to admit it, Ginger was frightened also.
Her voice spoke again.
“Mark—don’t panic. You are panicking—and really there’s nothing to panic about.”
“Perhaps not. But we’ve got to take every precaution. Ring up your doctor and get him to come and see you. At once.”
“All right… But—he’ll think I’m a terrible fusspot.”
“Never mind. Do it! Then, when he’s been, ring me back.”
After I had rung off, I sat for a long time staring at the black inhuman outline of the telephone. Panic—I mustn’t give way to panic… There was always ’flu about at this time of year… The doctor would be reassuring…perhaps it would be only a slight chill….
I saw in my mind’s eye Sybil in her peacock dress with its scrawled symbols of evil. I heard Thyrza’s voice, willing, commanding… On the chalked floor, Bella, chanting her evil spells, held up a struggling white cock….
Nonsense, all nonsense…Of course it was all superstitious nonsense…
The box—not so easy, somehow, to dismiss the box. The box represented, not human superstition, but a development of scientific possibility… But it wasn’t possible—it couldn’t be possible that—
Mrs. Dane Calthrop found me there, sitting staring at the telephone. She said at once:
“What’s happened?”
“Ginger,” I said, “isn’t feeling well….”
I wanted her to say that it was all nonsense. I wanted her to reassure me. But she didn’t reassure me.
“That’s bad,” she said. “Yes, I think that’s bad.”
“It’s not possible,” I urged. “It’s not possible for a moment that they can do what they say!”
“Isn’t it?”
“You don’t believe—you can’t believe—”
“My dear Mark,” said Mrs. Dane Calthrop, “both you and Ginger have already admitted the possibility of such a thing, or you wouldn’t be doing what you are doing.”
“And our believing makes it worse—makes it more likely!”
“You don’t go so far as believing—you just admit that, with evidence, you might believe.”
“Evidence? What evidence?”
“Ginger’s becoming ill is evidence,” said Mrs. Dane Calthrop.
I hated her. My voice rose angrily.
“Why must you be so pessimistic? It’s just a simple cold—something of that kind. Why must you persist in believing the worst?”
“Because if it’s the worst, we’ve got to face it—not bury our heads in the sand until it’s too late.”
“You think that this ridiculous mumbo jumbo works? These trances and spells and cock sacrifices and all the bag of tricks?”
“Something works,” said Mrs. Dane Calthrop. “That’s what we’ve got to face. A lot of it, most of it, I think, is trappings. It’s just to create atmosphere—atmosphere is important. But concealed amongst the trappings, there must be the real thing—the thing that does work.”
“Something like radioactivity at a distance?”
“Something of that kind. You see, people are discovering things all the time—frightening things. Some variation of this new knowledge might be adapted by some unscrupulous person for their own purposes— Thyrza’s father was a physicist, you know—”
“But what? What? That damned box! If we could get it examined? If the police—”
“Police aren’t very keen on getting a search warrant and removing property without a good deal more to go on than we’ve got.”
“If I went round there and smashed up the damned thing?”
Mrs. Dane Calthrop shook her head.
“From what you told me, the damage, if there has been damage, was done that night.”
I dropped my head in my hands and groaned.
“I wish we’d never started this damned business.”
Mrs. Dane Calthrop said firmly: “Your motives were excellent. And what’s done is done. You’ll know more when Ginger rings back after the doctor has been. She’ll ring Rhoda’s, I suppose—”
I took the hint.
“I’d better get back.”
“I’m being stupid,” said Mrs. Dane Calthrop suddenly as I left. “I know I’m being stupid. Trappings! We’re letting ourselves be obsessed by trappings. I can’t help feeling that we’re thinking the way they want us to think.”
Perhaps she was right. But I couldn’t see any other way of thinking.
Ginger rang me two hours later.
“He’s been,” she said. “He seemed a bit puzzled, but he says it’s probably ’flu. There’s quite a lot about. He’s sent me to bed and is sending along some medicine. My temperature is quite high. But it would be with ’flu, wouldn’t it?”
There was a forlorn appeal in her hoarse voice, under its surface bravery.
“You’ll be all right,” I said miserably. “Do you hear? You’ll be all right. Do you feel very awful?”
“Well—fever—and aching, and everything hurts, my feet and my skin. I hate anything touching me… And I’m so hot.”
“That’s the fever, darling. Listen, I’m coming up to you! I’m leaving now—at once. No, don’t protest.”
“All right. I’m glad you’re coming, Mark. I daresay—I’m not so brave as I thought….”
II
I rang up Lejeune.
“Miss Corrigan’s ill,” I said.
“What?”
“You heard me. She’s ill. She’s called her own doctor. He says perhaps ’flu. It may be. But it may not. I don’t know what you can do. The only idea that occurs to me is to get some kind of specialist onto it.”
“What kind of specialist?”
“A psychiatrist—or psychoanalyst, or psychologist. A psycho something. A man who knows about suggestion and hypnotism and brainwashing and all that kind of thing. There are people who deal with that kind of thing?”
“Of course there are. Yes. There are one or two Home Office men who specialise in it. I think you’re dead right. It may be just ’flu—but it may be some kind of psycho business about which nothing much is known. Lord, Easterbrook, this may be just what we’ve been hoping for!”
I slammed down the receiver. We might be learning something about psychological weapons—but all that I cared about was Ginger, gallant and frightened. We hadn’t really believed, either of us—or had we? No, of course we hadn’t. It had been a game—a cops and robbers game. But it wasn’t a game.
The Pale Horse was proving itself a reality.
I dropped my head into my hands and groaned.
Twenty-one
Mark Easterbrook’s Narrative
I
I doubt if I shall ever forget the next few days. It appears to me now as a kind of bewildered kaleidoscope without sequence or form. Ginger was removed from the flat to a private nursing home. I was allowed to see her only at visiting hours.
Her own doctor, I gather, was inclined to stand on his high horse about the whole business. He could not understand what the fuss was all about. His own diagnosis was quite clear—bronchopneumonia following on influenza, though complicated by certain slightly un
And, of course, all that he said was true. Ginger had bronchopneumonia. There was nothing mysterious about the disease from which she was suffering. She just had it—and had it badly.
I had one interview with the Home Office psychologist. He was a quaint little cock robin of a man, rising up and down on his toes, with eyes twinkling through very thick lenses.
He asked me innumerable questions, half of which I could see no point in whatever, but there must have been a point, for he nodded sapiently at my answers. He entirely refused to commit himself, wherein he was probably wise. He made occasional pronouncements in what I took to be the jargon of his trade. He tried, I think, various forms of hypnotism on Ginger, but by what seemed to be universal consent, no one would tell me very much. Possibly because there was nothing to tell.
I avoided my own friends and acquaintances, yet the loneliness of my existence was insupportable.
Finally, in an excess of desperation, I rang up Poppy at her flower shop. Would she come out and dine with me. Poppy would love to do so.
I took her to the Fantasie. Poppy prattled happily and I found her company very soothing. But I had not asked her out only for her soothing qualities. Having lulled her into a happy stupor with delicious food and drink, I began a little cautious probing. It seemed to be possible that Poppy might know something without being wholly conscious of what it was she knew. I asked her if she remembered my friend Ginger. Poppy said, “Of course,” opening her big blue eyes, and asked what Ginger was doing nowadays.
“She’s very ill,” I said.
“Poor pet.” Poppy looked as concerned as it was possible for her to look, which was not very much.
“She got herself mixed up with something,” I said. “I believe she asked your advice about it. Pale Horse stuff. Cost her a terrible lot of money.”
“Oh,” exclaimed Poppy, eyes wider still. “So it was you!”
For a moment or two I didn’t understand. Then it dawned upon me that Poppy was identifying me with the “man” whose invalid wife was the bar to Ginger’s happiness. So excited was she by this revelation of our love life that she quite failed to be alarmed by the mention of the Pale Horse.
She breathed excitedly:
“Did it work?”
“It went a bit wrong somehow,” I added, “The dog it was that died.”
“What dog?” asked Poppy, at sea.
I saw that words of one syllable would always be needed where Poppy was concerned.
“The—er—business seems to have recoiled upon Ginger. Did you ever hear of that happening before?”
Poppy never had.
“Of course,” I said, “this stuff they do at the Pale Horse down in Much Deeping—you know about that, don’t you?”
“I didn’t know where it was. Down in the country somewhere.”
“I couldn’t quite make out from Ginger what it is they do….”
I waited carefully.
“Rays, isn’t it?” said Poppy vaguely. “Something like that. From outer space,” she added helpfully. “Like the Russians!”
I decided that Poppy was now relying on her limited imagination.
“Something of that kind,” I agreed. “But it must be quite dangerous. I mean, for Ginger to get ill like this.”
“But it was your wife who was to be ill and die, wasn’t it?”
“Yes,” I said, accepting the role Ginger and Poppy had planted on me. “But it seems to have gone wrong—backfired.”
“You mean—?” Poppy made a terrific mental effort. “Like when you plug an electric iron in wrong and you get a shock?”
“Exactly,” I said. “Just like that. Did you ever know that sort of thing happen before?”
“Well, not that way—”
“What way, then?”
“Well, I mean if one didn’t pay up—afterwards. A man I knew wouldn’t.” Her voice dropped in an awestricken fashion. “He was killed in the tube—fell off the platform in front of a train.”
“It might have been an accident.”
“Oh no,” said Poppy, shocked at the thought. “It was THEM.”
I poured some more champagne into Poppy’s glass. Here, I felt, in front of me was someone who might be helpful if only you could tear out of her the disassociated facts that were flitting about in what she called her brain. She had heard things said, and assimilated about half of them, and got them jumbled up and nobody had been very careful what they said because it was “only Poppy.”
The maddening thing was that I didn’t know what to ask her. If I said the wrong thing she would shut up in alarm like a clam and go dumb on me.
“My wife,” I said, “is still an invalid, but she doesn’t seem any worse.”
“That’s too bad,” said Poppy sympathetically, sipping champagne.
“So what do I do next?”
Poppy didn’t seem to know.
“You see it was Ginger who—I didn’t make any of the arrangements. Is there anyone I could get at?”
“There’s a place in Birmingham,” said Poppy doubtfully.
“That’s closed down,” I said. “Don’t you know anyone else who’d know anything about it?”
“Eileen Brandon might know something—but I don’t think so.”
The introduction of a totally unexpected Eileen Brandon startled me. I asked who Eileen Brandon was.
“She’s terrible really,” said Poppy. “Very dim. Has her hair very tightly permed, and never wears stiletto heels. She’s the end.” She added by way of explanation, “I was at school with her—but she was pretty dim then. She was frightfully good at geography.”
“What’s she got to do with the Pale Horse?”
“Nothing really. It was only an idea she got. And so she chucked it up.”
“Chucked what up?” I asked, bewildered.
“Her job with C.R.C.”
“What’s C.R.C.?”
“Well, I don’t really know exactly. They just say C.R.C. Something about Customers’ Reactions or Research. It’s quite a small show.”
“And Eileen Brandon worked for them? What did she have to do?”
“Just go round and ask questions—about toothpaste or gas stoves, and what kind of sponges you used. Too too depressing and dull. I mean, who cares?”
“Presumably C.R.C.” I felt a slight prickling of excitement.
It was a woman employed by an association of this kind who had been visited by Father Gorman on the fatal night. And—yes—of course, someone of that kind had called on Ginger at the flat….
Here was a link of some kind.
“Why did she chuck up her job? Because she got bored?”
“I don’t think so. They paid quite well. But she got a sort of idea about it—that it wasn’t what it seemed.”
“She thought that it might be connected, in some way, with the Pale Horse? Is that it?”
“Well, I don’t know. Something of that kind… Anyway, she’s working in an Espresso coffee bar off Tottenham Court Road now.”
“Give me her address.”
“She’s not a bit your type.”
“I don’t want to make sexual advances to her,” I said brutally. “I want some hints on Customers Research. I’m thinking of buying some shares in one of those things.”
“Oh, I see,” said Poppy, quite satisfied with this explanation.
There was nothing more to be got out of her, so we finished up the champagne, and I took her home and thanked her for a lovely evening.
II
I tried to ring Lejeune next morning—but failed. However, after some difficulty I managed to get through to Jim Corrigan.
“What about that psychological pipsqueak you brought along to see me, Corrigan? What does he say about Ginger?”
“A lot of long words. But I rather think, Mark, that he’s truly baffled. And you know, people d
“Yes,” I said. “And several people we know of, whose names were on a certain list, have died of bronchopneumonia, gastroenteritis, bulbar paralysis, tumour on the brain, epilepsy, paratyphoid and other well-authenticated diseases.”
“I know how you feel… But what can we do?”
“She’s worse, isn’t she?” I asked.
“Well—yes…”
“Then something’s got to be done.”
“Such as?”
“I’ve got one or two ideas. Going down to Much Deeping, getting hold of Thyrza Grey and forcing her, by scaring the living daylights out of her, to reverse the spell or whatever it is—”
“Well—that might work.”
“Or—I might go to Venables—”
Corrigan said sharply:
“Venables? But he’s out. How can he possibly have any connection with it? He’s a cripple.”
“I wonder. I might go there and snatch off that rug affair and see if this atrophied limbs business is true or false!”
“We’ve looked into all that—”
“Wait. I ran into that little chemist chap, Osborne, down in Much Deeping. I want to repeat to you what he suggested to me.”
I outlined to him Osborne’s theory of impersonation.
“That man’s got a bee in his bonnet,” said Corrigan. “He’s the kind of man who has always got to be right.”
“But Corrigan, tell me, couldn’t it be as he said? It’s possible, isn’t it?”
After a moment or two Corrigan said slowly,
“Yes. I have to admit it’s possible… But several people would have to be in the know—and would have to be paid very heavily for holding their tongues.”
“What of that? He’s rolling in money, isn’t he? Has Lejeune found out yet how he’s made all that money?”
“No. Not exactly… I’ll admit this to you. There’s something wrong about the fellow. He’s got a past of some kind. The money’s all very cleverly accounted for, in a lot of ways. It isn’t possible to check up on it all without an investigation which might take years. The police have had to do that before—when they’ve been up against a financial crook who has covered his traces by a web of infinite complexity. I believe the Inland Revenue has been smelling around Venables for some time. But he’s clever. What do you see him as—the head of the show?”