Mr. Goby cleared his throat and went on.
“Miss Claudia Reece-Holland? She’s all right. Nothing against her. Nothing dubious, that is. Father a Member of Parliament, well off. No scandals. Not like some MPs we’ve heard about. Educated Roedean, Lady Margaret Hall, came down and did a secretarial course. First secretary to a doctor in Harley Street, then went to the Coal Board. First-class secretary. Has been secretary to Mr. Restarick for the last two months. No special attachments, just what you’d call minor boyfriends. Eligible and useful if she wants a date. Nothing to show there’s anything between her and Restarick. I shouldn’t say there is, myself. Has had a flat in Borodene Mansions for the last three years. Quite a high rent there. She usually has two other girls sharing it, no special friends. They come and go. Young lady, Frances Cary, the second girl, has been there some time. Was at RADA for a time, then went to the Slade. Works for the Wedderburn Gallery—well-known place in Bond Street. Specialises in arranging art shows in Manchester, Birmingham, sometimes abroad. Goes to Switzerland and Portugal. Arty type and has a lot of friends amongst artists and actors.”
He paused, cleared his throat and gave a brief look at the little notebook.
“Haven’t been able to get much from South Africa yet. Don’t suppose I shall. Restarick moved about a lot. Kenya, Uganda, Gold Coast, South America for a while. He just moved about. Restless chap. Nobody seems to have known him particularly well. He’d got plenty of money of his own to go where he liked. He made money, too, quite a lot of it. Liked going to out of the way places. Everyone who came across him seems to have liked him. Just seems as though he was a born wanderer. He never kept in touch with anyone. Three times I believe he was reported dead—gone off into the bush and not turned up again—but he always did in the end. Five or six months and he’d pop up in some entirely different place or country.
“Then last year his brother in London died suddenly. They had a bit of trouble in tracing him. His brother’s death seemed to give him a shock. Perhaps he’d had enough, and perhaps he’d met the right woman at last. Good bit younger than him, she was, and a teacher, they say. The steady kind. Anyway he seems to have made up his mind then and there to chuck wandering about, and come home to England. Besides being a very rich man himself, he’s his brother’s heir.”
“A success story and an unhappy girl,” said Poirot. “I wish I knew more about her. You have ascertained for me all that you could, the facts I needed. The people who surrounded that girl, who might have influenced her, who perhaps did influence her. I wanted to know something about her father, her stepmother, the boy she is in love with, the people she lived with, and worked for in London. You are sure that in connection with this girl there have been no deaths? That is important—”
“Not a smell of one,” said Mr. Goby. “She worked for a firm called Homebirds—on the verge of bankruptcy, and they didn’t pay her much. Stepmother was in hospital for observation recently—in the country, that was. A lot of rumours flying about, but they didn’t seem to come to anything.”
“She did not die,” said Poirot. “What I need,” he added in a bloodthirsty manner, “is a death.”
Mr. Goby said he was sorry about that and rose to his feet. “Will there be anything more you are wanting at present?”
“Not in the nature of information.”
“Very good, sir.” As he replaced his notebook in his pocket, Mr. Goby said: “You’ll excuse me, sir, if I’m speaking out of turn, but that young lady you had here just now—”
“Yes, what about her?”
“Well, of course it’s—I don’t suppose it’s anything to do with this, but I thought I might just mention it to you, sir—”
“Please do. You have seen her before, I gather?”
“Yes. Couple of months ago.”
“Where did you see her?”
“Kew Gardens.”
“Kew Gardens?” Poirot looked slightly surprised.
“I wasn’t following her. I was following someone else, the person who met her.”
“And who was that?”
“I don’t suppose as it matters mentioning it to you, sir. It was one of the junior attachés of the Hertzogovinian Embassy.”
Poirot raised his eyebrows. “That is interesting. Yes, very interesting. Kew Gardens,” he mused. “A pleasant place for a rendezvous. Very pleasant.”
“I thought so at the time.”
“They talked together?”
“No, sir, you wouldn’t have said they knew each other. The young lady had a book with her. She sat down on a seat. She read the book for a little then she laid it down beside her. Then my bloke came and sat there on the seat also. They didn’t speak—only the young lady got up and wandered away. He just sat there and presently he gets up and walks off. He takes with him the book that the young lady has left behind. That’s all, sir.”
“Yes,” said Poirot. “It is very interesting.”
Mr. Goby looked at the bookcase and said good night to it. He went.
Poirot gave an exasperated sigh.
“Enfin,” he said, “it is too much! There is far too much. Now we have espionage and counterespionage. All I am seeking is one perfectly simple murder. I begin to suspect that that murder only occurred in a drug addict’s brain!”
Fourteen
“Chère Madame,” Poirot bowed and presented Mrs. Oliver with a bouquet, very stylised, a posy in the Victorian manner.
“M. Poirot! Well, really, that is very nice of you, and it’s very like you somehow. All my flowers are always so untidy.” She looked towards a vase of rather temperamental-looking chrysanthemums, then back to the prim circle of rosebuds. “And how nice of you to come and see me.”
“I come, Madame, to offer you my felicitations on your recovery.”
“Yes,” said Mrs. Oliver, “I suppose I am all right again.” She shook her head to and fro rather gingerly. “I get headaches, though,” she said. “Quite bad headaches.”
“You remember, Madame, that I warned you not to do anything dangerous.”
“Not to stick my neck out, in fact. That I suppose is just what I did do.” She added, “I felt something evil was about. I was frightened, too, and I told myself I was a fool to be frightened, because what was I frightened of? I mean, it was London. Right in the middle of London. People all about. I mean—how could I be frightened? It wasn’t like a lonely wood or anything.”
Poirot looked at her thoughtfully. He wondered, had Mrs. Oliver really felt this nervous fear, had she really suspected the presence of evil, the sinister feeling that something or someone wished her ill, or had she read it into the whole thing afterwards? He knew only too well how easily that could be done. Countless clients had spoken in much the same words that Mrs. Oliver had just used. “I knew something was wrong. I could feel evil. I knew something was going to happen,” and actually they had not felt anything of the kind. What kind of a person was Mrs. Oliver?
He looked at her consideringly. Mrs. Oliver in her own opinion was famous for her intuition. One intuition succeeded another with remarkable rapidity and Mrs. Oliver always claimed the right to justify the particular intuition which turned out to be right!
And yet one shared very often with animals the uneasiness of a dog or a cat before a thunderstorm, the knowledge that there is something wrong, although one does not know what it is that is wrong.
“When did it come upon you, this fear?”
“When I left the main road,” said Mrs. Oliver. “Up till then it was all ordinary and quite exciting and—yes, I was enjoying myself, though vexed at finding how difficult it was to trail anybody.”
She paused, considering. “Just like a game. Then suddenly it didn’t seem so much like a game, because there were queer little streets and rather sort of broken-down places, and sheds and open spaces being cleared for building—oh, I don’t know, I can’t explain it. But it was all different. Like a dream really. You know how dreams are. They start with one thing, a party or some
thing, and then suddenly you find you’re in a jungle or somewhere quite different—and it’s all sinister.”
“A jungle?” said Poirot. “Yet, it is interesting you should put it like that. So it felt to you as though you were in a jungle and you were afraid of a peacock?”
“I don’t know that I was especially afraid of him. After all, a peacock isn’t a dangerous sort of animal. It’s—well I mean I thought of him as a peacock because I thought of him as a decorative creature. A peacock is very decorative, isn’t it? And this awful boy is decorative too.”
“You didn’t have any idea anyone was following you before you were hit?”
“No. No, I’d no idea—but I think he directed me wrong all the same.”
Poirot nodded thoughtfully.
“But of course it must have been the Peacock who hit me,” said Mrs. Oliver. “Who else? The dirty boy in the greasy clothes? He smelt nasty but he wasn’t sinister. And it could hardly be that limp Frances something—she was draped over a packing case with long black hair streaming all over the place. She reminded me of some actress or other.”
“You say she was acting as a model?”
“Yes. Not for the Peacock. For the dirty boy. I can’t remember if you’ve seen her or not.”
“I have not yet had that pleasure—if it is a pleasure.”
“Well, she’s quite nice looking in an untidy, arty sort of way. Very much made up. Dead white and lots of mascara and the usual kind of limp hair hanging over her face. Works in an art gallery so I suppose it’s quite natural that she should be all among the beatniks, acting as a model. How these girls can! I suppose she might have fallen for the Peacock. But it’s probably the dirty one. All the same I don’t see her coshing me on the head somehow.”
“I had another possibility in mind, Madame. Someone may have noticed you following David—and in turn followed you.”
“Someone saw me trailing David, and then they trailed me?”
“Or someone may have been already in the mews or the yard, keeping perhaps an eye on the same people that you were observing.”
“That’s an idea, of course,” said Mrs. Oliver. “I wonder who they could be?”
Poirot gave an exasperated sigh. “Ah, it is there. It is difficult—too difficult. Too many people, too many things. I cannot see anything clearly. I see only a girl who said that she may have committed a murder! That is all that I have to go on and you see even there there are difficulties.”
“What do you mean by difficulties?”
“Reflect,” said Poirot.
Reflection had never been Mrs. Oliver’s strong point.
“You always mix me up,” she complained.
“I am talking about a murder, but what murder?”
“The murder of the stepmother, I suppose.”
“But the stepmother is not murdered. She is alive.”
“You really are the most maddening man,” said Mrs. Oliver.
Poirot sat up in his chair. He brought the tips of his fingers together and prepared—or so Mrs. Oliver suspected—to enjoy himself.
“You refuse to reflect,” he said. “But to get anywhere we must reflect.”
“I don’t want to reflect. What I want to know is what you’ve been doing about everything while I’ve been in hospital. You must have done something. What have you done?”
Poirot ignored this question.
“We must begin at the beginning. One day you ring me up. I was in distress. Yes, I admit it, I was in distress. Something extremely painful had been said to me. You, Madame, were kindness itself. You cheered me, you encouraged me. You gave me a delicious tasse de chocolat. And what is more you not only offered to help me, but you did help me. You helped me to find a girl who had come to me and said that she thought she might have committed a murder! Let us ask ourselves, Madame, what about this murder? Who has been murdered? Where have they been murdered? Why have they been murdered?”
“Oh do stop,” said Mrs. Oliver. “You’re making my head ache again, and that’s bad for me.”
Poirot paid no attention to this plea. “Have we got a murder at all? You say—the stepmother—but I reply that the stepmother is not dead—so as yet we have no murder. But there ought to have been a murder. So me, I inquire first of all, who is dead? Somebody comes to me and mentions a murder. A murder that has been committed somewhere and somehow. But I cannot find that murder, and what you are about to say once again, that the attempted murder of Mary Restarick will do very well, does not satisfy Hercule Poirot.”
“I really can’t think what more you want,” said Mrs. Oliver.
“I want a murder,” said Hercule Poirot.
“It sounds very bloodthirsty when you say it like that!”
“I look for a murder and I cannot find a murder. It is exasperating—so I ask you to reflect with me.”
“I’ve got a splendid idea,” said Mrs. Oliver. “Suppose Andrew Restarick murdered his first wife before he went off in a hurry to South Africa. Had you thought of that possibility?”
“I certainly did not think of any such thing,” said Poirot indignantly.
“Well, I’ve thought of it,” said Mrs. Oliver. “It’s very interesting. He was in love with this other woman, and he wanted like Crippen to go off with her, and so he murdered the first one and nobody ever suspected.”
Poirot drew a long, exasperated sigh. “But his wife did not die until eleven or twelve years after he’d left this country for South Africa, and his child could not have been concerned in the murder of her own mother at the age of five years old.”
“She could have given her mother the wrong medicine or perhaps Restarick just said that she died. After all, we don’t know that she’s dead.”
“I do,” said Hercule Poirot. “I have made inquiries. The first Mrs. Restarick died on the 14th April, 1963.”
“How can you know these things?”
“Because I have employed someone to check the facts. I beg of you, Madame, do not jump to impossible conclusions in this rash way.”
“I thought I was being rather clever,” said Mrs. Oliver obstinately. “If I was making it happen in a book that’s how I would arrange it. And I’d make the child have done it. Not meaning to, but just by her father telling her to give her mother a drink made of pounded up box hedge.”
“Non d’un nom d’un nom!” said Poirot.
“All right,” said Mrs. Oliver. “You tell it your way.”
“Alas, I have nothing to tell. I look for a murder and I do not find one.”
“Not after Mary Restarick is ill and goes to hospital and gets better and comes back and is ill again, and if they looked they’d probably find arsenic or something hidden away by Norma somewhere.”
“That is exactly what they did find.”
“Well, really, M. Poirot, what more do you want?”
“I want you to pay some attention to the meaning of language. That girl said to me the same thing as she had said to my manservant, Georges. She did not say on either occasion ‘I have tried to kill someone’ or ‘I have tried to kill my stepmother.’ She spoke each time of a deed that had been done, something that had already happened. Definitely happened. In the past tense.”
“I give up,” said Mrs. Oliver. “You just won’t believe that Norma tried to kill her stepmother.”
“Yes, I believe it is perfectly possible that Norma may have tried to kill her stepmother. I think it is probably what happened—it is in accord psychologically. With her distraught frame of mind. But it is not proved. Anyone, remember, could have hidden a preparation of arsenic amongst Norma’s things. It could even have been put there by the husband.”
“You always seem to think that husbands are the ones who kill their wives,” said Mrs. Oliver.
“A husband is usually the most likely person,” said Hercule Poirot, “so one considers him first. It could have been the girl, Norma, or it could have been one of the servants, or it could have been the au pair girl, or it could have been
old Sir Roderick. Or it could have been Mrs. Restarick herself.”
“Nonsense. Why?”
“There could be reasons. Rather far-fetched reasons, but not beyond the bounds of belief.”
“Really, Monsieur Poirot, you can’t suspect everybody.”
“Mais oui, that is just what I can do. I suspect everybody. First I suspect, then I look for reasons.”
“And what reason would that poor foreign child have?”
“It might depend on what she is doing in that house, and what her reasons are for coming to England and a good deal more beside.”
“You’re really crazy.”
“Or it could have been the boy David. Your Peacock.”
“Much too far-fetched. David wasn’t there. He’s never been near the house.”
“Oh yes he has. He was wandering about its corridors the day I went there.”
“But not putting poison in Norma’s room.”
“How do you know?”
“But she and that awful boy are in love with each other.”
“They appear to be so, I admit.”
“You always want to make everything difficult,” complained Mrs. Oliver.
“Not at all. Things have been made difficult for me. I need information and there is only one person who can give me information. And she has disappeared.”
“You mean Norma.”
“Yes, I mean Norma.”
“But she hasn’t disappeared. We found her, you and I.”
“She walked out of that café and once more she has disappeared.”
“And you let her go?” Mrs. Oliver’s voice quivered with reproach.
“Alas!”
“You let her go? You didn’t even try to find her again?”
“I did not say I had not tried to find her.”
“But so far you have not succeeded. M. Poirot, I really am disappointed with you.”