Hallowe'en Party

  “Exquisite!”

  “I think so too,” said Michael Garfield.

  He let it be left doubtful whether he referred to the drawing he was making, or to the sitter.

  “Why?” asked Poirot.

  “Why am I doing it? Do you think I have a reason?”

  “You might have.”

  “You’re quite right. If I go away from here, there are one or two things I want to remember. Miranda is one of them.”

  “Would you forget her easily?”

  “Very easily. I am like that. But to have forgotten something or someone, to be unable to bring a face, a turn of a shoulder, a gesture, a tree, a flower, a contour of landscape, to know what it was like to see it but not to be able to bring that image in front of one’s eyes, that sometimes causes—what shall I say—almost agony. You see, you record—and it all passes away.”

  “Not the Quarry Garden or park. That has not passed away.”

  “Don’t you think so? It soon will. It soon will if no one is here. Nature takes over, you know. It needs love and attention and care and skill. If a Council takes it over—and that’s what happens very often nowadays—then it will be what they call ‘kept up.’ The latest sort of shrubs may be put in, extra paths will be made, seats will be put at certain distances. Litter bins even may be erected. Oh, they are so careful, so kind at preserving. You can’t preserve this. It’s wild. To keep something wild is far more difficult than to preserve it.”

  “Monsieur Poirot.” Miranda’s voice came across the stream.

  Poirot moved forward, so that he came within earshot of her.

  “So I find you here. So you came to sit for your portrait, did you?”

  She shook her head.

  “I didn’t come for that. That just happened.”

  “Yes,” said Michael Garfield, “yes, it just happened. A piece of luck sometimes comes one’s way.”

  “You were just walking in your favourite garden?”

  “I was looking for the well, really,” said Miranda.

  “A well?”

  “There was a wishing well once in this wood.”

  “In a former quarry? I didn’t know they kept wells in quarries.”

  “There was always a wood round the quarry. Well, there were always trees here. Michael knows where the well is but he won’t tell me.”

  “It will be much more fun for you,” said Michael Garfield, “to go on looking for it. Especially when you’re not at all sure it really exists.”

  “Old Mrs. Goodbody knows all about it.”

  And added:

  “She’s a witch.”

  “Quite right,” said Michael. “She’s the local witch, Monsieur Poirot. There’s always a local witch, you know, in most places. They don’t always call themselves witches, but everyone knows. They tell a fortune or put a spell on your begonias or shrivel up your peonies or stop a farmer’s cow from giving milk and probably give love potions as well.”

  “It was a wishing well,” said Miranda. “People used to come here and wish. They had to go round it three times backwards and it was on the side of the hill, so it wasn’t always very easy to do.”

  She looked past Poirot at Michael Garfield. “I shall find it one day,” she said, “even if you won’t tell me. It’s here somewhere, but it was sealed up, Mrs. Goodbody said. Oh! years ago. Sealed up because it was said to be dangerous. A child fell into it years ago—Kitty Somebody. Someone else might have fallen into it.”

  “Well, go on thinking so,” said Michael Garfield. “It’s a good local story, but there is a wishing well over at Little Belling.”

  “Of course,” said Miranda. “I know all about that one. It’s a very common one,” she said. “Everybody knows about it, and it’s very silly. People throw pennies into it and there’s not any water in it any more so there’s not even a splash.”

  “Well, I’m sorry.”

  “I’ll tell you when I find it,” said Miranda.

  “You mustn’t always believe everything a witch says. I don’t believe any child ever fell into it. I expect a cat fell into it once and got drowned.”

  “Ding dong dell, pussy’s in the well,” said Miranda. She got up. “I must go now,” she said. “Mummy will be expecting me.”

  She moved carefully from the knob of rock, smiled at both the men and went off down an even more intransigent path that ran the other side of the water.

  “‘Ding dong dell,’” said Poirot, thoughtfully. “One believes what one wants to believe, Michael Garfield. Was she right or was she not right?”

  Michael Garfield looked at him thoughtfully, then he smiled.

  “She is quite right,” he said. “There is a well, and it is as she says sealed up. I suppose it may have been dangerous. I don’t think it was ever a wishing well. I think that’s Mrs. Goodbody’s own bit of fancy talk. There’s a wishing tree, or there was once. A beech tree halfway up the hillside that I believe people did go round three times backwards and wished.”

  “What’s happened to that? Don’t they go round it any more?”

  “No. I believe it was struck by lightning about six years ago. Split in two. So that pretty story’s gone west.”

  “Have you told Miranda about that?”

  “No. I thought I’d rather leave her with her well. A blasted beech wouldn’t be much fun for her, would it?”

  “I must go on my way,” said Poirot.

  “Going back to your police friend?”

  “Yes.”

  “You look tired.”

  “I am tired,” said Hercule Poirot. “I am extremely tired.”

  “You’d be more comfortable in canvas shoes or sandals.”

  “Ah, ça, non.”

  “I see. You are sartorially ambitious.” He looked at Poirot. “The tout ensemble, it is very good and especially, if I may mention it, your superb moustache.”

  “I am gratified,” said Poirot, “that you have noticed it.”

  “The point is rather, could anyone not notice it?”

  Poirot put his head on one side. Then he said:

  “You spoke of the drawing you are doing because you wish to remember the young Miranda. Does that mean you’re going away from here?”

  “I have thought of it, yes.”

  “Yet you are, it seems to me, bien placé ici.”

  “Oh yes, eminently so. I have a house to live in, a house small but designed by myself, and I have my work, but that is less satisfactory than it used to be. So restlessness is coming over me.”

  “Why is your work less satisfactory?”

  “Because people wish me to do the most atrocious things. People who want to improve their gardens, people who bought some land and they’re building a house and want the garden designed.”

  “Are you not doing her garden for Mrs. Drake?”

  “She wants me to, yes. I made suggestions for it and she seemed to agree with them. I don’t think, though,” he added thoughtfully, “that I really trust her.”

  “You mean that she would not let you have what you wanted?”

  “I mean that she would certainly have what she wanted herself and that though she is attracted by the ideas I have set out, she would suddenly demand something quite different. Something utilitarian, expensive and showy, perhaps. She would bully me, I think. She would insist on her ideas being carried out. I would not agree, and we should quarrel. So on the whole it is better I leave here before I quarrel. And not only with Mrs. Drake but many other neighbours. I am quite well-known. I don’t need to stay in one spot. I could go and find some other corner of England, or it could be some corner of Normandy or Brittany.”

  “Somewhere where you can improve, or help, nature? Somewhere where you can experiment or you can put strange things where they have never grown before, where neither sun will blister nor frost destroy? Some good stretch of barren land where you can have the fun of playing at being Adam all over again? Have you always been restless?”

  “I never stayed an
ywhere very long.”

  “You have been to Greece?”

  “Yes. I should like to go to Greece again. Yes, you have something there. A garden on a Greek hillside. There may be cypresses there, not much else. A barren rock. But if you wished, what could there not be?”

  “A garden for gods to walk—”

  “Yes. You’re quite a mind reader, aren’t you, Mr. Poirot?”

  “I wish I were. There are so many things I would like to know and do not know.”

  “You are talking now of something quite prosaic, are you not?”

  “Unfortunately so.”

  “Arson, murder and sudden death?”

  “More or less. I do not know that I was considering arson. Tell me, Mr. Garfield, you have been here some considerable time, did you know a young man called Lesley Ferrier?”

  “Yes, I remember him. He was in a Medchester solicitor’s office, wasn’t he? Fullerton, Harrison and Leadbetter. Junior clerk, something of that kind. Good-looking chap.”

  “He came to a sudden end, did he not?”

  “Yes. Got himself knifed one evening. Woman trouble, I gather. Everyone seems to think that the police know quite well who did it, but they can’t get the evidence they want. He was more or less tied up with a woman called Sandra—can’t remember her name for the moment—Sandra Somebody, yes. Her husband kept the local pub. She and young Lesley were running an affair, and then Lesley took up with another girl. Or that was the story.”

  “And Sandra did not like it?”

  “No, she did not like it at all. Mind you, he was a great one for the girls. There were two or three that he went around with.”

  “Were they all English girls?”

  “Why do you ask that, I wonder? No, I don’t think he confined himself to English girls, so long as they could speak enough English to understand more or less what he said to them, and he could understand what they said to him.”

  “There are doubtless from time to time foreign girls in this neighbourhood?”

  “Of course there are. Is there any neighbourhood where there aren’t? Au pair girls—they’re a part of daily life. Ugly ones, pretty ones, honest ones, dishonest ones, ones that do some good to distracted mothers and some who are no use at all and some who walk out of the house.”

  “Like the girl Olga did?”

  “As you say, like the girl Olga did.”

  “Was Lesley a friend of Olga’s?”

  “Oh, that’s the way your mind is running. Yes, he was. I don’t think Mrs. Llewellyn-Smythe knew much about it. Olga was rather careful, I think. She spoke gravely of someone she hoped to marry some day in her own country. I don’t know whether that was true or whether she made it up. Young Lesley was an attractive young man, as I said. I don’t know what he saw in Olga—she wasn’t very beautiful. Still—” he considered a minute or two “—she had a kind of intensity about her. A young Englishman might have found that attractive, I think. Anyway, Lesley did all right, and his other girl friends weren’t pleased.”

  “That is very interesting,” said Poirot. “I thought you might give me information that I wanted.”

  Michael Garfield looked at him curiously.

  “Why? What’s it all about? Where does Lesley come in? Why this raking up of the past?”

  “Well, there are things one wants to know. One wants to know how things come into being. I am even looking farther back still. Before the time that those two, Olga Seminoff and Lesley Ferrier, met secretly without Mrs. Llewellyn-Smythe knowing about it.”

  “Well, I’m not sure about that. That’s only my—well, it’s only my idea. I did come across them fairly frequently but Olga never confided in me. As for Lesley Ferrier, I hardly knew him.”

  “I want to go back behind that. He had, I gather, certain disadvantages in his past.”

  “I believe so. Yes, well, anyway it’s been said here locally. Mr. Fullerton took him on and hoped to make an honest man of him. He’s a good chap, old Fullerton.”

  “His offence had been, I believe, forgery?”

  “Yes.”

  “It was a first offence, and there were said to be extenuating circumstances. He had a sick mother or drunken father or something of that kind. Anyway, he got off lightly.”

  “I never heard any of the details. It was something that he seemed to have got away with to begin with, then accountants came along and found him out. I’m very vague. It’s only hearsay. Forgery. Yes, that was the charge. Forgery.”

  “And when Mrs. Llewellyn-Smythe died and her Will was to be admitted to probate, it was found the Will was forged.”

  “Yes, I see the way your mind’s working. You’re fitting those two things as having a connection with each other.”

  “A man who was up to a point successful in forging. A man who became friends with the girl, a girl who, if a Will had been accepted when submitted to probate, would have inherited the larger part of a vast fortune.”

  “Yes, yes, that’s the way it goes.”

  “And this girl and the man who had committed forgery were great friends. He had given up his own girl and he’d tied up with the foreign girl instead.”

  “What you’re suggesting is that that forged Will was forged by Lesley Ferrier.”

  “There seems a likelihood of it, does there not?”

  “Olga was supposed to have been able to copy Mrs. Llewellyn-Smythe’s handwriting fairly well, but it seemed to me always that that was rather a doubtful point. She wrote handwritten letters for Mrs. Llewellyn-Smythe but I don’t suppose that they were really particularly similar. Not enough to pass muster. But if she and Lesley were in it together, that’s different. I daresay he could pass off a good enough job and he was probably quite cocksure that it would go through. But then he must have been sure of that when he committed his original offence, and he was wrong there, and I suppose he was wrong this time. I suppose that when the balloon went up, when the lawyers began making trouble and difficulties, and experts were called in to examine things and started asking questions, it could be that she lost her nerve, and had a row with Lesley. And then she cleared out, hoping he’d carry the can.”

  He gave his head a sharp shake. “Why do you come and talk to me about things like that here, in my beautiful wood?”

  “I wanted to know.”

  “It’s better not to know. It’s better never to know. Better to leave things as they are. Not push and pry and poke.”

  “You want beauty,” said Hercule Poirot. “Beauty at any price. For me, it is truth I want. Always truth.”

  Michael Garfield laughed. “Go on home to your police friends and leave me here in my local paradise. Get thee beyond me, Satan.”

  Twenty-one

  Poirot went on up the hill. Suddenly he no longer felt the pain of his feet. Something had come to him. The fitting together of the things he had thought and felt, had known they were connected, but had not seen how they were connected. He was conscious now of danger—danger that might come to someone any minute now unless steps were taken to prevent it. Serious danger.

  Elspeth McKay came out to the door to meet him. “You look fagged out,” she said. “Come and sit down.”

  “Your brother is here?”

  “No. He’s gone down to the station. Something’s happened, I believe.”

  “Something has happened?” He was startled. “So soon? Not possible.”

  “Eh?” said Elspeth. “What do you mean?”

  “Nothing. Nothing. Something has happened to somebody, do you mean?”

  “Yes, but I don’t know who exactly. Anyway, Tim Raglan rang up and asked for him to go down there. I’ll get you a cup of tea, shall I?”

  “No,” said Poirot, “thank you very much, but I think—I think I will go home.” He could not face the prospect of black bitter tea. He thought of a good excuse that would mask any signs of bad manners. “My feet,” he explained. “My feet. I am not very suitably attired as to footwear for the country. A change of shoes would be desi
rable.”

  Elspeth McKay looked down at them. “No,” she said. “I can see they’re not. Patent leather draws the feet. There’s a letter for you, by the way. Foreign stamps on it. Come from abroad—c/o Superintendent Spence, Pine Crest. I’ll bring it to you.”

  She came back in a minute or two, and handed it to him.

  “If you don’t want the envelope, I’d like it for one of my nephews—he collects stamps.”

  “Of course.” Poirot opened the letter and handed her the envelope. She thanked him and went back into the house.

  Poirot unfolded the sheet and read.

  Mr. Goby’s foreign service was run with the same competence that he showed in his English one. He spared no expense and got his results quickly.

  True, the results did not amount to much—Poirot had not thought that they would.

  Olga Seminoff had not returned to her hometown. She had had no family still living. She had had a friend, an elderly woman, with whom she had corresponded intermittently, giving news of her life in England. She had been on good terms with her employer who had been occasionally exacting, but had also been generous.

  The last letters received from Olga had been dated about a year and a half ago. In them there had been mention of a young man. There were hints that they were considering marriage, but the young man, whose name she did not mention, had, she said, his way to make, so nothing could be settled as yet. In her last letter she spoke happily of their prospects being good. When no more letters came, the elderly friend assumed that Olga had married her Englishman and changed her address. Such things happened frequently when girls went to England. If they were happily married they often never wrote again.

  She had not worried.

  It fitted, Poirot thought. Lesley had spoken of marriage, but might not have meant it. Mrs. Llewellyn-Smythe had been spoken of as “generous.” Lesley had been given money by someone, Olga perhaps (money originally given her by her employers), to induce him to do forgery on her behalf.

  Elspeth McKay came out on the terrace again. Poirot consulted her as to his surmises about a partnership between Olga and Lesley.