Third Girl

  Mrs. Oliver continued to look mildly inquiring. Mrs. Mop fell.

  “It’s not that she isn’t a nice young lady. Scatty but then they’re nearly all scatty. But I think as a doctor ought to see her. There are times when she doesn’t seem to know rightly what she’s doing, or where she is. It gives you quite a turn, sometimes—Looks just how my husband’s nephew does after he’s had a fit. (Terrible fits he has—you wouldn’t believe!) Only I’ve never known her have fits. Maybe she takes things—a lot do.”

  “I believe there is a young man her family doesn’t approve of.”

  “Yes, so I’ve heard. He’s come here to call for her once or twice—though I’ve never seen him. One of these Mods by all accounts. Miss Holland doesn’t like it—but what can you do nowadays? Girls go their own way.”

  “Sometimes one feels very upset about girls nowadays,” said Mrs. Oliver, and tried to look serious and responsible.

  “Not brought up right, that’s what I says.”

  “I’m afraid not. No, I’m afraid not. One feels really a girl like Norma Restarick would be better at home than coming all alone to London and earning her living as an interior decorator.”

  “She don’t like it at home.”

  “Really?”

  “Got a stepmother. Girls don’t like stepmothers. From what I’ve heard the stepmother’s done her best, tried to pull her up, tried to keep flashy young men out of the house, that sort of thing. She knows girls pick up with the wrong young man and a lot of harm may come of it. Sometimes—” the cleaning woman spoke impressively, “—I’m thankful I’ve never had any daughters.”

  “Have you got sons?”

  “Two boys, we’ve got. One’s doing very well at school, and the other one, he’s in a printer’s, doing well there too. Yes, very nice boys they are. Mind you, boys can cause you trouble, too. But girls is more worrying, I think. You feel you ought to be able to do something about them.”

  “Yes,” said Mrs. Oliver, thoughtfully, “one does feel that.”

  She saw signs of the cleaning woman wishing to return to her cleaning.

  “It’s too bad about my diary,” she said. “Well, thank you very much and I hope I haven’t wasted your time.”

  “Well, I hope you’ll find it, I’m sure,” said the other woman obligingly.

  Mrs. Oliver went out of the flat and considered what she should do next. She couldn’t think of anything she could do further that day, but a plan for tomorrow began to form in her mind.

  When she got home, Mrs. Oliver, in an important way, got out a notebook and jotted down in it various things under the heading “Facts I have learned.” On the whole the facts did not amount to very much but Mrs. Oliver, true to her calling, managed to make the most of them that could be made. Possibly the fact that Claudia Reece-Holland was employed by Norma’s father was the most salient fact of any. She had not known that before, she rather doubted if Hercule Poirot had known it either. She thought of ringing him up on the telephone and acquainting him with it but decided to keep it to herself for the moment because of her plan for the morrow. In fact, Mrs. Oliver felt at this moment less like a detective novelist than like an ardent bloodhound. She was on the trail, nose down on the scent, and tomorrow morning—well, tomorrow morning we would see.

  True to her plan, Mrs. Oliver rose early, partook of two cups of tea and a boiled egg and started out on her quest. Once more she arrived in the vicinity of Borodene Mansions. She wondered whether she might be getting a bit well known there, so this time she did not enter the courtyard, but skulked around either one entrance to it or the other, scanning the various people who were turning out into the morning drizzle to trot off on their way to work. They were mostly girls, and looked deceptively alike. How extraordinary human beings were when you considered them like this, emerging purposefully from these large tall buildings—just like anthills, thought Mrs. Oliver. One had never considered an anthill properly, she decided. It always looked so aimless, as one disturbed it with the toe of a shoe. All those little things rushing about with bits of grass in their mouths, streaming along industriously, worried, anxious, looking as though they were running to and fro and going nowhere, but presumably they were just as well organised as these human beings here. That man, for instance, who had just passed her. Scurrying along, muttering to himself. “I wonder what’s upsetting you,” thought Mrs. Oliver. She walked up and down a little more, then she drew back suddenly.

  Claudia Reece-Holland came out of the entranceway walking at a brisk businesslike pace. As before, she looked very well turned out. Mrs. Oliver turned away so that she should not be recognised. Once she had allowed Claudia to get a sufficient distance ahead of her, she wheeled round again and followed in her tracks. Claudia Reece-Holland came to the end of the street and turned right into a main thoroughfare. She came to a bus stop and joined the queue. Mrs. Oliver, still following her, felt a momentary uneasiness. Supposing Claudia should turn round, look at her, recognise her? All Mrs. Oliver could think of was to do several protracted but noiseless blows of the nose. But Claudia Reece-Holland seemed totally absorbed in her own thoughts. She looked at none of her fellow waiters for buses. Mrs. Oliver was about third in the queue behind her. Finally the right bus came and there was a surge forward. Claudia got on the bus and went straight up to the top. Mrs. Oliver got inside and was able to get a seat close to the door as the uncomfortable third person. When the conductor came round for fares Mrs. Oliver pressed a reckless one and sixpence into his hand. After all, she had no idea by what route the bus went or indeed how far the distance was to what the cleaning woman had described vaguely as “one of those new buildings by St. Paul’s.” She was on the alert and ready when the venerable dome was at last sighted. Anytime now, she thought to herself, and fixed a steady eye on those who descended from the platform above. Ah yes, there came Claudia, neat and chic in her smart suit. She got off the bus. Mrs. Oliver followed her in due course and kept at a nicely calculated distance.

  “Very interesting,” thought Mrs. Oliver. “Here I am actually trailing someone! Just like in my books. And, what’s more, I must be doing it very well because she hasn’t the least idea.”

  Claudia Reece-Holland, indeed, looked very much absorbed in her own thoughts. “That’s a very capable looking girl,” thought Mrs. Oliver, as indeed she had thought before. “If I was thinking of having a go at guessing a murderer, a good capable murderer, I’d choose someone very like her.”

  Unfortunately, nobody had been murdered yet, that is to say, unless the girl Norma had been entirely right in her assumption that she herself had committed a murder.

  This part of London seemed to have suffered or profited from a large amount of building in the recent years. Enormous skyscrapers, most of which Mrs. Oliver thought very hideous, mounted to the sky with a square matchbox-like air.

  Claudia turned into a building. “Now I shall find out exactly,” thought Mrs. Oliver and turned into it after her. Four lifts appeared to be all going up and down with frantic haste. This, Mrs. Oliver thought, was going to be more difficult. However, they were of a very large size and by getting into Claudia’s one at the last minute Mrs. Oliver was able to interpose large masses of tall men between herself and the figure she was following. Claudia’s destination turned out to be the fourth floor. She went along a corridor and Mrs. Oliver, lingering behind two of her tall men, noted the door where she went in. Three doors from the end of the corridor. Mrs. Oliver arrived at the same door in due course and was able to read the legend on it. “Joshua Restarick Ltd.” was the legend it bore.

  Having got as far as that Mrs. Oliver felt as though she did not quite know what to do next. She had found Norma’s father’s place of business and the place where Claudia worked, but now, slightly disabused, she felt that this was not as much of a discovery as it might have been. Frankly, did it help? Probably it didn’t.

  She waited around a few moments, walking from one end to the other of the corridor looking to see i
f anybody else interesting went in at the door of Restarick Enterprises. Two or three girls did but they did not look particularly interesting. Mrs. Oliver went down again in the lift and walked rather disconsolately out of the building. She couldn’t quite think what to do next. She took a walk round the adjacent streets, she meditated a visit to St. Paul’s.

  “I might go up in the Whispering Gallery and whisper,” thought Mrs. Oliver. “I wonder now how the Whispering Gallery would do for the scene of a murder?

  “No,” she decided, “too profane, I’m afraid. No, I don’t think that would be quite nice.” She walked thoughtfully towards the Mermaid Theatre. That, she thought, had far more possibilities.

  She walked back in the direction of the various new buildings. Then, feeling the lack of a more substantial breakfast than she had had, she turned into a local café. It was moderately well filled with people having extra late breakfast or else early “elevenses.” Mrs. Oliver, looking round vaguely for a suitable table, gave a gasp. At a table near the wall the girl Norma was sitting, and opposite her was sitting a young man with lavish chestnut hair curled on his shoulders, wearing a red velvet waistcoat and a very fancy jacket.

  “David,” said Mrs. Oliver under her breath. “It must be David.” He and the girl Norma were talking excitedly together.

  Mrs. Oliver considered a plan of campaign, made up her mind, and nodding her head in satisfaction, crossed the floor of the café to a discreet door marked “Ladies.”

  Mrs. Oliver was not quite sure whether Norma was likely to recognise her or not. It was not always the vaguest looking people who proved the vaguest in fact. At the moment Norma did not look as though she was likely to look at anybody but David, but who knows?

  “I expect I can do something to myself anyway,” thought Mrs. Oliver. She looked at herself in a small flyblown mirror provided by the café’s management, studying particularly what she considered to be the focal point of a woman’s appearance, her hair. No one knew this better than Mrs. Oliver, owing to the innumerable times that she had changed her mode of hairdressing, and had failed to be recognised by her friends in consequence. Giving her head an appraising eye she started work. Out came the pins, she took off several coils of hair, wrapped them up in her handkerchief and stuffed them into her handbag, parted her hair in the middle, combed it sternly back from her face and rolled it up into a modest bun at the back of her neck. She also took out a pair of spectacles and put them on her nose. There was a really earnest look about her now! “Almost intellectual,” Mrs. Oliver thought approvingly. She altered the shape of her mouth by an application of lipstick, and emerged once more into the café; moving carefully since the spectacles were only for reading and in consequence the landscape was blurred. She crossed the café, and made her way to an empty table next to that occupied by Norma and David. She sat down so that she was facing David. Norma, on the near side, sat with her back to her. Norma, therefore, would not see her unless she turned her head right round. The waitress drifted up. Mrs. Oliver ordered a cup of coffee and a Bath bun and settled down to be inconspicuous.

  Norma and David did not even notice her. They were deeply in the middle of a passionate discussion. It took Mrs. Oliver just a minute or two to tune into them.

  “…But you only fancy these things,” David was saying. “You imagine them. They’re all utter, utter nonsense, my dear girl.”

  “I don’t know. I can’t tell.” Norma’s voice had a queer lack of resonance in it.

  Mrs. Oliver could not hear her as well as she heard David, since Norma’s back was turned to her, but the dullness of the girl’s tone struck her disagreeably. There was something wrong here, she thought. Very wrong. She remembered the story as Poirot had first told it to her. “She thinks she may have committed a murder.” What was the matter with the girl? Hallucinations? Was her mind really slightly affected, or was it no more and no less than truth, and in consequence the girl had suffered a bad shock?

  “If you ask me, it’s all fuss on Mary’s part! She’s a thoroughly stupid woman anyway, and she imagines she has illnesses and all that sort of thing.”

  “She was ill.”

  “All right then, she was ill. Any sensible woman would get the doctor to give her some antibiotic or other, and not get het up.”

  “She thought I did it to her. My father thinks so too.”

  “I tell you, Norma, you imagine all these things.”

  “You just say that to me, David. You say it to me to cheer me up. Supposing I did give her the stuff?”

  “What do you mean, suppose? You must know whether you did or you didn’t. You can’t be so idiotic, Norma.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You keep saying that. You keep coming back to that, and saying it again and again. ‘I don’t know.’ ‘I don’t know.’”

  “You don’t understand. You don’t understand in the least what hate is. I hated her from the first moment I saw her.”

  “I know. You told me that.”

  “That’s the queer part of it. I told you that, and yet I don’t even remember telling you that. D’you see? Every now and then I—I tell people things. I tell people things that I want to do, or that I have done, or that I’m going to do. But I don’t even remember telling them the things. It’s as though I was thinking all these things in my mind, and sometimes they come out in the open and I say them to people. I did say them to you, didn’t I?”

  “Well—I mean—look here, don’t let’s harp back to that.”

  “But I did say it to you? Didn’t I?”

  “All right, all right! One says things like that. ‘I hate her and I’d like to kill her. I think I’ll poison her!’ But that’s only kid stuff, if you know what I mean, as though you weren’t quite grown-up. It’s a very natural thing. Children say it a lot. ‘I hate so and so. I’ll cut off his head!’ Kids say it at school. About some master they particularly dislike.”

  “You think it was just that? But—that sounds as though I wasn’t grown-up.”

  “Well, you’re not in some ways. If you’d just pull yourself together, realise how silly it all is. What can it matter if you do hate her? You’ve got away from home and don’t have to live with her.”

  “Why shouldn’t I live in my own home—with my own father?” said Norma. “It’s not fair. It’s not fair. First he went away and left my mother, and now, just when he’s coming back to me, he goes and marries Mary. Of course I hate her and she hates me too. I used to think about killing her, used to think of ways of doing it. I used to enjoy thinking like that. But then—when she really got ill….”

  David said uneasily:

  “You don’t think you’re a witch or anything, do you? You don’t make figures in wax and stick pins into them or do that sort of thing?”

  “Oh no. That would be silly. What I did was real. Quite real.”

  “Look here, Norma, what do you mean when you say it was real?”

  “The bottle was there, in my drawer. Yes, I opened the drawer and found it.”

  “What bottle?”

  “The Dragon Exterminator. Selective weed killer. That’s what it was labelled. Stuff in a dark green bottle and you were supposed to spray it on things. And it had labels with Caution and Poison, too.”

  “Did you buy it? Or did you just find it?”

  “I don’t know where I got it, but it was there, in my drawer, and it was half empty.”

  “And then you—you—remembered—”

  “Yes,” said Norma. “Yes…” Her voice was vague, almost dreamy. “Yes…I think it was then it all came back to me. You think so too, don’t you, David?”

  “I don’t know what to make of you, Norma. I really don’t. I think in a way, you’re making it all up, you’re telling it to yourself.”

  “But she went to hospital, for observation. They said they were puzzled. Then they said they couldn’t find anything wrong so she came home—and then she got ill again, and I began to be frightened. My father began looking a
t me in a queer sort of way, and then the doctor came and they talked together, shut up in Father’s study. I went round outside, and crept up to the window and I tried to listen. I wanted to hear what they were saying. They were planning together—to send me away to a place where I’d be shut up! A place where I’d have a ‘course of treatment’—or something. They thought, you see, that I was crazy, and I was frightened…Because—because I wasn’t sure what I’d done or what I hadn’t done.”

  “Is that when you ran away?”

  “No—that was later—”

  “Tell me.”

  “I don’t want to talk about it anymore.”

  “You’ll have to let them know sooner or later where you are—”

  “I won’t! I hate them. I hate my father as much as I hate Mary. I wish they were dead. I wish they were both dead. Then—then I think I’d be happy again.”

  “Don’t get all het up! Look here, Norma—” He paused in an embarrassed manner—“I’m not very set on marriage and all that rubbish…I mean I didn’t think I’d ever do anything of that kind…oh well, not for years. One doesn’t want to tie oneself up—but I think it’s the best thing we could do, you know. Get married. At a registry office or something. You’ll have to say you’re over twenty-one. Roll up your hair, put on some spectacles or something. Make you look a bit older. Once we’re married, your father can’t do a thing! He can’t send you away to what you call a ‘place.’ He’ll be powerless.”

  “I hate him.”

  “You seem to hate everybody.”

  “Only my father and Mary.”

  “Well, after all, it’s quite natural for a man to marry again.”

  “Look what he did to my mother.”

  “All that must have been a long time ago.”

  “Yes. I was only a child, but I remember. He went away and left us. He sent me presents at Christmas—but he never came himself. I wouldn’t even have known him if I’d met him in the street by the time he did come back. He didn’t mean anything to me by then. I think he got my mother shut up, too. She used to go away when she was ill. I don’t know where. I don’t know what was the matter with her. Sometimes I wonder…I wonder, David. I think, you know, there’s something wrong in my head, and someday it will make me do something really bad. Like the knife.”