Hallowe'en Party

  “Up to a point,” said Michael. “I saw to that. She was easy to satisfy.”

  “That seems most unlikely,” said Hercule Poirot. “She was, I have learned, over sixty. Sixty-five at least. Are people of that age often satisfied?”

  “She was assured by me that what I had carried out was the exact carrying out of her instructions and imagination and ideas.”

  “And was it?”

  “Do you ask me that seriously?”

  “No,” said Poirot. “No. Frankly I do not.”

  “For success in life,” said Michael Garfield, “one has to pursue the career one wants, one has to satisfy such artistic leanings as one has got, but one has as well to be a tradesman. You have to sell your wares. Otherwise you are tied to carrying out other people’s ideas in a way which will not accord with one’s own. I carried out mainly my own ideas and I sold them, marketed them perhaps is a better word, to the client who employed me, as a direct carrying out of her plans and schemes. It is not a very difficult art to learn. There is no more to it than selling a child brown eggs rather than white ones. The customer has to be assured they are the best ones, the right ones. The essence of the countryside. Shall we say, the hen’s own preference? Brown, farm, country eggs. One does not sell them if one says ‘they are just eggs. There is only one difference in eggs. They are new laid or they are not.’”

  “You are an unusual young man,” said Poirot. “Arrogant,” he said thoughtfully.”

  “Perhaps.”

  “You have made here something very beautiful. You have added vision and planning to the rough material of stone hollowed out in the pursuit of industry, with no thought of beauty in that hacking out. You have added imagination, a result seen in the mind’s eye, that you have managed to raise the money to fulfil. I congratulate you. I pay my tribute. The tribute of an old man who is approaching a time when the end of his own work is come.”

  “But at the moment you are still carrying it on?”

  “You know who I am, then?”

  Poirot was pleased indubitably. He liked people to know who he was. Nowadays, he feared, most people did not.

  “You follow the trail of blood…It is already known here. It is a small community, news travels. Another public success brought you here.”

  “Ah, you mean Mrs. Oliver.”

  “Ariadne Oliver. A best seller. People wish to interview her, to know what she thinks about such subjects as student unrest, socialism, girls’ clothing, should sex be permissive, and many other things that are no concern of hers.”

  “Yes, yes,” said Poirot, “deplorable, I think. They do not learn very much, I have noticed, from Mrs. Oliver. They learn only that she is fond of apples. That has now been known for twenty years at least, I should think, but she still repeats it with a pleasant smile. Although now, I fear, she no longer likes apples.”

  “It was apples that brought you here, was it not?”

  “Apples at a Hallowe’en party,” said Poirot. “You were at that party?”

  “No.”

  “You were fortunate.”

  “Fortunate?” Michael Garfield repeated the word, something that sounded faintly like surprise in his voice.

  “To have been one of the guests at a party where murder is committed is not a pleasant experience. Perhaps you have not experienced it, but I tell you, you are fortunate because—” Poirot became a little more foreign “—il y a des ennuis, vous comprenez? People ask you times, dates, impertinent questions.” He went on, “You knew the child?”

  “Oh yes. The Reynolds are well known here. I know most of the people living round here. We all know each other in Woodleigh Common, though in varying degrees. There is some intimacy, some friendships, some people remain the merest acquaintances, and so on.”

  “What was she like, the child Joyce?”

  “She was—how can I put it?—not important. She had rather an ugly voice. Shrill. Really, that’s about all I remember about her. I’m not particularly fond of children. Mostly they bore me. Joyce bored me. When she talked, she talked about herself.”

  “She was not interesting?”

  Michael Garfield looked slightly surprised.

  “I shouldn’t think so,” he said. “Does she have to be?”

  “It is my view that people devoid of interest are unlikely to be murdered. People are murdered for gain, for fear or for love. One takes one’s choice, but one has to have a starting point—”

  He broke off and glanced at his watch.

  “I must proceed. I have an engagement to fulfil. Once more, my felicitations.”

  He went on down, following the path and picking his way carefully. He was glad that for once he was not wearing his tight patent leather shoes.

  Michael Garfield was not the only person he was to meet in the sunk garden that day. As he reached the bottom he noted that three paths led from here in slightly different directions. At the entrance of the middle path, sitting on a fallen trunk of a tree, a child was awaiting him. She made this clear at once.

  “I expect you are Mr. Hercule Poirot, aren’t you?” she said.

  Her voice was clear, almost bell-like in tone. She was a fragile creature. Something about her matched the sunk garden. A dryad or some elf-like being.

  “That is my name,” said Poirot.

  “I came to meet you,” said the child. “You are coming to tea with us, aren’t you?”

  “With Mrs. Butler and Mrs. Oliver? Yes.”

  “That’s right. That’s Mummy and Aunt Ariadne.” She added with a note of censure: “You’re rather late.”

  “I am sorry. I stopped to speak to someone.”

  “Yes, I saw you. You were talking to Michael, weren’t you?”

  “You know him?”

  “Of course. We’ve lived here quite a long time. I know everybody.”

  Poirot wondered how old she was. He asked her. She said,

  “I’m twelve years old. I’m going to boarding school next year.”

  “Will you be sorry or glad?”

  “I don’t really know till I get there. I don’t think I like this place very much, not as much as I did.” She added, “I think you’d better come with me now, please.”

  “But certainly. But certainly. I apologize for being late.”

  “Oh, it doesn’t really matter.”

  “What’s your name?”

  “Miranda.”

  “I think it suits you,” said Poirot.

  “Are you thinking of Shakespeare?”

  “Yes. Do you have it in lessons?”

  “Yes. Miss Emlyn read us some of it. I asked Mummy to read some more. I liked it. It has a wonderful sound. A brave new world. There isn’t anything really like that, is there?”

  “You don’t believe in it?”

  “Do you?”

  “There is always a brave new world,” said Poirot, “but only, you know, for very special people. The lucky ones. The ones who carry the making of that world within themselves.”

  “Oh, I see,” said Miranda, with an air of apparently seeing with the utmost ease, though what she saw Poirot rather wondered.

  She turned, started along the path and said,

  “We go this way. It’s not very far. You can go through the hedge of our garden.”

  Then she looked back over her shoulder and pointed, saying:

  “In the middle there, that’s where the fountain was.”

  “A fountain?”

  “Oh, years ago. I suppose it’s still there, underneath the shrubs and the azaleas and the other things. It was all broken up, you see. People took bits of it away but nobody has put a new one there.”

  “It seems a pity.”

  “I don’t know. I’m not sure. Do you like fountains very much?”

  “Ca dépend,” said Poirot.

  “I know some French,” said Miranda. “That’s it depends, isn’t it?”

  “You are quite right. You seem very well-educated.”

  “Everyone says
Miss Emlyn is a very fine teacher. She’s our headmistress. She’s awfully strict and a bit stern, but she’s terribly interesting sometimes in the things she tells us.”

  “Then she is certainly a good teacher,” said Hercule Poirot. “You know this place very well—you seem to know all the paths. Do you come here often?”

  “Oh yes, it’s one of my favourite walks. Nobody knows where I am, you see, when I come here. I sit in trees—on the branches, and watch things. I like that. Watching things happen.”

  “What sort of things?”

  “Mostly birds and squirrels. Birds are very quarrelsome, aren’t they? Not like in the bit of poetry that says ‘birds in their little nests agree.’ They don’t really, do they? And I watch squirrels.”

  “And you watch people?”

  “Sometimes. But there aren’t many people who come here.”

  “Why not, I wonder?”

  “I suppose they are afraid.”

  “Why should they be afraid?”

  “Because someone was killed here long ago. Before it was a garden, I mean. It was a quarry once and then there was a gravel pile or a sand pile and that’s where they found her. In that. Do you think the old saying is true—about you’re born to be hanged or born to be drowned?”

  “Nobody is born to be hanged nowadays. You do not hang people any longer in this country.”

  “But they hang them in some other countries. They hang them in the streets. I’ve read it in the papers.”

  “Ah. Do you think that is a good thing or a bad thing?”

  Miranda’s response was not strictly in answer to the question, but Poirot felt that it was perhaps meant to be.

  “Joyce was drowned,” she said. “Mummy didn’t want to tell me, but that was rather silly, I think, don’t you? I mean, I’m twelve years old.”

  “Was Joyce a friend of yours?”

  “Yes. She was a great friend in a way. She told me very interesting things sometimes. All about elephants and rajahs. She’d been to India once. I wish I’d been to India. Joyce and I used to tell each other all our secrets. I haven’t so much to tell as Mummy. Mummy’s been to Greece, you know. That’s where she met Aunt Ariadne, but she didn’t take me.”

  “Who told you about Joyce?”

  “Mrs. Perring. That’s our cook. She was talking to Mrs. Minden who comes and cleans. Someone held her head down in a bucket of water.”

  “Have you any idea who that someone was?”

  “I shouldn’t think so. They didn’t seem to know, but then they’re both rather stupid really.”

  “Do you know, Miranda?”

  “I wasn’t there. I had a sore throat and a temperature so Mummy wouldn’t take me to the party. But I think I could know. Because she was drowned. That’s why I asked if you thought people were born to be drowned. We go through the hedge here. Be careful of your clothes.”

  Poirot followed her lead. The entrance through the hedge from the Quarry Garden was more suited to the build of his childish guide with her elfin slimness—it was practically a highway to her. She was solicitous for Poirot, however, warning him of adjacent thorn bushes and holding back the more prickly components of the hedge. They emerged at a spot in the garden adjacent to a compost heap and turned a corner by a derelict cucumber frame to where two dustbins stood. From there on a small neat garden mostly planted with roses gave easy access to the small bungalow house. Miranda led the way through an open french window, announcing with the modest pride of a collector who has just secured a sample of a rare beetle:

  “I’ve got him all right.”

  “Miranda, you didn’t bring him through the hedge, did you? You ought to have gone round by the path at the side gate.”

  “This is a better way,” said Miranda. “Quicker and shorter.”

  “And much more painful, I suspect.”

  “I forget,” said Mrs. Oliver—“I did introduce you, didn’t I, to my friend Mrs. Butler?”

  “Of course. In the post office.”

  The introduction in question had been a matter of a few moments while there had been a queue in front of the counter. Poirot was better able now to study Mrs. Oliver’s friend at close quarters. Before it had been a matter of a slim woman in a disguising headscarf and a mackintosh. Judith Butler was a woman of about thirty-five, and whilst her daughter resembled a dryad or a wood nymph, Judith had more the attributes of a water-spirit. She could have been a Rhine maiden. Her long blonde hair hung limply on her shoulders, she was delicately made with a rather long face and faintly hollow cheeks, whilst above them were big sea-green eyes fringed with long eyelashes.

  “I’m very glad to thank you properly, Monsieur Poirot,” said Mrs. Butler. “It was very good of you to come down here when Ariadne asked you.”

  “When my friend, Mrs. Oliver, asks me to do anything I always have to do it,” said Poirot.

  “What nonsense,” said Mrs. Oliver.

  “She was sure, quite sure, that you would be able to find out all about this beastly thing. Miranda, dear, will you go into the kitchen? You’ll find the scones on the wire tray above the oven.”

  Miranda disappeared. She gave, as she went, a knowledgeable smile directed at her mother that said as plainly as a smile could say, “She’s getting me out of the way for a short time.”

  “I tried not to let her know,” said Miranda’s mother, “about this—this horrible thing that happened. But I suppose that was a forlorn chance from the start.”

  “Yes indeed,” said Poirot. “There’s nothing that goes round any residential centre with the same rapidity as news of a disaster, and particularly an unpleasant disaster. And anyway,” he added, “one cannot go long through life without knowing what goes on around one. And children seem particularly apt at that sort of thing.”

  “I don’t know if it was Burns or Sir Walter Scott who said ‘There’s a chiel among you taking notes,’” said Mrs. Oliver, “but he certainly knew what he was talking about.”

  “Joyce Reynolds certainly seems to have noticed such a thing as a murder,” said Mrs. Butler. “One can hardly believe it.”

  “Believe that Joyce noticed it?”

  “I meant believe that if she saw such a thing she never spoke about it earlier. That seems very unlike Joyce.”

  “The first thing that everybody seems to tell me here,” said Poirot, in a mild voice, “is that this girl, Joyce Reynolds, was a liar.”

  “I suppose it’s possible,” said Judith Butler, “that a child might make up a thing and then it might turn out to be true?”

  “That is certainly the focal point from which we start,” said Poirot. “Joyce Reynolds was unquestionably murdered.”

  “And you have started. Probably you know already all about it,” said Mrs. Oliver.

  “Madame, do not ask impossibilities of me. You are always in such a hurry.”

  “Why not?” said Mrs. Oliver. “Nobody would ever get anything done nowadays if they weren’t in a hurry.”

  Miranda returned at this moment with a plateful of scones.

  “Shall I put them down here?” she asked. “I expect you’ve finished talking by now, haven’t you? Or is there anything else you would like me to get from the kitchen?”

  There was a gentle malice in her voice. Mrs. Butler lowered the Georgian silver teapot to the fender, switched on an electric kettle which had been turned off just before it came to the boil, duly filled the teapot and served the tea. Miranda handed hot scones and cucumber sandwiches with a serious elegance of manner.

  “Ariadne and I met in Greece,” said Judith.

  “I fell into the sea,” said Mrs. Oliver, “when we were coming back from one of the islands. It had got rather rough and the sailors always say ‘jump’ and, of course, they always say jump just when the thing’s at its furthest point which makes it come right for you, but you don’t think that can possibly happen and so you dither and you lose your nerve and you jump when it looks close and, of course, that’s the moment when it goes fa
r away.” She paused for breath. “Judith helped fish me out and it made a kind of bond between us, didn’t it?”

  “Yes, indeed,” said Mrs. Butler. “Besides, I liked your Christian name,” she added. “It seemed very appropriate, somehow.”

  “Yes, I suppose it is a Greek name,” said Mrs. Oliver. “It’s my own, you know. I didn’t just make it up for literary purposes. But nothing Ariadne-like has ever happened to me. I’ve never been deserted on a Greek island by my own true love or anything like that.”

  Poirot raised a hand to his moustache in order to hide the slight smile that he could not help coming to his lips as he envisaged Mrs. Oliver in the rôle of a deserted Greek maiden.

  “We can’t all live up to our names,” said Mrs. Butler.

  “No, indeed. I can’t see you in the rôle of cutting off your lover’s head. That is the way it happened, isn’t it, Judith and Holofernes, I mean?”

  “It was her patriotic duty,” said Mrs. Butler, “for which, if I remember rightly, she was highly commended and rewarded.”

  “I’m not really very well up in Judith and Holofernes. It’s the Apocrypha, isn’t it? Still, if one comes to think of it, people do give other people—their children, I mean—some very queer names, don’t they? Who was the one who hammered some nails in someone’s head? Jael or Sisera. I never remember which is the man or which is the woman there. Jael, I think. I don’t think I remember any child having been christened Jael.”

  “She laid butter before him in a lordly dish,” said Miranda unexpectedly, pausing as she was about to remove the tea tray.

  “Don’t look at me,” said Judith Butler to her friend, “it wasn’t I who introduced Miranda to the Apocrypha. “That’s her school training.”

  “Rather unusual for schools nowadays, isn’t it?” said Mrs. Oliver. “They give them ethical ideas instead, don’t they?”

  “Not Miss Emlyn,” said Miranda. “She says that if we go to church nowadays we only get the modern version of the Bible read to us in the lessons and things, and that it has no literary merit whatsoever. We should at least know the fine prose and blank verse sometimes of the Authorized Version. I enjoyed the story of Jael and Sisera very much,” she added. “It’s not a thing,” she said meditatively, “that I should ever have thought of doing myself. Hammering nails, I mean, into someone’s head when they were asleep.”