Miss Marple – Miss Marple and Mystery: The Complete Short Stories. Агата Кристи

the man towards you. What in the old days used to be called telepathy certainly exists, though the conditions governing it are very little understood.’

      ‘Have there been any other instances?’ asked Claire of Dermot.

      ‘Oh! yes, but nothing very pictorial – and I suppose they could all be explained under the heading of coincidence. I refused an invitation to a country house once, for no other reason than the hoisting of the “red signal”. The place was burnt out during the week. By the way, Uncle Alington, where does the subconscious come in there?’

      ‘I’m afraid it doesn’t,’ said Alington, smiling.

      ‘But you’ve got an equally good explanation. Come, now. No need to be tactful with near relatives.’

      ‘Well, then, nephew, I venture to suggest that you refused the invitation for the ordinary reason that you didn’t much want to go, and that after the fire, you suggested to yourself that you had had a warning of danger, which explanation you now believe implicitly.’

      ‘It’s hopeless,’ laughed Dermot. ‘It’s heads you win, tails I lose.’

      ‘Never mind, Mr West,’ cried Violet Eversleigh. ‘I believe in your Red Signal implicitly. Is the time in Mesopotamia the last time you had it?’

      ‘Yes – until –’

      ‘I beg your pardon?’

      ‘Nothing.’

      Dermot sat silent. The words which had nearly left his lips were: ‘Yes, until tonight.’They had come quite unbidden to his lips, voicing a thought which had as yet not been consciously realized, but he was aware at once that they were true. The Red Signal was looming up out of the darkness. Danger! Danger at hand!

      But why? What conceivable danger could there be here? Here in the house of his friends? At least – well, yes, there was that kind of danger. He looked at Claire Trent – her whiteness, her slenderness, the exquisite droop of her golden head. But that danger had been there for some time – it was never likely to get acute. For Jack Trent was his best friend, and more than his best friend, the man who had saved his life in Flanders and had been recommended for the VC for doing so. A good fellow, Jack, one of the best. Damned bad luck that he should have fallen in love with Jack’s wife. He’d get over it some day, he supposed. A thing couldn’t go on hurting like this for ever. One could starve it out – that was it, starve it out. It was not as though she would ever guess – and if she did guess, there was no danger of her caring. A statue, a beautiful statue, a thing of gold and ivory and pale pink coral … a toy for a king, not a real woman …

      Claire … the very thought of her name, uttered silently, hurt him … He must get over it. He’d cared for women before … ‘But not like this!’ said something. ‘Not like this.’ Well, there it was. No danger there – heartache, yes, but not danger. Not the danger of the Red Signal. That was for something else.

      He looked round the table and it struck him for the first time that it was rather an unusual little gathering. His uncle, for instance, seldom dined out in this small, informal way. It was not as though the Trents were old friends; until this evening Dermot had not been aware that he knew them at all.

      To be sure, there was an excuse. A rather notorious medium was coming after dinner to give a seance. Sir Alington professed to be mildly interested in spiritualism. Yes, that was an excuse, certainly.

      The word forced itself on his notice. An excuse. Was the seance just an excuse to make the specialist’s presence at dinner natural? If so, what was the real object of his being here? A host of details came rushing into Dermot’s mind, trifles unnoticed at the time, or, as his uncle would have said, unnoticed by the conscious mind.

      The great physician had looked oddly, very oddly, at Claire more than once. He seemed to be watching her. She was uneasy under his scrutiny. She made little twitching motions with her hands. She was nervous, horribly nervous, and was it, could it be, frightened? Why was she frightened?

      With a jerk, he came back to the conversation round the table. Mrs Eversleigh had got the great man talking upon his own subject.

      ‘My dear lady,’ he was saying, ‘what is madness? I can assure you that the more we study the subject, the more difficult we find it to pronounce. We all practise a certain amount of self-deception, and when we carry it so far as to believe we are the Czar of Russia, we are shut up or restrained. But there is a long road before we reach that point. At what particular spot on it shall we erect a post and say, “On this side sanity, on the other madness?” It can’t be done, you know. And I will tell you this, if the man suffering from a delusion happened to hold his tongue about it, in all probability we should never be able to distinguish him from a normal individual. The extraordinary sanity of the insane is a most interesting subject.’

      Sir Alington sipped his wine with appreciation, and beamed upon the company.

      ‘I’ve always heard they are very cunning,’ remarked Mrs Eversleigh. ‘Loonies, I mean.’

      ‘Remarkably so. And suppression of one’s particular delusion has a disastrous effect very often. All suppressions are dangerous, as psychoanalysis has taught us. The man who has a harmless eccentricity, and can indulge it as such, seldom goes over the border line. But the man’ – he paused – ‘or woman who is to all appearance perfectly normal may be in reality a poignant source of danger to the community.’

      His gaze travelled gently down the table to Claire, and then back again. He sipped his wine once more.

      A horrible fear shook Dermot. Was that what he meant? Was that what he was driving at? Impossible, but –

      ‘And all from suppressing oneself,’ sighed Mrs Eversleigh. ‘I quite see that one should be very careful always to – to express one’s personality. The dangers of the other are frightful.’

      ‘My dear Mrs Eversleigh,’ expostulated the physician. ‘You have quite misunderstood me. The cause of the mischief is in the physical matter of the brain – sometimes arising from some outward agency such as a blow; sometimes, alas, congenital.’

      ‘Heredity is so sad,’ sighed the lady vaguely. ‘Consumption and all that.’

      ‘Tuberculosis is not hereditary,’ said Sir Alington drily.

      ‘Isn’t it? I always thought it was. But madness is! How dreadful. What else?’

      ‘Gout,’ said Sir Alington smiling. ‘And colour blindness – the latter is rather interesting. It is transmitted direct to males, but is latent in females. So, while there are many colourblind men, for a woman to be colourblind, it must have been latent in her mother as well as present in her father – rather an unusual state of things to occur. That is what is called sex-limited heredity.’

      ‘How interesting. But madness is not like that, is it?’

      ‘Madness can be handed down to men or women equally,’ said the physician gravely.

      Claire rose suddenly, pushing back her chair so abruptly that it overturned and fell to the ground. She was very pale and the nervous motions of her fingers were very apparent.

      ‘You – you will not be long, will you?’ she begged. ‘Mrs Thompson will be here in a few minutes now.’

      ‘One glass of port, and I will be with you, for one,’ declared Sir Alington. ‘To see this wonderful Mrs Thompson’s performance is what I have come for, is it not? Ha, ha! Not that I needed any inducement.’ He bowed.

      Claire gave a faint smile of acknowledgment and passed out of the room, her hand on Mrs Eversleigh’s shoulder.

      ‘Afraid I’ve been talking shop,’ remarked the physician as he resumed his seat. ‘Forgive me, my dear fellow.’

      ‘Not at all,’ said Trent perfunctorily.

      He looked strained and worried. For the first time Dermot felt an outsider in the company