“Yes, sir. Took a drop too much, he did. And where he got the money from, I don’t know. Of course he used to get tips now and again on the quay helping people with boats or with parking their cars. Very cunning he was at hiding his money from me. Yes, I’m afraid as he’d had a drop too much. Missed his footing, I’d say, getting off his boat on to the quay. So he fell in and was drowned. His body was washed up down at Helmmouth the next day. ’Tis a wonder, as you might say, that it never happened before, him being ninety-two and half-blinded anyway.”
“The fact remains that it did not happen before—”
“Ah, well, accidents happen, sooner or later—”
“Accident,” mused Poirot. “I wonder.”
He got up. He murmured:
“I should have guessed. Guessed long ago. The child practically told me—”
“I beg your pardon, sir?”
“It is nothing,” said Poirot. “Once more I tender you my condolences both on the death of your daughter and on that of your father.”
He shook hands with them both and left the cottage. He said to himself:
“I have been foolish—very foolish. I have looked at everything the wrong way round.”
“Hi—mister.”
It was a cautious whisper. Poirot looked round. The fat child Marilyn was standing in the shadow of the cottage wall. She beckoned him to her and spoke in a whisper.
“Mum don’t know everything,” she said. “Marlene didn’t get that scarf off of the lady down at the cottage.”
“Where did she get it?”
“Bought it in Torquay. Bought some lipstick, too, and some scent—Newt in Paris—funny name. And a jar of foundation cream, what she’d read about in an advertisement.” Marilyn giggled. “Mum doesn’t know. Hid it at the back of her drawer, Marlene did, under her winter vests. Used to go into the convenience at the bus stop and do herself up, when she went to the pictures.”
Marilyn giggled again.
“Mum never knew.”
“Didn’t your mother find these things after your sister died?”
Marilyn shook her fair fluffy head.
“No,” she said. “I got ’em now—in my drawer. Mum doesn’t know.”
Poirot eyed her consideringly, and said:
“You seem a very clever girl, Marilyn.”
Marilyn grinned rather sheepishly.
“Miss Bird says it’s no good my trying for the grammar school.”
“Grammar school is not everything,” said Poirot. “Tell me, how did Marlene get the money to buy these things?”
Marilyn looked with close attention at a drainpipe.
“Dunno,” she muttered.
“I think you do know,” said Poirot.
Shamelessly he drew out a half crown from his pocket and added another half crown to it.
“I believe,” he said, “there is a new, very attractive shade of lipstick called ‘Carmine Kiss.’”
“Sounds smashing,” said Marilyn, her hand advanced towards the five shillings. She spoke in a rapid whisper. “She used to snoop about a bit, Marlene did. Used to see goings-on—you know what. Marlene would promise not to tell and then they’d give her a present, see?”
Poirot relinquished the five shillings.
“I see,” he said.
He nodded to Marilyn and walked away. He murmured again under his breath, but this time with intensified meaning:
“I see.”
So many things now fell into place. Not all of it. Not clear yet by any means—but he was on the right track. A perfectly clear trail all the way if only he had had the wit to see it. That first conversation with Mrs. Oliver, some casual words of Michael Weyman’s, the significant conversation with old Merdell on the quay, an illuminating phrase spoken by Miss Brewis—the arrival of Etienne de Sousa.
A public telephone box stood adjacent to the village post office. He entered it and rang up a number. A few minutes later he was speaking to Inspector Bland.
“Well, M. Poirot, where are you?”
“I am here, in Nassecombe.”
“But you were in London yesterday afternoon?”
“It only takes three and a half hours to come here by a good train,” Poirot pointed out. “I have a question for you.”
“Yes?”
“What kind of a yacht did Etienne de Sousa have?”
“Maybe I can guess what you’re thinking, M. Poirot, but I assure you there was nothing of that kind. It wasn’t fitted up for smuggling if that’s what you mean. There were no fancy hidden partitions or secret cubbyholes. We’d have found them if there had been. There was nowhere on it you could have stowed away a body.”
“You are wrong, mon cher, that is not what I mean. I only asked what kind of yacht, big or small?”
“Oh, it was very fancy. Must have cost the earth. All very smart, newly painted, luxury fittings.”
“Exactly,” said Poirot. He sounded so pleased that Inspector Bland felt quite surprised.
“What are you getting at, M. Poirot?” he asked.
“Etienne de Sousa,” said Poirot, “is a rich man. That, my friend, is very significant.”
“Why?” demanded Inspector Bland.
“It fits in with my latest idea,” said Poirot.
“You’ve got an idea, then?”
“Yes. At last I have an idea. Up to now I have been very stupid.”
“You mean we’ve all been very stupid.”
“No,” said Poirot, “I mean specially myself. I had the good fortune to have a perfectly clear trail presented to me, and I did not see it.”
“But now you’re definitely on to something?”
“I think so, yes.”
“Look here, M. Poirot—”
But Poirot had rung off. After searching his pockets for available change, he put through a personal call to Mrs. Oliver at her London number.
“But do not,” he hastened to add, when he made his demand, “disturb the lady to answer the telephone if she is at work.”
He remembered how bitterly Mrs. Oliver had once reproached him for interrupting a train of creative thought and how the world in consequence had been deprived of an intriguing mystery centring round an old-fashioned long-sleeved woollen vest. The exchange, however, was unable to appreciate his scruples.
“Well,” it demanded, “do you want a personal call or don’t you?”
“I do,” said Poirot, sacrificing Mrs. Oliver’s creative genius upon the altar of his own impatience. He was relieved when Mrs. Oliver spoke. She interrupted his apologies.
“It’s splendid that you’ve rung me up,” she said. “I was just going out to give a talk on How I Write My Books. Now I can get my secretary to ring up and say I am unavoidably detained.”
“But, Madame, you must not let me prevent—”
“It’s not a case of preventing,” said Mrs. Oliver joyfully. “I’d have made the most awful fool of myself. I mean, what can you say about how you write books? What I mean is, first you’ve got to think of something, and when you’ve thought of it you’ve got to force yourself to sit down and write it. That’s all. It would have taken me just three minutes to explain that, and then the Talk would have been ended and everyone would have been very fed up. I can’t imagine why everybody is always so keen for authors to talk about writing. I should have thought it was an author’s business to write, not talk.”
“And yet it is about how you write that I want to ask you.”
“You can ask,” said Mrs. Oliver; “but I probably shan’t know the answer. I mean one just sits down and writes. Half a minute, I’ve got a frightfully silly hat on for the Talk—and I must take it off. It scratches my forehead.” There was a momentary pause and then the voice of Mrs. Oliver resumed in a relieved voice, “Hats are really only a symbol, nowadays, aren’t they? I mean, one doesn’t wear them for sensible reasons anymore; to keep one’s head warm, or shield one from the sun, or hide one’s face from people one doesn’t want to meet. I beg your pardon,
M. Poirot, did you say something?”
“It was an ejaculation only. It is extraordinary,” said Poirot, and his voice was awed. “Always you give me ideas. So also did my friend Hastings whom I have not seen for many, many years. You have given me now the clue to yet another piece of my problem. But no more of all that. Let me ask you instead my question. Do you know an atom scientist, Madame?”
“Do I know an atom scientist?” said Mrs. Oliver in a surprised voice. “I don’t know. I suppose I may. I mean, I know some professors and things. I’m never quite sure what they actually do.”
“Yet you made an atom scientist one of the suspects in your Murder Hunt?”
“Oh, that! That was just to be up to date. I mean, when I went to buy presents for my nephews last Christmas, there was nothing but science fiction and the stratosphere and supersonic toys, and so I thought when I started on the Murder Hunt, ‘Better have an atom scientist as the chief suspect and be modern.’ After all, if I’d needed a little technical jargon for it I could always have got it from Alec Legge.”
“Alec Legge—the husband of Sally Legge? Is he an atom scientist?”
“Yes, he is. Not Harwell. Wales somewhere. Cardiff. Or Bristol, is it? It’s just a holiday cottage they have on the Helm. Yes, so, of course, I do know an atom scientist after all.”
“And it was meeting him at Nasse House that probably put the idea of an atom scientist into your head? But his wife is not Yugoslavian.”
“Oh, no,” said Mrs. Oliver, “Sally is English as English. Surely you realize that?”
“Then what put the idea of the Yugoslavian wife into your head?”
“I really don’t know…Refugees perhaps? Students? All those foreign girls at the hostel trespassing through the woods and speaking broken English.”
“I see…Yes, I see now a lot of things.”
“It’s about time,” said Mrs. Oliver.
“Pardon?”
“I said it was about time,” said Mrs. Oliver. “That you did see things, I mean. Up to now you don’t seem to have done anything.” Her voice held reproach.
“One cannot arrive at things all in a moment,” said Poirot, defending himself. “The police,” he added, “have been completely baffled.”
“Oh, the police,” said Mrs. Oliver. “Now if a woman were the head of Scotland Yard….”
Recognizing this well-known phrase, Poirot hastened to interrupt.
“The matter has been complex,” he said. “Extremely complex. But now—I tell you this in confidence—but now I arrive!”
Mrs. Oliver remained unimpressed.
“I daresay,” she said; “but in the meantime there have been two murders.”
“Three,” Poirot corrected her.
“Three murders? Who’s the third?”
“An old man called Merdell,” said Hercule Poirot.
“I haven’t heard of that one,” said Mrs. Oliver. “Will it be in the paper?”
“No,” said Poirot, “up to now no one has suspected that it was anything but an accident.”
“And it wasn’t an accident?”
“No,” said Poirot, “it was not an accident.”
“Well, tell me who did it—did them, I mean—or can’t you over the telephone?”
“One does not say these things over the telephone,” said Poirot.
“Then I shall ring off,” said Mrs. Oliver. “I can’t bear it.”
“Wait a moment,” said Poirot, “there is something else I wanted to ask you. Now, what was it?”
“That’s a sign of age,” said Mrs. Oliver. “I do that, too. Forget things—”
“There was something, some little point—it worried me. I was in the boathouse….”
He cast his mind back. That pile of comics. Marlene’s phrases scrawled on the margin. “Albert goes with Doreen.” He had had a feeling that there was something lacking—that there was something he must ask Mrs. Oliver.
“Are you still there, M. Poirot?” demanded Mrs. Oliver. At the same time the operator requested more money.
These formalities completed, Poirot spoke once more.
“Are you still there, Madame?”
“I’m still here,” said Mrs. Oliver. “Don’t let’s waste any more money asking each other if we’re there. What is it?”
“It is something very important. You remember your Murder Hunt?”
“Well, of course I remember it. It’s practically what we’ve just been talking about, isn’t it?”
“I made one grave mistake,” said Poirot. “I never read your synopsis for competitors. In the gravity of discovering a murder it did not seem to matter. I was wrong. It did matter. You are a sensitive person, Madame. You are affected by your atmosphere, by the personalities of the people you meet. And these are translated into your work. Not recognizably so, but they are the inspiration from which your fertile brain draws its creations.”
“That’s very nice flowery language,” said Mrs. Oliver. “But what exactly do you mean?”
“That you have always known more about this crime than you have realized yourself. Now for the question I want to ask you—two questions actually; but the first is very important. Did you, when you first began to plan your Murder Hunt, mean the body to be discovered in the boathouse?”
“No, I didn’t.”
“Where did you intend it to be?”
“In that funny little summerhouse tucked away in the rhododendrons near the house. I thought it was just the place. But then someone, I can’t remember who exactly, began insisting that it should be found in the Folly. Well, that, of course, was an absurd idea! I mean, anyone could have strolled in there quite casually and come across it without having followed a single clue. People are so stupid. Of course I couldn’t agree to that.”
“So, instead, you accepted the boathouse?”
“Yes, that’s just how it happened. There was really nothing against the boathouse though I still thought the little summerhouse would have been better.”
“Yes, that is the technique you outlined to me that first day. There is one thing more. Do you remember telling me that there was a final clue written on one of the ‘comics’ that Marlene was given to amuse her?”
“Yes, of course.”
“Tell me, was it something like” (he forced his memory back to a moment when he had stood reading various scrawled phrases): “Albert goes with Doreen; Georgie Porgie kisses hikers in the wood; Peter pinches girls in the Cinema?”
“Good gracious me, no,” said Mrs. Oliver in a slightly shocked voice. “It wasn’t anything silly like that. No, mine was a perfectly straightforward clue.” She lowered her voice and spoke in mysterious tones. “Look in the hiker’s rucksack.”
“Epatant!” cried Poirot. “Epatant! Of course, the ‘comic’ with that on it would have to be taken away. It might have given someone ideas!”
“The rucksack, of course, was on the floor by the body and—”
“Ah, but it is another rucksack of which I am thinking.”
“You’re confusing me with all these rucksacks,” Mrs. Oliver complained. “There was only one in my murder story. Don’t you want to know what was in it?”
“Not in the least,” said Poirot. “That is to say,” he added politely, “I should be enchanted to hear, of course, but—”
Mrs. Oliver swept over the “but.”
“Very ingenious, I think,” she said, the pride of authorship in her voice. “You see, in Marlene’s haversack, which was supposed to be the Yugoslavian wife’s haversack, if you understand what I mean—”
“Yes, yes,” said Poirot, preparing himself to be lost in fog once more.
“Well, in it was the bottle of medicine containing poison with which the country squire poisoned his wife. You see, the Yugoslavian girl had been over here training as a nurse and she’d been in the house when Colonel Blunt poisoned his first wife for her money. And she, the nurse, had got hold of the bottle and taken it away, and then come back to blackmail him. T
hat, of course, is why he killed her. Does that fit in, M. Poirot?”
“Fit in with what?”
“With your ideas,” said Mrs. Oliver.
“Not at all,” said Poirot, but added hastily, “All the same, my felicitations, Madame. I am sure your Murder Hunt was so ingenious that nobody won the prize.”
“But they did,” said Mrs. Oliver. “Quite late, about seven o’clock. A very dogged old lady supposed to be quite gaga. She got through all the clues and arrived at the boathouse triumphantly, but of course the police were there. So then she heard about the murder, and she was the last person at the whole fête to hear about it, I should imagine. Anyway, they gave her the prize.” She added with satisfaction, “That horrid young man with the freckles who said I drank like a fish never got farther than the camellia garden.”
“Some day, Madame,” said Poirot, “you shall tell me this story of yours.”
“Actually,” said Mrs. Oliver, “I’m thinking of turning it into a book. It would be a pity to waste it.”
And it may here be mentioned that some three years later Hercule Poirot read The Woman in the Wood, by Ariadne Oliver, and wondered whilst he read it why some of the persons and incidents seemed to him vaguely familiar.
Eighteen
The sun was setting when Poirot came to what was called officially Mill Cottage, and known locally as the Pink Cottage down by Lawder’s Creek. He knocked on the door and it was flung open with such suddenness that he started back. The angry-looking young man in the doorway stared at him for a moment without recognizing him. Then he gave a short laugh.
“Hallo,” he said, “it’s the sleuth. Come in, M. Poirot. I’m packing up.”
Poirot accepted the invitation and stepped into the cottage. It was plainly, rather badly furnished. And Alec Legge’s personal possessions were at the moment taking up a disproportionate amount of room. Books, papers and articles of stray clothing were strewn all around, an open suitcase stood on the floor.
“The final breakup of the ménage,” said Alec Legge. “Sally has cleared out. I expect you know that.”