He frowned over the entry in the notebook he carried.
“I’ve copied the next clue but it doesn’t seem to make sense.” He eyed them suspiciously. “You competing?”
“Oh, no,” said Mrs. Oliver. “We’re just—looking on.”
“Righty-ho…‘When lovely woman stoops to folly.’…I’ve an idea I’ve heard that somewhere.”
“It is a well-known quotation,” said Poirot.
“A Folly can also be a building,” said Mrs. Oliver helpfully. “White—with pillars,” she added.
“That’s an idea! Thanks a lot. They say Mrs. Ariadne Oliver is down here herself somewhere about. I’d like to get her autograph. You haven’t seen her about, have you?”
“No,” said Mrs. Oliver firmly.
“I’d like to meet her. Good yarns she writes.” He lowered his voice. “But they say she drinks like a fish.”
He hurried off and Mrs. Oliver said indignantly:
“Really! That’s most unfair when I only like lemonade!”
“And have you not just perpetrated the greatest unfairness in helping that young man towards the next clue?”
“Considering he’s the only one who’s got here so far, I thought he ought to be encouraged.”
“But you wouldn’t give him your autograph.”
“That’s different,” said Mrs. Oliver. “Sh! Here come some more.”
But these were not clue hunters. They were two women who having paid for admittance were determined to get their money’s worth by seeing the grounds thoroughly.
They were hot and dissatisfied.
“You’d think they’d have some nice flower beds,” said one to the other. “Nothing but trees and more trees. It’s not what I call a garden.”
Mrs. Oliver nudged Poirot, and they slipped quietly away.
“Supposing,” said Mrs. Oliver distractedly, “that nobody ever finds my body?”
“Patience, Madame, and courage,” said Poirot. “The afternoon is still young.”
“That’s true,” said Mrs. Oliver, brightening. “And it’s half-price admission after four-thirty, so probably lots of people will flock in. Let’s go and see how that Marlene child is getting on. I don’t really trust that girl, you know. No sense of responsibility. I wouldn’t put it past her to sneak away quietly, instead of being a corpse, and go and have tea. You know what people are like about their teas.”
They proceeded amicably along the woodland path and Poirot commented on the geography of the property.
“I find it very confusing,” he said. “So many paths, and one is never sure where they lead. And trees, trees everywhere.”
“You sound like that disgruntled woman we’ve just left.”
They passed the Folly and zigzagged down the path to the river. The outlines of the boathouse showed beneath them.
Poirot remarked that it would be awkward if the murder searchers were to light upon the boathouse and find the body by accident.
“A sort of short cut? I thought of that. That’s why the last clue is just a key. You can’t unlock the door without it. It’s a Yale. You can only open it from the inside.”
A short steep slope led down to the door of the boathouse which was built out over the river, with a little wharf and a storage place for boats underneath. Mrs. Oliver took a key from a pocket concealed amongst her purple folds and unlocked the door.
“We’ve just come to cheer you up, Marlene,” she said brightly as she entered.
She felt slightly remorseful at her unjust suspicions of Marlene’s loyalty, for Marlene, artistically arranged as “the body,” was playing her part nobly, sprawled on the floor by the window.
Marlene made no response. She lay quite motionless. The wind blowing gently through the open window rustled a pile of “comics” spread out on the table.
“It’s all right,” said Mrs. Oliver impatiently. “It’s only me and M. Poirot. Nobody’s got any distance with the clues yet.”
Poirot was frowning. Very gently he pushed Mrs. Oliver aside and went and bent over the girl on the floor. A suppressed exclamation came from his lips. He looked up at Mrs. Oliver.
“So…” he said. “That which you expected has happened.”
“You don’t mean…” Mrs. Oliver’s eyes widened in horror. She grasped for one of the basket chairs and sat down. “You can’t mean…She isn’t dead?”
Poirot nodded.
“Oh, yes,” he said. “She is dead. Though not very long dead.”
“But how—?”
He lifted the corner of the gay scarf bound round the girl’s head, so that Mrs. Oliver could see the ends of the clothesline.
“Just like my murder,” said Mrs. Oliver unsteadily. “But who? And why?”
“That is the question,” said Poirot.
He forebore to add that those had also been her questions.
And that the answers to them could not be her answers, since the victim was not the Yugoslavian first wife of an Atom Scientist, but Marlene Tucker, a fourteen-year-old village girl who, as far as was known, had not an enemy in the world.
Seven
Detective-Inspector Bland sat behind a table in the study. Sir George had met him on arrival, had taken him down to the boathouse and had now returned with him to the house. Down at the boathouse a photographic unit was now busy and the fingerprint men and the medical officer had just arrived.
“This do for you here all right?” asked Sir George.
“Very nicely, thank you, sir.”
“What am I to do about this show that’s going on, tell ’em about it, stop it, or what?”
Inspector Bland considered for a moment or two.
“What have you done so far, Sir George?” he asked.
“Haven’t said anything. There’s a sort of idea floating round that there’s been an accident. Nothing more than that. I don’t think anyone’s suspected yet that it’s—er—well, murder.”
“Then leave things as they are just for the moment,” decided Bland. “The news will get round fast enough, I daresay,” he added cynically. He thought again for a moment or two before asking, “How many people do you think there are at this affair?”
“Couple of hundred I should say,” answered Sir George, “and more pouring in every moment. People seem to have come from a good long way round. In fact the whole thing’s being a roaring success. Damned unfortunate.”
Inspector Bland inferred correctly that it was the murder and not the success of the fête to which Sir George was referring.
“A couple of hundred,” he mused, “and any one of them, I suppose, could have done it.”
He sighed.
“Tricky,” said Sir George sympathetically. “But I don’t see what reason any one of them could have had. The whole thing seems quite fantastic—don’t see who would want to go murdering a girl like that.”
“How much can you tell me about the girl? She was a local girl, I understand?”
“Yes. Her people live in one of the cottages down near the quay. Her father works at one of the local farms—Paterson’s, I think.” He added, “The mother is here at the fête this afternoon. Miss Brewis—that’s my secretary, and she can tell you about everything much better than I can—Miss Brewis winkled the woman out and has got her somewhere, giving her cups of tea.”
“Quite so,” said the inspector, approvingly. “I’m not quite clear yet, Sir George, as to the circumstances of all this. What was the girl doing down there in the boathouse? I understand there’s some kind of a murder hunt—or treasure hunt, going on.”
Sir George nodded.
“Yes. We all thought it rather a bright idea. Doesn’t seem quite so bright now. I think Miss Brewis can probably explain it all to you better than I can. I’ll send her to you, shall I? Unless there’s anything else you want to know about first.”
“Not at the moment, Sir George. I may have more questions to ask you later. There are people I shall want to see. You, and Lady Stubbs, and the people who dis
covered the body. One of them, I gather, is the woman novelist who designed this murder hunt as you call it.”
“That’s right. Mrs. Oliver. Mrs. Ariadne Oliver.”
The inspector’s eyebrows went up slightly.
“Oh—her!” he said. “Quite a best-seller. I’ve read a lot of her books myself.”
“She’s a bit upset at present,” said Sir George, “naturally, I suppose. I’ll tell her you’ll be wanting her, shall I? I don’t know where my wife is. She seems to have disappeared completely from view. Somewhere among the two or three hundred, I suppose—not that she’ll be able to tell you much. I mean about the girl or anything like that. Who would you like to see first?”
“I think perhaps your secretary, Miss Brewis, and after that the girl’s mother.”
Sir George nodded and left the room.
The local police constable, Robert Hoskins, opened the door for him and shut it after he went out. He then volunteered a statement, obviously intended as a commentary on some of Sir George’s remarks.
“Lady Stubbs is a bit wanting,” he said, “up here.” He tapped his forehead. “That’s why he said she wouldn’t be much help. Scatty, that’s what she is.”
“Did he marry a local girl?”
“No. Foreigner of some sort. Coloured, some say, but I don’t think that’s so myself.”
Bland nodded. He was silent for a moment, doodling with a pencil on a sheet of paper in front of him. Then he asked a question which was clearly off the record.
“Who did it, Hoskins?” he said.
If anyone did have any ideas as to what had been going on, Bland thought, it would be P.C. Hoskins. Hoskins was a man of inquisitive mind with a great interest in everybody and everything. He had a gossiping wife and that, taken with his position as local constable, provided him with vast stores of information of a personal nature.
“Foreigner, if you ask me. ’Twouldn’t be anyone local. The Tuckers is all right. Nice, respectable family. Nine of ’em all told. Two of the older girls is married, one boy in the Navy, the other one’s doing his National Service, another girl’s over to a hairdresser’s at Torquay. There’s three younger ones at home, two boys and a girl.” He paused, considering. “None of ’em’s what you’d call bright, but Mrs. Tucker keeps her home nice, clean as a pin—youngest of eleven, she was. She’s got her old father living with her.”
Bland received this information in silence. Given in Hoskins’ particular idiom, it was an outline of the Tuckers’ social position and standing.
“That’s why I say it was a foreigner,” continued Hoskins. “One of those that stop up to the Hostel at Hoodown, likely as not. There’s some queer ones among them—and a lot of goings-on. Be surprised, you would, at what I’ve seen ’em doing in the bushes and the woods! Every bit as bad as what goes on in parked cars along the Common.”
P.C. Hoskins was by this time an absolute specialist on the subject of sexual “goings-on.” They formed a large portion of his conversation when off duty and having his pint in the Bull and Bear. Bland said:
“I don’t think there was anything—well, of that kind. The doctor will tell us, of course, as soon as he’s finished his examination.”
“Yes, sir, that’ll be up to him, that will. But what I say is, you never know with foreigners. Turn nasty, they can, all in a moment.”
Inspector Bland sighed as he thought to himself that it was not quite as easy as that. It was all very well for Constable Hoskins to put the blame conveniently on “foreigners.” The door opened and the doctor walked in.
“Done my bit,” he remarked. “Shall they take her away now? The other outfits have packed up.”
“Sergeant Cottrill will attend to that,” said Bland. “Well, Doc, what’s the finding?”
“Simple and straightforward as it can be,” said the doctor. “No complications. Garrotted with a piece of clothesline. Nothing could be simpler or easier to do. No struggle of any kind beforehand. I’d say the kid didn’t know what was happening to her until it had happened.”
“Any signs of assault?”
“None. No assault, signs of rape, or interference of any kind.”
“Not presumably a sexual crime, then?”
“I wouldn’t say so, no.” The doctor added, “I shouldn’t say she’d been a particularly attractive girl.”
“Was she fond of the boys?”
Bland addressed this question to Constable Hoskins.
“I wouldn’t say they’d much use for her,” said Constable Hoskins, “though maybe she’d have liked it if they had.”
“Maybe,” agreed Bland. His mind went back to the pile of comic papers in the boathouse and the idle scrawls on the margin. “Johnny goes with Kate,” “Georgie Porgie kisses hikers in the wood.” He thought there had been a little wishful thinking there. On the whole, though, it seemed unlikely that there was a sex angle to Marlene Tucker’s death. Although, of course, one never knew…There were always those queer criminal individuals, men with a secret lust to kill, who specialized in immature female victims. One of these might be present in this part of the world during this holiday season. He almost believed that it must be so—for otherwise he could really see no reason for so pointless a crime. However, he thought, we’re only at the beginning. I’d better see what all these people have to tell me.
“What about time of death?” he asked.
The doctor glanced over at the clock and his own watch.
“Just after half past five now,” he said. “Say I saw her about twenty past five—she’d been dead about an hour. Roughly, that is to say. Put it between four o’clock and twenty to five. Let you know if there’s anything more after the autopsy.” He added: “You’ll get the proper report with the long words in due course. I’ll be off now. I’ve got some patients to see.”
He left the room and Inspector Bland asked Hoskins to fetch Miss Brewis. His spirits rose a little when Miss Brewis came into the room. Here, as he recognized at once, was efficiency. He would get clear answers to his questions, definite times and no muddleheadedness.
“Mrs. Tucker’s in my sitting room,” Miss Brewis said as she sat down. “I’ve broken the news to her and given her some tea. She’s very upset, naturally. She wanted to see the body but I told her it was much better not. Mr. Tucker gets off work at six o’clock and was coming to join his wife here. I told them to look out for him and bring him along when he arrives. The younger children are at the fête still, and someone is keeping an eye on them.”
“Excellent,” said Inspector Bland, with approval. “I think before I see Mrs. Tucker I would like to hear what you and Lady Stubbs can tell me.”
“I don’t know where Lady Stubbs is,” said Miss Brewis acidly. “I rather imagine she got bored with the fête and has wandered off somewhere, but I don’t expect she can tell you anything more than I can. What exactly is it that you want to know?”
“I want to know all the details of this murder hunt first and of how this girl, Marlene Tucker, came to be taking a part in it.”
“That’s quite easy.”
Succinctly and clearly Miss Brewis explained the idea of the murder hunt as an original attraction for the fête, the engaging of Mrs. Oliver, the well-known novelist, to arrange the matter, and a short outline of the plot.
“Originally,” Miss Brewis explained, “Mrs. Alec Legge was to have taken the part of the victim.”
“Mrs. Alec Legge?” queried the inspector.
Constable Hoskins put in an explanatory word.
“She and Mr. Legge have the Lawders’ cottage, the pink one down by Mill Creek. Came here a month ago, they did. Two or three months they got it for.”
“I see. And Mrs. Legge, you say, was to be the original victim? Why was that changed?”
“Well, one evening Mrs. Legge told all our fortunes and was so good at it that it was decided we’d have a fortune teller’s tent as one of the attractions and that Mrs. Legge should put on Eastern dress and be Madame Zuleika and te
ll fortunes at half a crown a time. I don’t think that’s really illegal, is it, Inspector? I mean it’s usually done at these kind of fêtes?”
Inspector Bland smiled faintly.
“Fortune telling and raffles aren’t always taken too seriously, Miss Brewis,” he said. “Now and then we have to—er—make an example.”
“But usually you’re tactful? Well, that’s how it was. Mrs. Legge agreed to help us that way and so we had to find somebody else to do the body. The local Guides were helping us at the fête, and I think someone suggested that one of the Guides would do quite well.”
“Just who was it who suggested that, Miss Brewis?”
“Really, I don’t quite know…I think it may have been Mrs. Masterton, the Member’s wife. No, perhaps it was Captain Warburton…Really, I can’t be sure. But, anyway, it was suggested.”
“Is there any reason why this particular girl should have been chosen?”
“N-no, I don’t think so. Her people are tenants on the estate, and her mother, Mrs. Tucker, sometimes comes to help in the kitchen. I don’t know quite why we settled on her. Probably her name came to mind first. We asked her and she seemed quite pleased to do it.”
“She definitely wanted to do it?”
“Oh, yes, I think she was flattered. She was a very moronic kind of girl,” continued Miss Brewis, “she couldn’t have acted a part or anything like that. But this was all very simple, and she felt she’d been singled out from the others and was pleased about it.”
“What exactly was it that she had to do?”
“She had to stay in the boathouse. When she heard anyone coming to the door she was to lie down on the floor, put the cord round her neck and sham dead.” Miss Brewis’ tones were calm and businesslike. The fact that the girl who was to sham dead had actually been found dead did not at the moment appear to affect her emotionally.