“Really, Monsieur Poirot, what an imagination you have got. What you are saying seems to me most unlikely.”
“It does not seem so unlikely to me,” said Poirot. “Children do see things. They are so often, you see, not expected to be where they are.”
“But surely when they go home and relate what they have seen?”
“They might not,” said Poirot. “They might not, you see, be sure of what they had seen. Especially if what they had seen had been faintly frightening to them. Children do not always go home and report a street accident they have seen, or some unexpected violence. Children keep their secrets very well. Keep them and think about them. Sometimes they like to feel that they know a secret, a secret which they are keeping to themselves.”
“They’d tell their mothers,” said Mr. Fullerton.
“I am not so sure of that,” said Poirot. “In my experience the things that children do not tell their mothers are quite numerous.”
“What interests you so much, may I know, about this case of Lesley Ferrier? The regrettable death of a young man by a violence which is so lamentably often amongst us nowadays?”
“I know nothing about him. But I wanted to know something about him because his is a violent death that occurred not many years ago. That might be important to me.”
“You know, Mr. Poirot,” said Mr. Fullerton, with some slight acerbity. “I really cannot quite make out why you have come to me, and in what you are really interested. You cannot surely suspect any tie-up between the death of Joyce Reynolds and the death of a young man of promise but slightly criminal activities who has been dead for some years?”
“One can suspect anything,” said Poirot. “One has to find out more.”
“Excuse me, what one has to have in all matters dealing with crime, is evidence.”
“You have perhaps heard that the dead girl Joyce was heard by several witnesses to say that she had with her own eyes witnessed a murder.”
“In a place like this,” said Mr. Fullerton, “one usually hears any rumour that may be going round. One usually hears it, too, if I may add these words, in a singularly exaggerated form not usually worthy of credence.”
“That also,” said Poirot, “is quite true. Joyce was, I gather, just thirteen years of age. A child of nine could remember something she had seen—a hit-and-run accident, a fight or a struggle with knives on a dark evening, or a schoolteacher who was strangled, say—all these things might leave a very strong impression on a child’s mind about which she would not speak, being uncertain, perhaps, of the actual facts she had seen, and mulling them over in her own mind. Forgetting about them even, possibly, until something happened to remind her. You agree that that is a possible happening?”
“Oh yes, yes, but I hardly—I think it is an extremely far-fetched supposition.”
“You had, also, I believe, a disappearance here of a foreign girl. Her name, I believe, was Olga or Sonia—I am not sure of the surname.”
“Olga Seminoff. Yes, indeed.”
“Not, I fear, a very reliable character?”
“No.”
“She was companion or nurse attendant to Mrs. Llewellyn-Smythe, was she not, whom you described to me just now? Mrs. Drake’s aunt—”
“Yes. She had had several girls in that position—two other foreign girls, I think, one of them with whom she quarrelled almost immediately, and another one who was nice but painfully stupid. Mrs. Llewellyn-Smythe was not one to suffer fools gladly. Olga, her last venture, seems to have suited her very well. She was not, if I remember rightly, a particularly attractive girl,” said Mr. Fullerton. “She was short, rather stocky, had rather a dour manner, and people in the neighbourhood did not like her very much.”
“But Mrs. Llewellyn-Smythe did like her,” suggested Poirot.
“She became very much attached to her—unwisely so, it seemed at one moment.”
“Ah, indeed.”
“I have no doubt,” said Mr. Fullerton, “that I am not telling you anything that you have not heard already. These things, as I say, go round the place like wildfire.”
“I understand that Mrs. Llewellyn-Smythe left a large sum of money to the girl.”
“A most surprising thing to happen,” said Mr. Fullerton. “Mrs. Llewellyn-Smythe had not changed her fundamental testamentary disposition for many years, except for adding new charities or altering legacies left void by death. Perhaps I am telling you what you know already, if you are interested in this matter. Her money had always been left jointly to her nephew, Hugo Drake, and his wife, who was also his first cousin, and so also niece to Mrs. Llewellyn-Smythe. If either of them predeceased her the money went to the survivor. A good many bequests were left to charities and to old servants. But what was alleged to be her final disposal of her property was made about three weeks before her death, and not, as heretofore, drawn up by our firm. It was a codicil written in her own handwriting. It included one or two charities—not so many as before—the old servants had no legacies at all, and the whole residue of her considerable fortune was left to Olga Seminoff in gratitude for the devoted service and affection she had shown her. A most astonishing disposition, one that seemed totally unlike anything Mrs. Llewellyn-Smythe had ever done before.”
“And then?” said Poirot.
“You have presumably heard more or less the developments. From the evidence of handwriting experts, it became clear that the codicil was a complete forgery. It bore only a faint resemblance to Mrs. Llewellyn-Smythe’s handwriting, no more than that. Mrs. Smythe had disliked the typewriter and had frequently got Olga to write letters of a personal nature, as far as possible copying her employer’s handwriting—sometimes, even, signing the letter with her employer’s signature. She had had plenty of practice in doing this. It seems that when Mrs. Llewellyn-Smythe died the girl went one step further and thought that she was proficient enough to make the handwriting acceptable as that of her employer. But that sort of thing won’t do with experts. No, indeed it won’t.”
“Proceedings were about to be taken to contest the document?”
“Quite so. There was, of course, the usual legal delay before the proceedings actually came to court. During that period the young lady lost her nerve and well, as you said yourself just now, she—disappeared.”
Thirteen
When Hercule Poirot had taken his leave and departed, Jeremy Fullerton sat before his desk drumming gently with his fingertips. His eyes, however, were far away—lost in thought.
He picked up a document in front of him and dropped his eyes down to it, but without focusing his glance. The discreet buzz of the house telephone caused him to pick up the receiver on his desk.
“Yes, Miss Miles?”
“Mr. Holden is here, sir.”
“Yes. Yes, his appointment, I believe was for nearly three quarters of an hour ago. Did he give any reason for having been so late?…Yes, yes. I quite see. Rather the same excuse he gave last time. Will you tell him I’ve seen another client, and I am now too short of time. Make an appointment with him for next week, will you? We can’t have this sort of thing going on.”
“Yes, Mr. Fullerton.”
He replaced the receiver and sat looking thoughtfully down at the document in front of him. He was still not reading it. His mind was going over events of the past. Two years—close on two years ago—and that strange little man this morning with his patent leather shoes and his big moustaches, had brought it back to him, asking all those questions.
Now he was going over in his own mind a conversation of nearly two years ago.
He saw again, sitting in the chair opposite him, a girl, a short, stocky figure—the olive brown skin, the dark red generous mouth, the heavy cheekbones and the fierceness of the blue eyes that looked into his beneath the heavy, beetling brows. A passionate face, a face full of vitality, a face that had known suffering—would probably always know suffering—but would never learn to accept suffering. The kind of woman who would fight and protest unt
il the end. Where was she now, he wondered? Somehow or other she had managed—what had she managed exactly? Who had helped her? Had anyone helped her? Somebody must have done so.
She was back again, he supposed, in some trouble-stricken spot in Central Europe where she had come from, where she belonged, where she had had to go back to because there was no other course for her to take unless she was content to lose her liberty.
Jeremy Fullerton was an upholder of the law. He believed in the law, he was contemptuous of many of the magistrates of today with their weak sentences, their acceptance of scholastic needs. The students who stole books, the young married women who denuded the supermarkets, the girls who filched money from their employers, the boys who wrecked telephone boxes, none of them in real need, none of them desperate, most of them had known nothing but overindulgence in bringing up and a fervent belief that anything they could not afford to buy was theirs to take. Yet along with his intrinsic belief in the administration of the law justly, Mr. Fullerton was a man who had compassion. He could be sorry for people. He could be sorry, and was sorry, for Olga Seminoff though he was quite unaffected by the passionate arguments she advanced for herself.
“I came to you for help. I thought you would help me. You were kind last year. You helped me with forms so that I could remain another year in England. So they say to me: ‘You need not answer any questions you do not wish to. You can be represented by a lawyer.’ So I come to you.”
“The circumstances you have instanced—” and Mr. Fullerton remembered how drily and coldly he had said that, all the more drily and coldly because of the pity that lay behind the dryness of the statement “—do not apply. In this case I am not at liberty to act for you legally. I am representing already the Drake family. As you know, I was Mrs. Llewellyn-Smythe’s solicitor.”
“But she is dead. She does not want a solicitor when she is dead.”
“She was fond of you,” said Mr. Fullerton.
“Yes, she was fond of me. That is what I am telling you. That is why she wanted to give me the money.”
“All her money?”
“Why not? Why not? She did not like her relations.”
“You are wrong. She was very fond of her niece and nephew.”
“Well, then, she may have liked Mr. Drake but she did not like Mrs. Drake. She found her very tiresome. Mrs. Drake interfered. She would not let Mrs. Llewellyn-Smythe do always what she liked. She would not let her eat the food she liked.”
“She is a very conscientious woman, and she tried to get her aunt to obey the doctor’s orders as to diet and not too much exercise and many other things.”
“People do not always want to obey a doctor’s orders. They do not want to be interfered with by relations. They like living their own lives and doing what they want and having what they want. She had plenty of money. She could have what she wanted! She could have as much as she liked of everything. She was rich—rich—rich, and she could do what she liked with her money. They have already quite enough money, Mr. and Mrs. Drake. They have a fine house and clothes and two cars. They are very well-to-do. Why should they have any more?”
“They were her only living relations.”
“She wanted me to have the money. She was sorry for me. She knew what I had been through. She knew about my father, arrested by the police and taken away. We never saw him again, my mother and I. And then my mother and how she died. All my family died. It is terrible, what I have endured. You do not know what it is like to live in a police state, as I have lived in it. No, no. You are on the side of the police. You are not on my side.”
“No,” Mr. Fullerton said, “I am not on your side. I am very sorry for what has happened to you, but you’ve brought this trouble about yourself.”
“That is not true! It is not true that I have done anything I should not do. What have I done? I was kind to her, I was nice to her. I brought her in lots of things that she was not supposed to eat. Chocolates and butter. All the time nothing but vegetable fats. She did not like vegetable fats. She wanted butter. She wanted lots of butter.”
“It’s not just a question of butter,” said Mr. Fullerton.
“I looked after her, I was nice to her! And so she was grateful. And then when she died and I find that in her kindness and her affection she has left a signed paper leaving all her money to me, then those Drakes come along and say I shall not have it. They say all sorts of things. They say I had a bad influence. And then they say worse things than that. Much worse. They say I wrote the Will myself. That is nonsense. She wrote it. She wrote it. And then she sent me out of the room. She got the cleaning woman and Jim the gardener. She said they had to sign the paper, not me. Because I was going to get the money. Why should not I have the money? Why should I not have some good luck in my life, some happiness? It seemed so wonderful. All the things I planned to do when I knew about it.”
“I have no doubt, yes, I have no doubt.”
“Why shouldn’t I have plans? Why should not I rejoice? I am going to be happy and rich and have all the things I want. What did I do wrong? Nothing. Nothing, I tell you. Nothing.”
“I have tried to explain to you,” said Mr. Fullerton.
“That is all lies. You say I tell lies. You say I wrote the paper myself. I did not write it myself. She wrote it. Nobody can say anything different.”
“Certain people say a good many things,” said Mr. Fullerton. “Now listen. Stop protesting and listen to me. It is true, is it not, that Mrs. Llewellyn-Smythe in the letters you wrote for her, often asked you to copy her handwriting as nearly as you could? That was because she had an old-fashioned idea that to write typewritten letters to people who are friends or with whom you have a personal acquaintance, is an act of rudeness. That is a survival from Victorian days. Nowadays nobody cares whether they receive handwritten letters or typewritten ones. But to Mrs. Llewellyn-Smythe that was discourtesy. You understand what I am saying?”
“Yes, I understand. And so she asks me. She says, ‘Now, Olga,’ she says. ‘These four letters you will answer as I have told you and that you have taken down in shorthand. But you will write them in handwriting and you will make the handwriting as close to mine as possible.’ And she told me to practise writing her handwriting, to notice how she made her a’s, and her b’s and her l’s and all the different letters. ‘So long as it is reasonably like my handwriting,’ she said, ‘that will do, and then you can sign my name. But I do not want people to think that I am no longer able to write my own letters. Although, as you know, the rheumatism in my wrist is getting worse and I find it more difficult, but I don’t want my personal letters typewritten.’”
“You could have written them in your ordinary handwriting,” said Mr. Fullerton, “and put a note at the end saying ‘per secretary’ or per initials if you liked.”
“She did not want me to do that. She wanted it to be thought that she wrote the letters herself.”
And that, Mr. Fullerton thought, could be true enough. It was very like Louise Llewellyn-Smythe. She was always passionately resentful of the fact that she could no longer do the things she used to do, that she could no longer walk far or go up hills quickly or perform certain actions with her hands, her right hand especially. She wanted to be able to say “I’m perfectly well, perfectly all right and there’s nothing I can’t do if I set my mind to it.” Yes, what Olga was telling him now was perfectly true, and because it was true it was one of the reasons why the codicil appended to the last Will properly drawn out and signed by Louise Llewellyn-Smythe had been accepted at first without suspicion. It was in his own office, Mr. Fullerton reflected, that suspicions had arisen because both he and his younger partner knew Mrs. Llewellyn-Smythe’s handwriting very well. It was young Cole who had first said,
“You know, I really can’t believe that Louise Llewellyn-Smythe wrote that codicil. I know she had arthritis lately but look at these specimens of her own writing that I’ve brought along from amongst her papers to show you. There’s so
mething wrong about that codicil.”
Mr. Fullerton had agreed that there was something wrong about it. He had said they would take expert opinion on this handwriting question. The answer had been quite definite. Separate opinions had not varied. The handwriting of the codicil was definitely not that of Louise Llewellyn-Smythe. If Olga had been less greedy, Mr. Fullerton thought, if she had been content to write a codicil beginning as this one had done—“Because of her great care and attention to me and the affection and kindness she has shown me, I leave—” That was how it had begun, that was how it could have begun, and if it had gone on to specify a good round sum of money left to the devoted au pair girl, the relations might have considered it overdone, but they would have accepted it without questioning. But to cut out the relations altogether, the nephew who had been his aunt’s residuary legatee in the last four wills she had made during a period of nearly twenty years, to leave everything to the stranger Olga Seminoff—that was not in Louise Llewellyn-Smythe’s character. In fact, a plea of undue influence could upset such a document anyway. No. She had been greedy, this hot, passionate child. Possibly Mrs. Llewellyn-Smythe had told her that some money would be left to her because of her kindness, because of her attention, because of a fondness the old lady was beginning to feel for this girl who fulfilled all her whims, who did whatever she asked her. And that had opened up a vista for Olga. She would have everything. The old lady should leave everything to her, and she would have all the money. All the money and the house and the clothes and the jewels. Everything. A greedy girl. And now retribution had caught up with her.
And Mr. Fullerton, against his will, against his legal instincts and against a good deal more, felt sorry for her. Very sorry for her. She had known suffering since she was a child, had known the rigours of a police state, had lost her parents, lost a brother and a sister and known injustice and fear, and it had developed in her a trait that she had no doubt been born with but which she had never been able so far to indulge. It had developed a childish passionate greed.