Hallowe'en Party

  “When did you yourself see the girl Joyce last?”

  “I’ve no idea,” said Elizabeth Whittaker. “I don’t know her very well. She’s not in my class. She wasn’t a very interesting girl so I wouldn’t have been watching her. I do remember I saw her cutting the flour because she was so clumsy that she capsized it almost at once. So she was alive then—but that was quite early on.”

  “You did not see her go into the library with anyone?”

  “Certainly not. I should have mentioned it before if I had. That at least might have been significant and important.”

  “And now,” said Poirot, “for my second question or questions. How long have you been at the school here?”

  “Six years this next autumn.”

  “And you teach—?”

  “Mathematics and Latin.”

  “Do you remember a girl who was teaching here two years ago—Janet White by name?”

  Elizabeth Whittaker stiffened. She half rose from her chair, then sat down again.

  “But that—that has nothing to do with all this, surely?”

  “It could have,” said Poirot.

  “But how? In what way?”

  Scholastic circles were less well-informed than village gossip, Poirot thought.

  “Joyce claimed before witnesses to have seen a murder done some years ago. Could that possibly have been the murder of Janet White, do you think? How did Janet White die?”

  “She was strangled, walking home from school one night.”

  “Alone?”

  “Probably not alone.”

  “But not with Nora Ambrose?”

  “What do you know about Nora Ambrose?”

  “Nothing as yet,” said Poirot, “but I should like to. What were they like, Janet White and Nora Ambrose?”

  “Oversexed,” said Elizabeth Whittaker, “but in different ways. How could Joyce have seen anything of the kind or know anything about it? It took place in a lane near Quarry Wood. She wouldn’t have been more than ten or eleven years old.”

  “Which one had the boyfriend?” asked Poirot. “Nora or Janet?”

  “All this is past history.”

  “Old sins have long shadows,” quoted Poirot. “As we advance through life, we learn the truth of that saying. Where is Nora Ambrose now?”

  “She left the school and took another post in the North of England—she was, naturally, very upset. They were—great friends.”

  “The police never solved the case?”

  Miss Whittaker shook her head. She got up and looked at her watch.

  “I must go now.”

  “Thank you for what you have told me.”

  Eleven

  Hercule Poirot looked up at the façade of Quarry House. A solid, well-built example of mid-Victorian architecture. He had a vision of its interior—a heavy mahogany sideboard, a central rectangular table also of heavy mahogany, a billiard room, perhaps, a large kitchen with adjacent scullery, stone flags on the floor, a massive coal range now no doubt replaced by electricity or gas.

  He noted that most of the upper windows were still curtained. He rang the front doorbell. It was answered by a thin, grey-haired woman who told him that Colonel and Mrs. Weston were away in London and would not be back until next week.

  He asked about the Quarry Woods and was told that they were open to the public without charge. The entrance was about five minutes’ walk along the road. He would see a notice board on an iron gate.

  He found his way there easily enough, and passing through the gate began to descend a path that led downwards through trees and shrubs.

  Presently he came to a halt and stood there lost in thought. His mind was not only on what he saw, on what lay around him. Instead he was conning over one or two sentences, and reflecting over one or two facts that had given him at the time, as he expressed it to himself, furiously to think. A forged Will, a forged Will and a girl. A girl who had disappeared, the girl in whose favour the Will had been forged. A young artist who had come here professionally to make out of an abandoned quarry of rough stone a garden, a sunk garden. Here again, Poirot looked round him and nodded his head with approval of the phrase. A Quarry Garden was an ugly term. It suggested the noise of blasting rock, the carrying away by lorries of vast masses of stone for road making. It had behind it industrial demand. But a Sunk Garden—that was different. It brought with it vague remembrances in his own mind. So Mrs. Llewellyn-Smythe had gone on a National Trust tour of gardens in Ireland. He himself, he remembered, had been in Ireland five or six years ago. He had gone there to investigate a robbery of old family silver. There had been some interesting points about the case which had aroused his curiosity, and having (as usual)—Poirot added this bracket to his thoughts—solved his mission with full success, he had put in a few days travelling around and seeing the sights.

  He could not remember now the particular garden he had been to see. Somewhere, he thought, not very far from Cork. Killarney? No, not Killarney. Somewhere not far from Bantry Bay. And he remembered it because it had been a garden quite different from the gardens which he had so far acclaimed as the great successes of this age, the gardens of the Châteaux in France, the formal beauty of Versailles. Here, he remembered, he had started with a little group of people in a boat. A boat difficult to get into if two strong and able boatmen had not practically lifted him in. They had rowed towards a small island, not a very interesting island, Poirot had thought, and began to wish that he had not come. His feet were wet and cold and the wind was blowing through the crevices of his mackintosh. What beauty, he had thought, what formality, what symmetrical arrangement of great beauty could there be on this rocky island with its sparse trees? A mistake—definitely a mistake.

  They had landed at the little wharf. The fishermen had landed him with the same adroitness they had shown before. The remaining members of the party had gone on ahead, talking and laughing. Poirot, readjusting his mackintosh in position and tying up his shoes again, had followed them up the rather dull path with shrubs and bushes and a few sparse trees either side. A most uninteresting park, he thought.

  And then, rather suddenly, they had come out from among the scrub on to a terrace with steps leading down from it. Below it he had looked down into what struck him at once as something entirely magical. Something as it might have been if elemental beings such as he believed were common in Irish poetry, had come out of their hollow hills and had created there, not so much by toil and hard labour as by waving a magic wand, a garden. You looked down into the garden. Its beauty, the flowers and bushes, the artificial water below in the fountain, the path round it, enchanted, beautiful and entirely unexpected. He wondered how it had been originally. It seemed too symmetrical to have been a quarry. A deep hollow here in the raised ground of the island, but beyond it you could see the waters of the Bay and the hills rising the other side, their misty tops an enchanting scene. He thought perhaps that it might have been that particular garden which had stirred Mrs. Llewellyn-Smythe to possess such a garden of her own, to have the pleasure of taking an unkempt quarry set in this smug, tidy, elementary and essentially conventional countryside of that part of England.

  And so she had looked about for the proper kind of well-paid slave to do her bidding. And she had found the professionally qualified young man called Michael Garfield and had brought him here and had paid him no doubt a large fee, and had in due course built a house for him. Michael Garfield, thought Poirot, had not failed her.

  He went and sat down on a bench, a bench which had been strategically placed. He pictured to himself what the sunken quarry would look like in the spring. There were young beech trees and birches with their white shivering barks. Bushes of thorn and white rose, little juniper trees. But now it was autumn, and autumn had been catered for also. The gold and red of acers, a parrotia or two, a path that led along a winding way to fresh delights. There were flowering bushes of gorse or Spanish broom—Poirot was not famous for knowing the names of either flowers or shr
ubs—only roses and tulips could he approve and recognize.

  But everything that grew here had the appearance of having grown by its own will. It had not been arranged or forced into submission. And yet, thought Poirot, that is not really so. All has been arranged, all has been planned to this tiny little plant that grows here and to that large towering bush that rises up so fiercely with its golden and red leaves. Oh yes. All has been planned here and arranged. What is more, I would say that it had obeyed.

  He wondered then whom it had obeyed. Mrs. Llewellyn-Smythe or Michael Garfield? It makes a difference, said Poirot to himself, yes, it makes a difference. Mrs. Llewellyn-Smythe was knowledgeable, he felt sure. She had gardened for many years, she was no doubt a Fellow of the Royal Horticultural Society, she went to shows, she consulted catalogues, she visited gardens. She took journeys abroad, no doubt, for botanical reasons. She would know what she wanted, she would say what she wanted. Was that enough? Poirot thought it was not quite enough. She could have given orders to gardeners and made sure her orders were carried out. But did she know—really know—see in her mind’s eye exactly what her orders would look like when they had been carried out? Not in the first year of their planting, not even the second, but things that she would see two years later, three years later, perhaps, even six or seven years later. Michael Garfield, thought Poirot, Michael Garfield knows what she wants because she has told him what she wants, and he knows how to make this bare quarry of stone and rock blossom as a desert can blossom. He planned and he brought it about; he had no doubt the intense pleasure that comes to an artist who is commissioned by a client with plenty of money. Here was his conception of a fairy-land tucked away in a conventional and rather dull hillside, and here it would grow up. Expensive shrubs for which large cheques would have to be written, and rare plants that perhaps would only be obtainable through the goodwill of a friend, and here, too, the humble things that were needed and which cost next to nothing at all. In spring on the bank just to his left there would be primroses, their modest green leaves all bunched together up the side of it told him that.

  “In England,” said Poirot, “people show you their herbaceous borders and they take you to see their roses and they talk at inordinate length about their iris gardens, and to show they appreciate one of the great beauties of England, they take you on a day when the sun shines and the beech trees are in leaf, and underneath them are all the bluebells. Yes, it is a very beautiful sight, but I have been shown it, I think, once too often. I prefer—” the thought broke off in his mind as he thought back to what he had preferred. A drive through Devon lanes. A winding road with great banks up each side of it, and on those banks a great carpet and showing of primroses. So pale, so subtly and timidly yellow, and coming from them that sweet, faint, elusive smell that the primrose has in large quantities, which is the smell of spring almost more than any other smell. And so it would not be all rare shrubs here. There would be spring and autumn, there would be little wild cyclamen and there would be autumn crocus here too. It was a beautiful place.

  He wondered about the people who lived in Quarry House now. He had their names, a retired elderly Colonel and his wife, but surely, he thought, Spence might have told him more about them. He had the feeling that whoever owned this now had not got the love of it that dead Mrs. Llewellyn-Smythe had had. He got up and walked along the path a little way. It was an easy path, carefully levelled, designed, he thought, to be easy for an elderly person to walk where she would at will, without undue amount of steep steps, and at a convenient angle and convenient intervals a seat that looked rustic but was much less rustic than it looked. In fact, the angle for the back and for one’s feet was remarkably comfortable. Poirot thought to himself, I’d like to see this Michael Garfield. He made a good thing of this. He knew his job, he was a good planner and he got experienced people to carry his plans out, and he managed, I think, to get his patron’s plans so arranged that she would think that the whole planning had been hers. But I don’t think it was only hers. It was mostly his. Yes, I’d like to see him. If he’s still in the cottage—or the bungalow—that was built for him, I suppose—his thought broke off.

  He stared. Stared across a hollow that lay at his feet where the path ran round the other side of it. Stared at one particular golden red branching shrub which framed something that Poirot did not know for a moment was really there or was a mere effect of shadow and sunshine and leaves.

  What am I seeing? thought Poirot. Is this the result of enchantment? It could be. In this place here, it could be. Is it a human being I see, or is it—what could it be? His mind reverted to some adventures of his many years ago which he had christened “The Labours of Hercules.” Somehow, he thought, this was not an English garden in which he was sitting. There was an atmosphere here. He tried to pin it down. It had qualities of magic, of enchantment, certainly of beauty, bashful beauty, yet wild. Here, if you were staging a scene in the theatre, you would have your nymphs, your fauns, you would have Greek beauty, you would have fear too. Yes, he thought, in this sunk garden there is fear. What did Spence’s sister say? Something about a murder that took place in the original quarry years ago? Blood had stained the rock there, and afterwards, death had been forgotten, all had been covered over, Michael Garfield had come, had planned and had created a garden of great beauty, and an elderly woman who had not many more years to live had paid out money for it.

  He saw now it was a young man who stood on the other side of the hollow, framed by golden red leaves, and a young man, so Poirot now recognized, of an unusual beauty. One didn’t think of young men that way nowadays. You said of a young man that he was sexy or madly attractive, and these evidences of praise are often quite justly made. A man with a craggy face, a man with wild greasy hair and whose features were far from regular. You didn’t say a young man was beautiful. If you did say it, you said it apologetically as though you were praising some quality that had been long dead. The sexy girls didn’t want Orpheus with his lute, they wanted a pop singer with a raucous voice, expressive eyes and large masses of unruly hair.

  Poirot got up and walked round the path. As he got to the other side of the steep descent, the young man came out from the trees to meet him. His youth seemed the most characteristic thing about him, yet, as Poirot saw, he was not really young. He was past thirty, perhaps nearer forty. The smile on his face was very, very faint. It was not quite a welcoming smile, it was just a smile of quiet recognition. He was tall, slender, with features of great perfection such as a classical sculptor might have produced. His eyes were dark, his hair was black and fitted him as a woven chain mail helmet or cap might have done. For a moment Poirot wondered whether he and this young man might not be meeting in the course of some pageant that was being rehearsed. If so, thought Poirot, looking down at his galoshes, I, alas, shall have to go to the wardrobe mistress to get myself better equipped. He said:

  “I am perhaps trespassing here. If so, I must apologize. I am a stranger in this part of the world. I only arrived yesterday.”

  “I don’t think one could call it trespassing.” The voice was very quiet; it was polite yet in a curious way uninterested, as if this man’s thoughts were really somewhere quite far away. “It’s not exactly open to the public, but people do walk round here. Old Colonel Weston and his wife don’t mind. They would mind if there was any damage done, but that’s not really very likely.”

  “No vandalism,” said Poirot, looking round him. “No litter that is noticeable. Not even a little basket. That is very unusual, is it not? And it seems deserted—strange. Here you would think,” he went on, “there would be lovers walking.”

  “Lovers don’t come here,” said the young man. “It’s supposed to be unlucky for some reason.”

  “Are you, I wonder, the architect? But perhaps I’m guessing wrong.”

  “My name is Michael Garfield,” said the young man.

  “I thought it might be,” said Poirot. He gesticulated with a hand around him. “You m
ade this?”

  “Yes,” said Michael Garfield.

  “It is beautiful,” said Poirot. “Somehow one feels it is always rather unusual when something beautiful is made in—well, frankly, what is a dull part of the English landscape.

  “I congratulate you,” he said. “You must be satisfied with what you have done here.”

  “Is one ever satisfied? I wonder.”

  “You made it, I think, for a Mrs. Llewellyn-Smythe. No longer alive, I believe. There is a Colonel and Mrs. Weston, I believe? Do they own it now?”

  “Yes. They got it cheap. It’s a big, ungainly house—not easy to run—not what most people want. She left it in her Will to me.”

  “And you sold it.”

  “I sold the house.”

  “And not the Quarry Garden?”

  “Oh yes. The Quarry Garden went with it, practically thrown in, as one might say.”

  “Now why?” said Poirot. “It is interesting, that. You do not mind if I am perhaps a little curious?”

  “Your questions are not quite the usual ones,” said Michael Garfield.

  “I ask not so much for facts as for reasons. Why did A do so and so? Why did B do something else? Why was C’s behaviour quite different from that of A and B?”

  “You should be talking to a scientist,” said Michael. “It is a matter—or so we are told nowadays—of genes or chromosomes. The arrangement, the pattern, and so on.”

  “You said just now you were not entirely satisfied because no one ever was. Was your employer, your patron, whatever you like to call her—was she satisfied? With this thing of beauty?”