“And you are sure it will not pain you to go over those days in detail?”
“It won’t pain me at all. Things can only pain you when they are happening.”
“It is so with some people, I know.”
Lady Dittisham said:
“That’s what Edward—my husband—can’t understand. He thinks the trial and all that was a terrible ordeal for me.”
“Was it not?”
Elsa Dittisham said:
“No, I enjoyed it.” There was a reflective satisfied quality in her voice. She went on: “God, how that old brute Depleach went for me. He’s a devil, if you like. I enjoyed fighting him. He didn’t get me down.”
She looked at Poirot with a smile.
“I hope I’m not upsetting your illusions. A girl of twenty, I ought to have been prostrated, I suppose—agonized with shame or something. I wasn’t. I didn’t care what they said to me. I only wanted one thing.”
“What?”
“To get her hanged, of course,” said Elsa Dittisham.
He noticed her hands—beautiful hands but with long curving nails. Predatory hands.
She said:
“You’re thinking me vindictive? So I am vindictive—to anyone who has injured me. That woman was to my mind the lowest kind of woman there is. She knew that Amyas cared for me—that he was going to leave her and she killed him so that I shouldn’t have him.”
She looked across at Poirot.
“Don’t you think that’s pretty mean?”
“You do not understand or sympathize with jealousy?”
“No, I don’t think I do. If you’ve lost, you’ve lost. If you can’t keep your husband, let him go with a good grace. It’s possessiveness I don’t understand.”
“You might have understood it if you had ever married him.”
“I don’t think so. We weren’t—” She smiled suddenly at Poirot. Her smile was, he felt, a little frightening. It was so far removed from any real feeling. “I’d like you to get this right,” she said. “Don’t think that Amyas Crale seduced an innocent young girl. It wasn’t like that at all! Of the two of us, I was responsible. I met him at a party and I fell for him—I knew I’d got to have him—”
A travesty—a grotesque travesty but—
And all my fortunes at thy foot I’ll lay
And follow thee, my lord, throughout the world….
“Although he was married?”
“Trespassers will be prosecuted? It takes more than a printed notice to keep you from reality. If he was unhappy with his wife and could be happy with me, then why not? We’ve only one life to live.”
“But it has been said he was happy with his wife.”
Elsa shook her head.
“No. They quarrelled like cat and dog. She nagged at him. She was—oh, she was a horrible woman!”
She got up and lit a cigarette. She said with a little smile: