Aloud he said:
“I am quite sure of it. That was the order. Elsa, myself, Philip, Angela and Caroline. Does that help you at all?”
Poirot said:
“It all fits in. Listen. I want to arrange a meeting here. It will not, I think, be difficult….”
III
“Well?”
Elsa Dittisham said it almost eagerly—like a child.
“I want to ask you a question, madame.”
“Yes?”
Poirot said:
“After it was all over—the trial, I mean—did Meredith Blake ask you to marry him?”
Elsa stared. She looked contemptuous—almost bored.
“Yes—he did. Why?”
“Were you surprised?”
“Was I? I don’t remember.”
“What did you say?”
Elsa laughed. She said:
“What do you think I said? After Amyas—Meredith? It would have been ridiculous! It was stupid of him. He always was rather stupid.”
She smiled suddenly.
“He wanted, you know, to protect me—to ‘look after me’—that’s how he put it! He thought like everybody else that the Assizes had been a terrible ordeal for me. And the reporters! And the booing crowds! And all the mud that was slung at me.”
She brooded a minute. Then said:
“Poor old Meredith! Such an ass!” And laughed again.
IV
Once again Hercule Poirot encountered the shrewd penetrating glance of Miss Williams, and once again felt the years falling away and himself a meek and apprehensive little boy.
There was, he explained, a question he wished to ask.
Miss Williams intimated her willingness to hear what the question was.
Poirot said slowly, picking his words carefully:
“Angela Warren was injured as a very young child. In my notes I find two references to that fact. In one of them it is stated that Mrs. Crale threw a paperweight at the child. In the other that she attacked the baby with a crowbar. Which of those versions is the right one?”
Miss Williams replied briskly:
“I never heard anything about a crowbar. The paperweight is the correct story.”
“Who was your own informant?”
“Angela herself. She volunteered the information quite early.”
“What did she say exactly?”
“She touched her cheek and said: ‘Caroline did this when I was a baby. She threw a paperweight at me. Never refer to it, will you, because it upsets her dreadfully.’”
“Did Mrs. Crale herself ever mention the matter to you?”
“Only obliquely. She assumed that I knew the story. I remember her saying once: ‘I know you think I spoil Angela, but you see, I always feel there is nothing I can do to make up to her for what I did.’ And on another occasion she said: ‘To know you have permanently injured another human being is the heaviest burden anyone could have to bear.’”
“Thank you, Miss Williams. That is all I wanted to know.”
Cecilia Williams said sharply:
“I don’t understand you, Mr. Poirot. You showed Carla my account of the tragedy?”
Poirot nodded.
“And yet you are still—” She stopped.
Poirot said:
“Reflect a minute. If you were to pass a fishmonger’s and saw twelve fish laid out on his slab, you would think they were all real fish, would you not? But one of them might be stuffed fish.”
Miss Williams replied with spirit:
“Most unlikely and anyway—”
“Ah, unlikely, yes, but not impossible—because a friend of mine once took down a stuffed fish (it was his trade, you comprehend) to compare it with the real thing! And if you saw a bowl of zinnias in a drawing room in December you would say that they were false—but they might be real ones flown home from Baghdad.”
“What is the meaning of all this nonsense?” demanded Miss Williams.
“It is to show you that it is the eyes of the mind with which one really sees….”
V
Poirot slowed up a little as he approached the big block of flats overlooking Regent’s Park.
Really, when he came to think of it, he did not want to ask Angela Warren any questions at all. The only question he did want to ask her could wait….
No, it was really only his insatiable passion for symmetry that was bringing him here. Five people—there should be five questions! It was neater so. It rounded off the thing better.
Ah well—he would think of something.
Angela Warren greeted him with something closely approaching eagerness. She said:
“Have you found out anything? Have you got anywhere?”
Slowly Poirot nodded his head in his best China mandarin manner. He said:
“At last I make progress.”
“Philip Blake?” It was halfway between statement and a question.
“Mademoiselle, I do not wish to say anything at present. The moment has not yet come. What I will ask of you is to be so good as to come down to Handcross Manor. The others have consented.”
She said with a slight frown:
“What do you propose to do? Reconstruct something that happened sixteen years ago?”
“See it, perhaps, from a clearer angle. You will come?”
Angela Warren said slowly:
“Oh, yes, I’ll come. It will be interesting to see all those people again. I shall see them now, perhaps, from a clearer angle (as you put it) than I did then.”
“And you will bring with you the letter that you showed me?”
Angela Warren frowned.
“That letter is my own. I showed it to you for a good and sufficient reason, but I have no intention of allowing it to be read by strange and unsympathetic persons.”
“But you will allow yourself to be guided by me in this matter?”
“I will do nothing of the kind. I will bring the letter with me, but I shall use my own judgement which I venture to think is quite as good as yours.”
Poirot spread out his hands in a gesture of resignation. He got up to go. He said:
“You permit that I ask one little question?”
“What is it?”
“At the time of the tragedy, you had lately read, had you not, Somerset Maugham’s The Moon and Sixpence?”
Angela stared at him. Then she said:
“I believe—why, yes, that is quite true.” She looked at him with frank curiosity. “How did you know?”
“I want to show you, mademoiselle, that even in a small unimportant matter, I am something of a magician. There are things I know without having to be told.”
Three
RECONSTRUCTION
The afternoon sun shone into the laboratory at Handcross Manor. Some easy chairs and a settee had been brought into the room, but they served more to emphasize its forlorn aspect than to furnish it.
Slightly embarrassed, pulling at his moustache, Meredith Blake talked to Carla in a desultory way. He broke off once to say: “My dear, you are very like your mother—and yet unlike her, too.”
Carla asked: “How am I like her and how unlike?”
“You have her colouring and her way of moving, but you are—how shall I put it—more positive than she ever was.”
Philip Blake, a scowl creasing over his forehead, looked out of the window and drummed impatiently on the pane. He said:
“What’s the sense of all this? A perfectly fine Saturday afternoon—”
Hercule Poirot hastened to pour oil on troubled waters.
“Ah, I apologize—it is, I know, unpardonable to disarrange the golf. Mais voyons, Mr. Blake, this is the daughter of your best friend. You will stretch a point for her, will you not?”
The butler announced: “Miss Warren.”
Meredith went to welcome her. He said: “It’s good of you to spare the time, Angela. You’re busy, I know.”
He led her over to the window.
Carla said: “H
allo, Aunt Angela. I read your article in The Times this morning. It’s nice to have a distinguished relative.” She indicated the tall, square-jawed young man with the steady grey eyes. “This is John Rattery. He and I—hope—to be married.”
Angela Warren said: “Oh!—I didn’t know….”
Meredith went to greet the next arrival.
“Well, Miss Williams, it’s a good many years since we met.”
Thin, frail and indomitable, the elderly governess advanced up the room. Her eyes rested thoughtfully on Poirot for a minute, then they went to the tall, square-shouldered figure in the well-cut tweeds.
Angela Warren came forward to meet her and said with a smile: “I feel like a schoolgirl again.”
“I’m very proud of you, my dear,” said Miss Williams. “You’ve done me credit. This is Carla, I suppose? She won’t remember me. She was too young….”
Philip Blake said fretfully: “What is all this? Nobody told me—”
Hercule Poirot said: “I call it—me—an excursion into the past. Shall we not all sit down? Then we shall be ready when the last guest arrives. And when she is here we can proceed to our business—to lay the ghosts.”
Philip Blake exclaimed: “What tomfoolery is this? You’re not going to hold a séance, are you?”
“No, no. We are only going to discuss some events that happened long ago—to discuss them and, perhaps, to see more clearly the course of them. As to the ghosts, they will not materialize, but who is to say they are not here, in this room, although we cannot see them. Who is to say that Amyas and Caroline Crale are not here—listening?”
Philip Blake said: “Absurd nonsense—” and broke off as the door opened again and the butler announced Lady Dittisham.
Elsa Dittisham came in with that faint, bored insolence that was a characteristic of her. She gave Meredith a slight smile, stared coldly at Angela and Philip, and went over to a chair by the window a little apart from the others. She loosened the rich pale furs round her neck and let them fall back. She looked for a minute or two about the room, then at Carla, and the girl stared back, thoughtfully appraising the woman who had wrought the havoc in her parents’ lives. There was no animosity in her young earnest face, only curiosity.
Elsa said: “I am sorry if I am late, Mr. Poirot.”
“It was very good of you to come, madame.”
Cecilia Williams snorted ever so slightly. Elsa met the animosity in her eyes with a complete lack of interest. She said:
“I wouldn’t have known you, Angela. How long is it? Sixteen years?”
Hercule Poirot seized his opportunity.
“Yes, it is sixteen years since the events of which we are to speak, but let me first tell you why we are here.”
And in a few simple words he outlined Carla’s appeal to him and his acceptance of the task.
He went on quickly, ignoring the gathering storm visible on Philip’s face, and the shocked distaste on Meredith’s.
“I accepted that commision—I set to work to find out—the truth.”
Carla Lemarchant, in the big grandfather chair, heard Poirot’s words dimly, from a distance.
With her hand shielding her eyes she studied five faces, surreptitiously. Could she see any of these people committing murder? The exotic Elsa, the red-faced Philip, dear, nice, kind Mr. Meredith Blake, that grim tartar of a governess, the cool, competent Angela Warren?
Could she—if she tried hard—visualize one of them killing someone? Yes, perhaps—but it wouldn’t be the right kind of murder. She could picture Philip Blake, in an outburst of fury, strangling some women—yes, she could picture that…And she could picture Meredith Blake, threatening a burglar with a revolver—and letting it off by accident. And she could picture Angela Warren, also firing a revolver, but not by accident. With no personal feeling in the matter—the safety of the expedition depended on it! And Elsa, in some fantastic castle, saying from her couch of oriental silks: “Throw the wretch over the battlements!” All wild fancies—and not even in the wildest flight of fancy could she imagine little Miss Williams killing anybody at all! Another fantastic picture: “Did you ever kill anybody, Miss Williams?” “Go on with your arithmetic, Carla, and don’t ask silly questions. To kill anybody is very wicked.”
Carla thought: “I must be ill—and I must stop this. Listen, you fool, listen to that little man who says he knows.”
Hercule Poirot was talking.
“That was my task—to put myself in reverse gear, as it were, and go back through the years and discover what really happened.”
Philip Blake said: “We all know what happened. To pretend anything else is a swindle—that’s what it is, a bare-faced swindle. You’re getting money out of this girl on false pretences.”
Poirot did not allow himself to be angered. He said:
“You say, we all know what happened. You speak without reflection. The accepted version of certain facts is not necessarily the true one. On the face of it, for instance, you, Mr. Blake, disliked Caroline Crale. That is the accepted version of your attitude. But anyone with the least flair for psychology can perceive at once that the exact opposite was the truth. You were always violently attracted towards Caroline Crale. You resented the fact, and tried to conquer it by steadfastly telling yourself her defects and reiterating your dislike. In the same way, Mr. Meredith Blake had a tradition of devotion to Caroline Crale lasting over many years. In his story of the tragedy he represents himself as resenting Amyas Crale’s conduct on her account, but you have only to read carefully between the lines and you will see that the devotion of a lifetime had worn itself thin and that it was the young, beautiful Elsa Greer that was occupying his mind and thoughts.”
There was a splutter from Meredith, and Lady Dittisham smiled.
Poirot went on.
“I mention these matters only as illustrations, though they have their bearing on what happened. Very well, then, I start on my backward journey—to learn everything I can about the tragedy. I will tell you how I set about it. I talked to the Counsel who defended Caroline Crale, to the Junior Counsel for the Crown, to the old solicitor who had known the Crale family intimately, to the lawyer’s clerk who had been in court during the trial, to the police officer in charge of the case—and I came finally to the five eyewitnesses who had been upon the scene. And from all of these I put together a picture—a composite picture of a woman. And I learned these facts:
“That at no time did Caroline Crale protest her innocence (except in that one letter written to her daughter).
“That Caroline Crale showed no fear in the dock, that she showed, in fact, hardly any interest, that she adopted throughout a thoroughly defeatist attitude. That in prison she was quiet and serene. That in a letter she wrote to her sister immediately after the verdict, she expressed herself as acquiescent in the fate that had overtaken her. And in the opinion of everyone I talked to (with one notable exception) Caroline Crale was guilty.”
Philip Blake nodded his head. “Of course she was!”
Hercule Poirot said:
“But it was not my part to accept the verdict of others. I had to examine the evidence for myself. To examine the facts and to satisfy myself that the psychology of the case accorded itself with them. To do this I went over the police files carefully, and I also succeeded in getting five people who were on the spot to write me out their own accounts of the tragedy. These accounts were very valuable for they contained certain matter which the police files could not give me—that is to say: A, certain conversations and incidents which, from the police point of view, were not relevant; B, the opinions of the people themselves as to what Caroline Crale was thinking and feeling (not admissible legally as evidence); C, certain facts which had been deliberately withheld from the police.
“I was in a position now to judge the case for myself. There seems no doubt whatever that Caroline Crale had ample motive for the crime. She loved her husband, he had publicly admitted that he was about to leave her for another
woman, and by her own admission she was a jealous woman.
“To come from motives to means, an empty scent bottle that had contained coniine was found in her bureau drawer. There were no fingerprints upon it but hers. When asked about it by the police, she admitted taking it from this room we are in now. The coniine bottle here also had her fingerprints upon it. I questioned Mr. Meredith Blake as to the order in which the five people left this room on that day—for it seemed to me hardly conceivable that anyone should be able to help themselves to the poison whilst five people were in the room. The people left the room in this order—Elsa Greer, Meredith Blake, Angela Warren and Philip Blake, Amyas Crale, and lastly Caroline Crale. Moreover, Mr. Meredith Blake has his back to the room whilst he was waiting for Mrs. Crale to come out, so that it was impossible for him to see what she was doing. She had, that is to say, the opportunity. I am therefore satisfied that she did take the coniine. There is indirect confirmation of it. Mr. Meredith Blake said to me the other day: “I can remember standing here and smelling the jasmine through the open window.” But the month was September, and the jasmine creeper outside that window would have finished flowering. It is the ordinary jasmine which blooms in June and July. But the scent bottle found in her room and which contained the dregs of coniine had originally contained jasmine scent. I take it as certain, then, that Mrs. Crale decided to steal the coniine, and surreptitiously emptied out the scent from a bottle she had in her bag.
“I tested that a second time the other day when I asked Mr. Blake to shut his eyes and try and remember the order of leaving the room. A whiff of jasmine scent stimulated his memory immediately. We are all more influenced by smell than we know.
“So we come to the morning of the fatal day. So far the facts are not in dispute. Miss Greer’s sudden revealing of the fact that she and Mr. Crale contemplate marriage, Amyas Crale’s confirmation of that, and Caroline Crale’s deep distress. None of these things depend on the evidence of one witness only.
“On the following morning there is a scene between husband and wife in the library. The first thing that is overheard is Caroline Crale saying: “You and your women!” in a bitter voice, and finally going on to say, “Some day I’ll kill you.” Philip Blake overheard this from the hall. And Miss Greer overheard it from the terrace outside.