Why Didnt They Ask Evans by Agatha Christie Read Free Book Online Page B

Frankie absently. 'A single-handed murder is much higher class. Bobby!' 'Yes?' 'What was it Pritchard said - just before he died? You know, you told me about it that day on the links. That funny question?' “'Why didn't they ask Evans?'” 'Yes. Suppose that was it?' 'But that's ridiculous.' 'It sounds so, but it might be important, really. Bobby, I'm sure it's that. Oh, no, I'm being an idiot - you never told the Caymans about it?' 'I did, as a matter of fact,' said Bobby slowly.
    'You didr 'Yes. I wrote to them that evening. Saying, of course, that it was probably quite unimportant.' 'And what happened?' 'Cayman wrote back, politely agreeing, of course, that there was nothing in it, but thanking me for taking the trouble. I felt rather snubbed.' 'And two days later you got this letter from a strange firm bribing you to go to South America?' 'Yes.' 'Well,' said Frankie, 'I don't know what more you want.
    They try that first; you turn it down, and the next thing is that they follow you round and seize a good moment to empty a lot of morphia into your bottle of beer.' 'Then the Caymans are in it?' 'Of course the Caymans are in it!' 'Yes,' said Bobby thoughtfully. 'If your reconstruction is correct, they must be in it. According to our present theory, it goes like this. Dead man X is deliberately pushed over cliff presumably by OF (pardon these initials). It is important that X should not be correctly identified, so portrait of Mrs C is put in his pocket and portrait of fair unknown removed. (Who was she, I wonder?)' 'Keep to the point,' said Frankie sternly.
    'Mrs C waits for photographs to appear and turns up as grief-stricken sister and identifies X as her brother from foreign parts.' 'You don't believe he could really have been her brother?' 'Not for a moment! You know, it puzzled me all along. The Caymans were a different class altogether. The dead man was - well, it sounds a most awful thing to say and just like some deadly old retired Anglo-Indian, but the dead man was a pukka sahib.' 'And the Caymans most emphatically weren't?' 'Most emphatically.' 'And then, just when everything has gone off well from the Caymans' point of view - body successfully identified, verdict of accidental death, everything in the garden lovely -you come along and mess things up,' mused Frankie.
    '“ Why didn 't they ask Evans? ”' Bobby repeated the phrase thoughtfully. 'You know, I can't see what on earth there can be in that to put the wind up anybody.' 'Ah! that's because you don't know. It's like making crossword puzzles. You write down a clue and you think it's too idiotically simple and that everyone will guess it straight off, and you're frightfully surprised when they simply can't get it in the least. “ Why didn't they ask Evans? ” must have been a most frightfully significant phrase to them, and they couldn't realize that it meant nothing at all to you.' 'More fools they.' 'Oh, quite so. But it's just possible they thought that if Pritchard said that, he might have said something more which would also recur to you in due time. Anyway, they weren't going to take chances. You were safer out of the way.' 'They took a lot of risk. Why didn't they engineer another “accident”?' 'No, no. That would have been stupid. Two accidents within a week of each other? It might have suggested a connection between the two, and then people would have begun inquiring into the first one. No, I think there's a kind of bald simplicity about their method which is really rather clever.' 'And yet you said just now that morphia wasn't easy to get hold of.' 'No more it isn't. You have to sign poison books and things.
    Oh! of course, that's a clue. Whoever did it had easy access to supplies of morphia.' 'A doctor, a hospital nurse, or a chemist,' suggested Bobby.
    'Well, I was thinking more of illicitly imported drugs.' 'You can't mix up too many different sorts of crime,' said Bobby.
    'You see, the strong point would be the absence of motive.
    Your