Third Girl by Agatha Christie Page A

and opposite her was sitting a young man with lavish chestnut hair curled on his shoulders, wearing a red velvet waistcoat and a very fancy jacket.
    “David,” said Mrs Oliver under her breath. “It must be David.” He and the girl Norma were talking excitedly together.
    Mrs Oliver considered a plan of campaign, made up her mind, and nodding her head in satisfaction, crossed the floor of the cafй to a discreet door marked “Ladies”.
    Mrs Oliver was not quite sure whether Norma was likely to recognise her or not. It was not always the vaguest looking people who proved the vaguest in fact. At the moment Norma did not look as though she was likely to look at anybody but David, but who knows?
    “I expect I can do something to myself anyway,” thought Mrs Oliver. She looked at herself in a small fly-blown mirror provided by the cafй's management, studying particularly what she considered to be the focal point of a woman's appearance, her hair. No one knew this better than Mrs Oliver, owing to the innumerable times that she had changed her mode of hairdressing, and had failed to be recognised by her friends in consequence. Giving her head an appraising eye she started work.
    Out came the pins, she took off several coils of hair, wrapped them up in her handkerchief and stuffed them into her handbag, parted her hair in the middle, combed it sternly back from her face and rolled it up into a modest bun at the back of her neck. She also took out a pair of spectacles and put them on her nose. There was a really earnest look about her now!
    “Almost intellectual,” Mrs Oliver thought approvingly. She altered the shape of her mouth by an application of lipstick, and emerged once more into the cafй, moving carefully since the spectacles were only for reading and in consequence that landscape was blurred. She crossed the cafй, and made her way to an empty table next to that occupied by Norma and David. She sat down so that she was facing David.
    Norma, on the near side, sat with her back to her. Norma, therefore, would not see her unless she turned her head right round. The waitress drifted up. Mrs Oliver ordered coffee and a Bath bun and settled down to be inconspicuous. Norma and David did not even notice her. They were deeply in the middle of a passionate discussion. It took Mrs Oliver just a minute or two to tune in to them.
    “... But you only fancy these things,” David was saying. “You imagine them. They're all utter, utter nonsense, my dear girl.”
    “I don't know. I can't tell.” Norma's voice had a queer lack of resonance in it.
    Mrs Oliver could not hear her as well as she heard David, since Norma's back was turned to her, but the dullness of the girl's tone struck her disagreeably. There was something wrong here, she thought.
    Very wrong. She remembered the story as Poirot had first told it to her. “She thinks she may have committed a murder.” What was the matter with the girl. Hallucinations? Was her mind really slightly affected, or was it no more and no less than truth, and in consequence the girl had suffered a bad shock?
    “If you ask me, it's all fuss on Mary's part! She's a thoroughly stupid woman anyway, and she imagines she has illnesses and all that sort of thing.”
    “She was ill.”
    “All right then, she was ill. Any sensible woman would get the doctor to give her some antibiotic or other, and not get het up.”
    “She thought I did it to her. My father thinks so too.”
    “I tell you, Norma, you imagine all these things.”
    “You just say that to me, David. You say it to me to cheer me up. Supposing I did give her the stuff?”
    “What do you mean, suppose? You must know whether you did or you didn't. You can't be so idiotic, Norma.”
    “I don't know.”
    “You keep saying that. You keep coming back to that, and saying it again and again. 'I don't know. I don't know.'”
    “You don't understand. You don't understand in the least what hate is. I hated her from the first moment I