“What knife?”
“It doesn’t matter. Just a knife.”
“Well, can’t you tell me what you’re talking about?”
“I think it had bloodstains on it—it was hidden there…under my stockings.”
“Do you remember hiding a knife there?”
“I think so. But I can’t remember what I’d done with it before that. I can’t remember where I’d been…There is a whole hour gone out of that evening. A whole hour I didn’t know where I’d been. I’d been somewhere and done something.”
“Hush!” He hissed it quickly as the waitress approached their table. “You’ll be all right. I’ll look after you. Let’s have something more,” he said to the waitress in a loud voice, picking up the menu—“Two baked beans on toast.”
Eight
I
Hercule Poirot was dictating to his secretary, Miss Lemon.
“And while I much appreciate the honour you have done me, I must regretfully inform you that…”
The telephone rang. Miss Lemon stretched out a hand for it. “Yes? Who did you say?” She put her hand over the receiver and said to Poirot, “Mrs. Oliver.”
“Ah…Mrs. Oliver,” said Poirot. He did not particularly want to be interrupted at this moment, but he took the receiver from Miss Lemon. “’Allo,” he said, “Hercule Poirot speaks.”
“Oh, M. Poirot, I’m so glad I got you! I’ve found her for you!”
“I beg your pardon?”
“I’ve found her for you. Your girl! You know, the one who’s committed a murder or thinks she has. She’s talking about it too, a great deal. I think she is off her head. But never mind that now. Do you want to come and get her?”
“Where are you, chère Madame?”
“Somewhere between St. Paul’s and the Mermaid Theatre and all that. Calthorpe Street,” said Mrs. Oliver, suddenly looking out of the telephone box in which she was standing. “Do you think you can get here quickly? They’re in a restaurant.”
“They?”
“Oh, she and what I suppose is the unsuitable boyfriend. He is rather nice really, and he seems very fond of her. I can’t think why. People are odd. Well, I don’t want to talk because I want to get back again. I followed them, you see. I came into the restaurant and saw them there.”
“Aha? You have been very clever, Madame.”
“No, I haven’t really. It was a pure accident. I mean, I walked into a small café place and there the girl was, just sitting there.”
“Ah. You had the good fortune then. That is just as important.”
“And I’ve been sitting at the next table to them, only she’s got her back to me. And anyway I don’t suppose she’d recognise me. I’ve done things to my hair. Anway, they’ve been talking as though they were alone in the world, and when they ordered another course—baked beans—(I can’t bear baked beans, it always seems to me so funny that people should)—”
“Never mind the baked beans. Go on. You left them and came out to telephone. Is that right?”
“Yes. Because the baked beans gave me time. And I shall go back now. Or I might hang about outside. Anway, try and get here quickly.”
“What is the name of this café?”
“The Merry Shamrock—but it doesn’t look very merry. In fact, it looks rather sordid, but the coffee is quite good.”
“Say no more. Go back. In due course, I will arrive.”
“Splendid,” said Mrs. Oliver, and rang off.
II
Miss Lemon, always efficient, had preceded him to the street, and was waiting by a taxi. She asked no questions and displayed no curiosity. She did not tell Poirot how she would occupy her time whilst he was away. She did not need to tell him. She always knew what she was going to do and she was always right in what she did.
Poirot duly arrived at the corner of Calthorpe Street. He descended, paid the taxi, and looked around him. He saw The Merry Shamrock but he saw no one in its vicinity who looked at all like Mrs. Oliver, however well disguised. He walked to the end of the street and back. No Mrs. Oliver. So either the couple in which they were interested had left the café and Mrs. Oliver had gone on a shadowing expedition, or else—To answer “or else” he went to the café door. One could not see the inside very well from the outside, on account of steam, so he pushed the door gently open and entered. His eyes swept round it.
He saw at once the girl who had come to visit him at the breakfast table. She was sitting by herself at a table against the wall. She was smoking a cigarette and staring in front of her. She seemed to be lost in thought. No, Poirot thought, hardly that. There did not seem to be any thought there. She was lost in a kind of oblivion. She was somewhere else.
He crossed the room quietly and sat down in the chair opposite her. She looked up then, and he was at least gratified to see that he was recognised.
“So we meet again, Mademoiselle,” he said pleasantly. “I see you recognise me.”
“Yes. Yes, I do.”
“It is always gratifying to be recognised by a young lady one has only met once and for a very short time.”
She continued to look at him without speaking.
“And how did you know me, may I ask? What made you recognise me?”
“Your moustache,” said Norma immediately. “It couldn’t be anyone else.”
He was gratified by that observation and stroked it with the pride and vanity that he was apt to display on these occasions.
“Ah yes, very true. Yes, there are not many moustaches such as mine. It is a fine one, hein?”
“Yes—well, yes—I suppose it is.”
“Ah, you are perhaps not a connoisseur of moustaches, but I can tell you, Miss Restarick—Miss Norma Restarick, is it not?—that it is a very fine moustache.”
He had dwelt deliberately upon her name. She had at first looked so oblivious to everything around her, so far away, that he wondered if she would notice. She did. It startled her.
“How did you know my name?” she said.
“True, you did not give your name to my servant when you came to see me that morning.”
“How did you know it? How did you get to know it? Who told you?”
He saw the alarm, the fear.
“A friend told me,” he said. “One’s friends can be very useful.”
“Who was it?”
“Mademoiselle, you like keeping your little secrets from me. I, too, have a preference for keeping my little secrets from you.”
“I don’t see how you could know who I was.”
“I am Hercule Poirot,” said Poirot, with his usual magnificence. Then he left the initiative to her, merely sitting there smiling gently at her.
“I—” she began, then stopped. “—Would—” Again she stopped.
“We did not get very far that morning, I know,” said Hercule Poirot. “Only so far as your telling me that you had committed a murder.”
“Oh that!”
“Yes, Mademoiselle, that.”
“But—I didn’t mean it of course. I didn’t mean anything like that. I mean, it was just a joke.”
“Vraiment? You came to see me rather early in the morning, at breakfast time. You said it was urgent. The urgency was because you might have committed a murder. That is your idea of a joke, eh?”
A waitress who had been hovering, looking at Poirot with a fixed attention, suddenly came up to him and proffered him what appeared to be a paper boat such as is made for children to sail in a bath.
“This for you?” she said. “Mr. Porritt? A lady left it.”
“Ah yes,” said Poirot. “And how did you know who I was?”
“The lady said I’d know by your moustache. Said I wouldn’t have seen a moustache like that before. And it’s true enough,” she added, gazing at it.
“Well, thank you very much.”
Poirot took the boat from her, untwisted it and smoothed it out; he read some hastily pencilled words: “He’s just going. She’s staying behind, so I’m goin
g to leave her for you, and follow him.” It was signed Ariadne.
“Ah yes,” said Hercule Poirot, folding it and slipping it into his pocket. “What were we talking about? Your sense of humour, I think, Miss Restarick.”
“Do you know just my name or—or do you know everything about me?”
“I know a few things about you. You are Miss Norma Restarick, your address in London is 67 Borodene Mansions. Your home address is Crosshedges, Long Basing. You live there with a father, a stepmother, a great-uncle and—ah yes, an au pair girl. You see, I am quite well informed.”
“You’ve been having me followed.”
“No, no,” said Poirot. “Not at all. As to that, I give you my word of honour.”
“But you are not police, are you? You didn’t say you were.”
“I am not police, no.”
Her suspicion and defiance broke down.
“I don’t know what to do,” she said.
“I am not urging you to employ me,” said Poirot. “For that you have said already that I am too old. Possibly you are right. But since I know who you are and something about you, there is no reason we should not discuss together in a friendly fashion the troubles that afflict you. The old, you must remember, though considered incapable of action, have nevertheless a good fund of experience on which to draw.”
Norma continued to look at him doubtfully, that wide-eyed stare that had disquieted Poirot before. But she was in a sense trapped, and she had at this particular moment, or so Poirot judged, a wish to talk about things. For some reason, Poirot had always been a person it was easy to talk to.
“They think I’m crazy,” she said bluntly. “And—and I rather think I’m crazy, too. Mad.”
“That is most interesting,” said Hercule Poirot, cheerfully. “There are many different names for these things. Very grand names. Names rolled out happily by psychiatrists, psychologists and others. But when you say crazy, that describes very well what the general appearance may be to ordinary, everyday people. Eh bien, then, you are crazy, or you appear crazy or you think you are crazy, and possibly you may be crazy. But all the same that is not to say the condition is serious. It is a thing that people suffer from a good deal, and it is usually easily cured with the proper treatment. It comes about because people have had too much mental strain, too much worry, have studied too much for examinations, have dwelled too much perhaps on their emotions, have too much religion or have a lamentable lack of religion, or have good reasons for hating their fathers or their mothers! Or, of course, it can be as simple as having an unfortunate love affair.”
“I’ve got a stepmother. I hate her and I rather think I hate my father too. That seems rather a lot, doesn’t it?”
“It is more usual to hate one or the other,” said Poirot. “You were, I suppose, very fond of your own mother. Is she divorced or dead?”
“Dead. She died two or three years ago.”
“And you cared for her very much?”
“Yes. I suppose I did. I mean of course I did. She was an invalid, you know, and she had to go to nursing homes a good deal.”
“And your father?”
“Father had gone abroad a long time before that. He went to South Africa when I was about five or six. I think he wanted Mother to divorce him but she wouldn’t. He went to South Africa and was mixed up with mines or something like that. Anyway, he used to write to me at Christmas, and send me a Christmas present or arrange for one to come to me. That was about all. So he didn’t really seem very real to me. He came home about a year ago because he had to wind up my uncle’s affairs and all that sort of financial thing. And when he came home he—he brought this new wife with him.”
“And you resented the fact?”
“Yes, I did.”
“But your mother was dead by then. It is not unusual, you know, for a man to marry again. Especially when he and his wife have been estranged for many years. This wife he brought, was she the same lady he had wished to marry previously, when he asked your mother for a divorce?”
“Oh, no, this one is quite young. And she’s very good-looking and she acts as though she just owns my father!”
She went on after a pause—in a different, rather childish voice. “I thought perhaps when he came home this time he would be fond of me and take notice of me and—but she won’t let him. She’s against me. She’s crowded me out.”
“But that does not matter at all at the age you are. It is a good thing. You do not need anyone to look after you now. You can stand on your own feet, you can enjoy life, you can choose your own friends—”
“You wouldn’t think so, the way they go on at home! Well, I mean to choose my own friends.”
“Most girls nowadays have to endure criticism about their friends,” said Poirot.
“It was all so different,” said Norma. “My father isn’t at all like I remember him when I was five years old. He used to play with me, all the time, and be so gay. He’s not gay now. He’s worried and rather fierce and—oh quite different.”
“That must be nearly fifteen years ago, I presume. People change.”
“But ought people to change so much?”
“Has he changed in appearance?”
“Oh no, no, not that. Oh no! If you look at his picture just over his chair, although it’s of him when he was much younger, it’s exactly like him now. But it isn’t at all the way I remember him.”
“But you know, my dear,” said Poirot gently, “people are never like what you remember them. You make them, as the years go by, more and more the way you wish them to be, and as you think you remember them. If you want to remember them as agreeable and gay and handsome, you make them far more so than they actually were.”
“Do you think so? Do you really think so?” She paused and then said abruptly, “But why do you think I want to kill people?” The question came out quite naturally. It was there between them. They had, Poirot felt, got at last to a crucial moment.
“That may be quite an interesting question,” said Poirot, “and there may be quite an interesting reason. The person who can probably tell you the answer to that will be a doctor. The kind of doctor who knows.”
She reacted quickly.
“I won’t go to a doctor. I won’t go near a doctor! They wanted to send me to a doctor, and then I’ll be shut up in one of those loony places and they won’t let me out again. I’m not going to do anything like that.” She was struggling now to rise to her feet.
“It is not I who can send you to one! You need not be alarmed. You could go to a doctor entirely on your own behalf if you liked. You can go and say to him the things you have been saying to me, and you may ask him why, and he will perhaps tell you the cause.”
“That’s what David says. That’s what David says I should do but I don’t think—I don’t think he understands. I’d have to tell a doctor that I—I might have tried to do things….”
“What makes you think you have?”
“Because I don’t always remember what I’ve done—or where I’ve been. I lose an hour of time—two hours—and I can’t remember. I was in a corridor once—a corridor outside a door, her door. I’d something in my hand—I don’t know how I got it. She came walking along towards me—But when she got near me, her face changed. It wasn’t her at all. She’d changed into somebody else.”
“You are remembering, perhaps, a nightmare. There people do change into somebody else.”
“It wasn’t a nightmare. I picked up the revolver—It was lying there at my feet—”
“In a corridor?”
“No, in the courtyard. She came and took it away from me.”
“Who did?”
“Claudia. She took me upstairs and gave me some bitter stuff to drink.”
“Where was your stepmother then?”
“She was there, too—No, she wasn’t. She was at Crosshedges. Or in hospital. That’s where they found out she was being poisoned—and that it was me.”
“It need not ha
ve been you—It could have been someone else.”
“Who else could it have been?”
“Perhaps—her husband.”
“Father? Why on earth should Father want to poison Mary. He’s devoted to her. He’s silly about her!”
“There are others in the house, are there not?”
“Old Uncle Roderick? Nonsense!”
“One does not know,” said Poirot, “he might be mentally afflicted. He might think it was his duty to poison a woman who might be a beautiful spy. Something like that.”
“That would be very interesting,” said Norma, momentarily diverted, and speaking in a perfectly natural manner. “Uncle Roderick was mixed up a good deal with spies and things in the last war. Who else is there? Sonia? I suppose she might be a beautiful spy, but she’s not quite my idea of one.”
“No, and there does not seem very much reason why she should wish to poison your stepmother. I suppose there might be servants, gardeners?”
“No, they just come in for the days. I don’t think—well, they wouldn’t be the kind of people to have any reason.”
“She might have done it herself.”
“Committed suicide, do you mean? Like the other one?”
“It is a possibility.”
“I can’t imagine Mary committing suicide. She’s far too sensible. And why should she want to?”
“Yes, you feel that if she did, she would put her head in the gas oven, or she would lie on a bed nicely arranged and take an overdose of sleeping draughts. Is that right?”
“Well, it would have been more natural. So you see,” said Norma earnestly, “it must have been me.”
“Aha,” said Poirot, “that interests me. You would almost, it would seem, prefer that it should be you. You are attracted to the idea that it was your hand who slipped the fatal dose of this, that or the other. Yes, you like the idea.”
“How dare you say such a thing! How can you?”