Evil Under the Sun by Agatha Christie Page B

towel.
    â€œPretty good in the sea this morning,” he said. “Unfortunately I’ve got a lot of work to do. Must go and get on with it.”
    â€œWhy, if that isn’t too bad, Captain Marshall. On a beautiful day like this, too. My, wasn’t yesterday too terrible? I said to Mr. Gardener that if the weather was going to continue like that we’d just have to leave. It’s the melancholy, you know, with the mist right up around the island. Gives you a kind of ghostly feeling, but then I’ve always been very susceptible to atmosphere ever since I was a child. Sometimes, you know, I’d feel I just had to scream and scream. And that, of course, was very trying to my parents. But my mother was a lovely woman and she said to my father, ‘Sinclair, if the child feels like that, we must let her do it. Screaming is her way of expressing herself.’ And of course, my father agreed. He was devoted to my mother and just did everything she said. They were a perfectly lovely couple, as I’m sure Mr. Gardener will agree. They were a very remarkable couple, weren’t they, Odell?”
    â€œYes, darling,” said Mr. Gardener.
    â€œAnd where’s your girl this morning, Captain Marshall?”
    â€œLinda? I don’t know. I expect she’s mooning round the island somewhere.”
    â€œYou know, Captain Marshall, that girl looks kind of peaky to me. She needs feeding up and very very sympathetic treatment.”
    Kenneth Marshall said curtly:
    â€œLinda’s all right.”
    He went up to the hotel.
    Patrick Redfern did not go into the water. He sat about, frankly looking up towards the hotel. He was beginning to look a shade sulky.
    Miss Brewster was brisk and cheerful when she arrived.
    The conversation was much as it had been on a previous morning. Gentle yapping from Mrs. Gardener and short staccato barks from Miss Brewster.
    She remarked at last: “Beach seems a bit empty. Everyone off on excursions?”
    Mrs. Gardener said:
    â€œI was saying to Mr. Gardener only this morning that we simply must make an excursion to Dartmoor. It’s quite near and the associations are all so romantic. And I’d like to see that convict prison—Princetown, isn’t it? I think we’d better fix up right away and go there tomorrow, Odell.”
    Mr. Gardener said:
    â€œYes, darling.”
    Hercule Poirot said to Miss Brewster.
    â€œYou are going to bathe, Mademoiselle?”
    â€œOh I’ve had my morning dip before breakfast. Somebody nearly brained me with a bottle, too. Chucked it out of one of the hotel windows.”
    â€œNow that’s a very dangerous thing to do,” said Mrs. Gardener. “I had a very dear friend who got concussion by a toothpaste tin falling on him in the street—thrown out of a thirty-fifth storey window it was. A most dangerous thing to do. He got very substantial damages.” She began to hunt among her skeins of wool. “Why, Odell, I don’t believe I’ve got that second shade of purple wool. It’s in the second drawer of the bureau in our bedroom or it might be the third.”
    â€œYes, darling.”
    Mr. Gardener rose obediently and departed on his search.
    Mrs. Gardener went on:
    â€œSometimes, you know, I do think that maybe we’re going a little too far nowadays. What with all our great discoveries and all the electrical waves there must be in the atmosphere, I do think it leads to a great deal of mental unrest, and I just feel that maybe the time has come for a new message to humanity. I don’t know, M. Poirot, if you’ve ever interested yourself in the prophecies from the Pyramids.”
    â€œI have not,” said Poirot.
    â€œWell, I do assure you that they’re very, very interesting. What with Moscow being exactly a thousand miles due north of—now what was it?—would it be Nineveh?—but anyway you take a circle and it just shows the most surprising