Third Girl by Agatha Christie Page B

saw her.”
    “I know. You told me that.”
    “That's the queer part of it. I told you that, and yet I don't even remember telling you that. D'you see? Every now and then I - I tell people things. I tell people things that I want to do, or that I have done, or that I'm going to do. But I don't even remember telling them the things. It's as though I was thinking all these things in my mind, and sometimes they come out in the open and I say them to people. I did say them to you, didn't I?”
    “Well - I mean - look here, don't let's harp back to that.”
    “But I did say it to you? Didn't I?”
    “All right, all right! One says things like that. 'I hate her and I'd like to kill her. I think I'll poison her!' But that's only kid stuff, if you know what I mean, as though you weren't quite grown up. It's a very natural thing. Children say it a lot. 'I hate so and so. I'll cut off his head!' Kids say it at school. About some master they particularly dislike.”
    “You think it was just that? But - that sounds as though I wasn't grown up.”
    “Well, you're not in some ways. If you'd just pull yourself together, realise how silly it all is. What can it matter if you do hate her? You've got away from home and don't have to live with her.”
    “Why shouldn't I live in my own home - with my own father?” said Norma. “It's not fair. It's not fair. First he went away and left my mother, and now, just when he's coming back to me, he goes and marries Mary. Of course I hate her and she hates me too. I used to think about killing her, used to think of ways of doing it. I used to enjoy thinking like that. But then - when she really got ill...”
    David said uneasily: “You don't think you're a witch or anything, do you? You don't make figures in wax and stick pins into them or do that sort of thing?”
    “Oh no. That would be silly. What I did was real. Quite real.”
    “Look here, Norma, what do you mean when you say it was real?”
    “The bottle was there, in my drawer. Yes, I opened the drawer and found it.”
    “What bottle?”
    “The Dragon Exterminator. Selective weed killer. That's what it was labelled. Stuff in a dark green bottle and you were supposed to spray it on things. And it had labels with Caution and Poison, too.”
    “Did you buy it? Or did you just find it?”
    “I don't know where I got it, but it was there, in my drawer, and it was half empty.”
    “And then you - you - remembered -”
    “Yes,” said Norma. “Yes...” Her voice was vague, almost dreamy. “Yes... I think it was then it all came back to me. You think so too, don't you, David?”
    “I don't know what to make of you, Norma. I really don't. I think in a way, you're making it all up, you're telling it to yourself.”
    “But she went to hospital, for observation, they said, they were puzzled. Then they said they couldn't find anything wrong so she came home - and then she got ill again, and I began to be frightened. My father began looking at me in a queer sort of way, and then the doctor came and they talked together, shut up in father's study. I went round outside, and crept up to the window and I tried to listen. I wanted to hear what they were saying. They were planning together - to send me away to a place where I'd be shut up! A place where I'd have a 'course of treatment' - or something. They thought, you see, that I was crazy, and I was frightened... Because - because I wasn't sure what I'd done or what I hadn't done.”
    “Is that when you ran away?”
    “No - that was later -”
    “Tell me.”
    “I don't want to talk about it any more.”
    “You'll have to let them know sooner or later where you are -”
    “I won't! I hate them. I hate my father as much as I hate Mary. I wish they were dead. I wish they were both dead. Then - then I think I'd be happy again.”
    “Don't get all het up! Look here, Norma -” He paused in an embarrassed manner - “I'm not very set on marriage and all that rubbish... I mean I didn't think