The Regatta Mystery and Other Stories

I could see that Mr. Rhodes was highly skeptical of my being of any use anl that he was annoyed at being brought here. But Mr. Petherick took no notice and proceeded to give me the fasts of what occurred on the night of March 8th. Mr. and Mrs. Rhodes had been staying at the Crown Hotel in Barncheater. Mrs. Rhodes who (so I gathered from Mr. Petherick's careful language) was perhaps just a shade of a hypochondriac, had retired to bed in, mediately after dinner. She and her husband occupied adjoining rooms with a connecting door. Mr. Rhodes, who is writing a book on prehistoric flints, settled down to work in the adjoining from. At eleven o'clock he tidied up his papers and prepared to go to bed. Before doing so, he just glanced into his wife's room to make sure that there was nothing she wanted. He discovered the electric light on and his wife lying in bed stabbed through the heart. She had been dead at least an hour--probably longer. The following were the POints made. There was another door in Mrs. Rholes' room leading into the corridor. This door was locked and bolted on the inside. The only wirdow in the room was closed and latched. According to Mr. Rhodes no 134 Agatha Christie

body had passed through the room in which he was sitting except a chambermaid bringing hot water bottles. The weapon found in the wound was a stiletto dagger which had been lying on Mrs. Rhodes' dressing-table. She was in the habit of using it as a paper knife. There were no fingerprints on it. The situation boiled down to this--no one but Mr. Rhodes and the chambermaid had entered the victim's room. I inquired about the chambermaid. "That was our first line of inquiry," said Mr. Petherick. "Mary Hill is a local woman. She has been chambermaid at the Crown for ten years; There seems absolutely no reason why she should commit a sudden assault on a guest. She is, in any case, extraordinarily stupid, almost half-witted. Her story has never varied. She brought Mrs. Rhodes her hot water bottle and says the lady was drowsy--just dropping off to sleep. Frankly, I cannot believe, and I am sure no jury would believe, that she committed the crime."

Mr. Petherick went on to mention a few additional

details. At the head of the staircase in the Crown Hotel is a kind of miniature lounge where people sometimes sit and have coffee. A passage goes off to the right and the last door in it is the door into the room occupied by Mr. Rhodes. The passage then turns sharply to the right again and the first door round the corner is the door into Mrs. Rhodes' room. As it happened, both these doors could be seen by witnesses. The first door--that into Mr. Rhodes' room, which I will call A, could be seen by four people, two commercial

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travelers and an elderly married couple who were having coffee. According to them nobody went in or out of door A except Mr. Rhodes and the chambermaid. As to the other door in passage B, there was an electrician at work there and he also swears that nobody entered or left door B except the chambermaid.

It was certainly a very curious and interesting

case. On the face of it, it looked as though Mr. Rhodes must have murdered his wife. But I could see that Mr. Petherick was quite convinced of his client's innocence and Mr. Petherick was a very shrewd man.

At the inquest Mr. Rhodes had told a hesitating and rambling story about some woman who had written threatening letters to his wife. His story, I gathered, had been unconvincing in the extreme. Appealed to by Mr. Petherick, he explained him-self.

"Frankly," he said, "I never believed it. I thought Amy had made most of it up."

Mrs. Rhodes, I gathered, was one of those ro-mantic liars who go through life embroidering everything that happens to them. The amount of adventures that, according to her own account, happened to her in a year was simply incredible. If she slipped on a bit of banana peel it was a case of near escape from death. If a lamp-shade caught fire, she was rescued from a burning building at the hazard of her life. Her husband got into the

habit of discounting her statements. Her tale as to

some woman whose child she had injured .in a motor accident and who had vowed vengeance on her--wellmMr. Rhodes had simply not taken any

136 Agatha Christie

notice of it. The incident had happened before he married his wife and although she had read him letters couched in crazy language, he had suso pected her of composing them herself. She had ac-tually done such a thing once or twice before. She was a woman of hysterical tendencies who craved ceaselessly for excitement.

Now, all that seemed to me very natural--indeed, we have a young woman in the village who does much the same thing. The danger with such people is that when anything at all extraordinary really does happen to them, nobody believes they are speaking the truth. It seemed to me that that was what had happened in this case. The police, I gathered, merely believed that Mr. Rhodes was