“I thought, doctor, that you might put it to M. Poirot—explain it, you know—because it’s so difficult for a foreigner to see our point of view. And you don’t know—nobody could know—what I’ve had to contend with. A martyrdom—a long martyrdom. That’s what my life has been. I don’t like to speak ill of the dead—but there it is. Not the smallest bill but it had all to be gone over—just as though Roger had had a few miserly hundreds a year instead of being (as Mr. Hammond told me yesterday) one of the wealthiest men in these parts.”
Mrs. Ackroyd paused to dab her eyes with the frilled handkerchief.
“Yes,” I said encouragingly. “You were talking about bills?”
“Those dreadful bills. And some I didn’t like to show Roger at all. They were things a man wouldn’t understand. He would have said the things weren’t necessary. And of course they mounted up, you know, and they kept coming in—”
She looked at me appealingly, as though asking me to condole with her on this striking peculiarity.
“It’s a habit they have,” I agreed.
“And the tone altered—became quite abusive. I assure you, doctor, I was becoming a nervous wreck. I couldn’t sleep at nights. And a dreadful fluttering round the heart. And then I got a letter from a Scotch gentleman—as a matter of fact there were two letters—both Scotch gentlemen. Mr. Bruce MacPherson was one, and the other was Colin MacDonald. Quite a coincidence.”
“Hardly that,” I said drily. “They are usually Scotch gentlemen, but I suspect a Semitic strain in their ancestry.”
“Ten pounds to ten thousand on note of hand alone,” murmured Mrs. Ackroyd reminiscently. “I wrote to one of them, but it seemed there were difficulties.”