Free Endless Night by Agatha Christie

could they do? Send me to prison for twenty—thirty years? That’s rather ironical, isn’t it, there aren’t twenty or thirty years for me to serve. Six months—one year—eighteen months at the utmost. There’s nothing anyone can do to me. So in the span that’s left to me I am king. I can do what I like. Sometimes it’s a very heady thought. Only—only, you see, there’s not much temptation because there’s nothing particularly exotic or lawless that I want to do.”
    After we had left him, as we were driving back to Athens, Ellie said to me:
    “He’s an odd person. Sometimes you know, I feel frightened of him.”
    “Frightened, of Rudolf Santonix—why?”
    “Because he isn’t like other people and because he has a—I don’t know—a ruthlessness and an arrogance about him somewhere. And I think that he was trying to tell us, really, that knowing he’s going to die soon has increased his arrogance. Supposing,” said Ellie, looking at me in an animated way, with almost a rapt and emotional expression on her face, “supposing he built us our lovely castle, our lovely house on the cliff’s edge there in the pines, supposing we were coming to live in it. There he was on the doorstep and he welcomed us in and then—”
    “Well, Ellie?”
    “Then supposing he came in after us, he slowly closed the doorway behind us and sacrificed us there on the threshold. Cut our throats or something.”
    “You frighten me, Ellie. The things you think of!”
    “The trouble with you and me, Mike, is that we don’t live in the real world. We dream of fantastic things that may never happen.”
    “Don’t think of sacrifices in connection with Gipsy’s Acre.”
    “It’s the name, I suppose, and the curse upon it.”
    “There isn’t any curse,” I shouted. “It’s all nonsense. Forget it.”
    That was in Greece.

Ten
     
    I t was, I think, the day after that. We were in Athens. Suddenly, on the steps of the Acropolis Ellie ran into people that she knew. They had come ashore from one of the Hellenic cruises. A woman of about thirty-five detached herself from the group and rushed along the steps to Ellie exclaiming:
    “Why, I never did. It’s really you, Ellie Guteman? Well, what are you doing here? I’d no idea. Are you on a cruise?”
    “No,” said Ellie, “just staying here.”
    “My, but it’s lovely to see you. How’s Cora, is she here?”
    “No, Cora is at Salzburg I believe.”
    “Well, well.” The woman was looking at me and Ellie said quietly, “Let me introduce—Mr. Rogers, Mrs. Bennington.”
    “How d’you do. How long are you here for?”
    “I’m leaving tomorrow,” said Ellie.
    “Oh dear! My, I’ll lose my party if I don’t go, and I just don’t want to miss a word of the lecture and the descriptions. They do hustle one a bit, you know. I’m just dead beat at the end of the day. Any chance of meeting you for a drink?”
    “Not today,” said Ellie, “we’re going on an excursion.”
    Mrs. Bennington rushed off to rejoin her party. Ellie, who had been going with me up the steps of the Acropolis, turned round and moved down again.
    “That rather settles things, doesn’t it?” she said to me.
    “What does it settle?”
    Ellie did not answer for a minute or two and then she said with a sigh, “I must write tonight.”
    “Write to whom?”
    “Oh, to Cora, and to Uncle Frank, I suppose, and Uncle Andrew.”
    “Who’s Uncle Andrew? He’s a new one.”
    “Andrew Lippincott. Not really an uncle. He’s my principal guardian or trustee or whatever you call it. He’s a lawyer—a very well-known one.”
    “What are you going to say?”
    “I’m going to tell them I’m married. I couldn’t say suddenly to Nora Bennington ‘Let me introduce my husband.’ There would have been frightful shrieks and exclamations and ‘I never heard you were married. Tell me all about it, darling’ etcetera, etcetera. It’s only fair that my stepmother and Uncle Frank and Uncle Andrew