“Drink this,” he said. “It will do you good.”
Four
Mrs. Oliver put down the glass and wiped her lips.
“You were right,” she said. “That—that helped. I was getting hysterical.”
“You have had a great shock, I see now. When did this happen?”
“Last night. Was it only last night? Yes, yes, of course.”
“And you came to me.”
It was not quite a question, but it displayed a desire for more information than Poirot had yet had.
“You came to me—why?”
“I thought you could help,” said Mrs. Oliver. “You see, it’s—it’s not simple.”
“It could be and it could not,” said Poirot. “A lot depends. You must tell me more, you know. The police, I presume, are in charge. A doctor was, no doubt, called. What did he say?”
“There’s to be an inquest,” said Mrs. Oliver.
“Naturally.”
“Tomorrow or the next day.”
“This girl, Joyce, how old was she?”
“I don’t know exactly. I should think perhaps twelve or thirteen.”
“Small for her age?”
“No, no, I should think rather mature, perhaps. Lumpy,” said Mrs. Oliver.
“Well-developed? You mean sexy-looking?”
“Yes, that is what I mean. But I don’t think that was the kind of crime it was—I mean that would have been more simple, wouldn’t it?”
“It is the kind of crime,” said Poirot, “of which one reads every day in the paper. A girl who is attacked, a school child who is assaulted—yes, every day. This happened in a private house which makes it different, but perhaps not so different as all that. But all the same, I’m not sure yet that you’ve told me everything.”
“No, I don’t suppose I have,” said Mrs. Oliver. “I haven’t told you the reason, I mean, why I came to you.”
“You knew this Joyce, you knew her well?”
“I didn’t know her at all. I’d better explain to you, I think, just how I came to be there.”
“There is where?”
“Oh, a place called Woodleigh Common.”
“Woodleigh Common,” said Poirot thoughtfully. “Now where lately—” he broke off.
“It’s not very far from London. About—oh, thirty to forty miles, I think. It’s near Medchester. It’s one of those places where there are a few nice houses, but where a certain amount of new building has been done. Residential. A good school nearby, and people can commute from there to London or into Medchester. It’s quite an ordinary sort of place where people with what you might call everyday reasonable incomes live.”
“Woodleigh Common,” said Poirot again, thoughtfully.
“I was staying with a friend there. Judith Butler. She’s a widow. I went on a Hellenic cruise this year and Judith was on the cruise and we became friends. She’s got a daughter. A girl called Miranda who is twelve or thirteen. Anyway, she asked me to come and stay and she said friends of hers were giving this party for children, and it was to be a Hallowe’en party. She said perhaps I had some interesting ideas.”
“Ah,” said Poirot, “she did not suggest this time that you should arrange a murder hunt or anything of that kind?”
“Good gracious, no,” said Mrs. Oliver. “Do you think I should ever consider such a thing again?”
“I should think it unlikely.”
“But it happened, that’s what’s so awful,” said Mrs. Oliver. “I mean, it couldn’t have happened just because I was there, could it?”
“I do not think so. At least—Did any of the people at the party know who you were?”
“Yes,” said Mrs. Oliver. “One of the children said something about my writing books and that they liked murders. That’s how it—well—that’s what led to the thing—I mean to the thing that made me come to you.”
“Which you still haven’t told me.”
“Well, you see, at first I didn’t think of it. Not straight away. I mean, children do queer things sometimes. I mean there are queer children about, children who—well, once I suppose they would have been in mental homes and things, but they send them home now and tell them to lead ordinary lives or something, and then they go and do something like this.”
“There were some young adolescents there?”
“There were two boys, or youths as they always seem to call them in police reports. About sixteen to eighteen.”
“I suppose one of them might have done it. Is that what the police think?”
“They don’t say what they think,” said Mrs. Oliver, “but they looked as though they might think so.”
“Was this Joyce an attractive girl?”
“I don’t think so,” said Mrs. Oliver. “You mean attractive to boys, do you?”
“No,” said Poirot, “I think I meant—well, just the plain simple meaning of the word.”
“I don’t think she was a very nice girl,” said Mrs. Oliver, “not one you’d want to talk to much. She was the sort of girl who shows off and boasts. It’s a rather tiresome age, I think. It sounds unkind what I’m saying, but—”
“It is not unkind in murder to say what the victim was like,” said Poirot. “It is very, very necessary. The personality of the victim is the cause of many a murder. How many people were there in the house at the time?”
“You mean for the party and so on? Well, I suppose there were five or six women, some mothers, a schoolteacher, a doctor’s wife, or sister, I think, a couple of middle-aged married people, the two boys of sixteen to eighteen, a girl of fifteen, two or three of eleven or twelve—well that sort of thing. About twenty-five or thirty in all, perhaps.”
“Any strangers?”
“They all knew each other, I think. Some better than others. I think the girls were mostly in the same school. There were a couple of women who had come in to help with the food and the supper and things like that. When the party ended, most of the mothers went home with their children. I stayed behind with Judith and a couple of others to help Rowena Drake, the woman who gave the party, to clear up a bit, so the cleaning women who came in the morning wouldn’t have so much mess to deal with. You know, there was a lot of flour about, and paper caps out of crackers and different things. So we swept up a bit, and we got to the library last of all. And that’s when—when we found her. And then I remembered what she’d said.”
“What who had said?”
“Joyce.”
“What did she say? We are coming to it now, are we not? We are coming to the reason why you are here?”
“Yes. I thought it wouldn’t mean anything to—oh, to a doctor or the police or anyone, but I thought it might mean something to you.”
“Eh bien,” said Poirot, “tell me. Was this something Joyce said at the party?”
“No—earlier in the day. That afternoon when we were fixing things up. It was after they’d talked about my writing murder stories and Joyce said ‘I saw a murder once’ and her mother or somebody said ‘Don’t be silly, Joyce, saying things like that’ and one of the older girls said ‘You’re just making it up’ and Joyce said ‘I did. I saw it I tell you. I did. I saw someone do a murder,’ but no one believed her. They just laughed and she got very angry.”
“Did you believe her?”
“No, of course not.”
“I see,” said Poirot, “yes, I see.” He was silent for some moments, tapping a finger on the table. Then he said: “I wonder—she gave no details—no names?”
“No. She went on boasting and shouting a bit and being angry because most of the other girls were laughing at her. The mothers, I think, and the older people, were rather cross with her. But the girls and the younger boys just laughed at her! They said things like ‘Go on, Joyce, when was this? Why did you never tell us about it?’ And Joyce said, ‘I’d forgotten all about it, it was so long ago.’”
“Aha! Did she say how long ago?”
“‘Years ago,’” she said. You know, in rat
her a would-be grown-up way.
“‘Why didn’t you go and tell the police then?’ one of the girls said. Ann, I think, or Beatrice. Rather a smug, superior girl.”
“Aha, and what did she say to that?”
“She said: ‘Because I didn’t know at the time it was a murder.’”
“A very interesting remark,” said Poirot, sitting up rather straighter in his chair.
“She’d got a bit mixed up by then, I think,” said Mrs. Oliver. “You know, trying to explain herself and getting angry because they were all teasing her.
“They kept asking her why she hadn’t gone to the police, and she kept on saying ‘Because I didn’t know then that it was a murder. It wasn’t until afterwards that it came to me quite suddenly that that was what I had seen.’”
“But nobody showed any signs of believing her—and you yourself did not believe her—but when you came across her dead you suddenly felt that she might have been speaking the truth?”
“Yes, just that. I didn’t know what I ought to do, or what I could do. But then, later, I thought of you.”
Poirot bowed his head gravely in acknowledgement. He was silent for a moment or two, then he said:
“I must pose to you a serious question, and reflect before you answer it. Do you think that this girl had really seen a murder? Or do you think that she merely believed that she had seen a murder?”
“The first, I think,” said Mrs. Oliver. “I didn’t at the time. I just thought that she was vaguely remembering something she had once seen and was working it up to make it sound important and exciting. She became very vehement, saying, ‘I did see it, I tell you. I did see it happen.’”
“And so.”
“And so I’ve come along to you,” said Mrs. Oliver, “because the only way her death makes sense is that there really was a murder and that she was a witness to it.”
“That would involve certain things. It would involve that one of the people who were at the party committed the murder, and that that same person must also have been there earlier that day and have heard what Joyce said.”
“You don’t think I’m just imagining things, do you?” said Mrs. Oliver. “Do you think that it is all just my very far-fetched imagination?”
“A girl was murdered,” said Poirot. “Murdered by someone who had strength enough to hold her head down in a bucket of water. An ugly murder and a murder that was committed with what we might call, no time to lose. Somebody was threatened, and whoever it was struck as soon as it was humanly possible.”
“Joyce could not have known who it was who did the murder she saw,” said Mrs. Oliver. “I mean she wouldn’t have said what she did if there was someone actually in the room who was concerned.”
“No,” said Poirot, “I think you are right there. She saw a murder, but she did not see the murderer’s face. We have to go beyond that.”
“I don’t understand exactly what you mean.”
“It could be that someone who was there earlier in the day and heard Joyce’s accusation knew about the murder, knew who committed the murder, perhaps was closely involved with that person. It may have been that someone thought he was the only person who knew what his wife had done, or his mother or his daughter or his son. Or it might have been a woman who knew what her husband or mother or daughter or son had done. Someone who thought that no one else knew. And then Joyce began talking….”
“And so—”
“Joyce had to die?”
“Yes. What are you going to do?”
“I have just remembered,” said Hercule Poirot, “why the name of Woodleigh Common was familiar to me.”
Five
Hercule Poirot looked over the small gate which gave admission to Pine Crest. It was a modern, perky little house, nicely built. Hercule Poirot was slightly out of breath. The small, neat house in front of him was very suitably named. It was on a hill top, and the hill top was planted with a few sparse pines. It had a small neat garden and a large elderly man was trundling along a path a big tin galvanized waterer.
Superintendent Spence’s hair was now grey all over instead of having a neat touch of grey hair at the temples. He had not shrunk much in girth. He stopped trundling his can and looked at the visitor at the gate. Hercule Poirot stood there without moving.
“God bless my soul,” said Superintendent Spence. “It must be. It can’t be but it is. Yes, it must be. Hercule Poirot, as I live.”
“Aha,” said Hercule Poirot, “you know me. That is gratifying.”
“May your moustaches never grow less,” said Spence.
He abandoned the watering can and came down to the gate.
“Diabolical weeds,” he said. “And what brings you down here?”
“What has brought me to many places in my time,” said Hercule Poirot, “and what once a good many years ago brought you to see me. Murder.”
“I’ve done with murder,” said Spence, “except in the case of weeds. That’s what I’m doing now. Applying weed killer. Never so easy as you think, something’s always wrong, usually the weather. Mustn’t be too wet, mustn’t be too dry and all the rest of it. How did you know where to find me?” he asked as he unlatched the gate and Poirot passed through.
“You sent me a Christmas card. It had your new address notified on it.”
“Ah yes, so I did. I’m old-fashioned, you know. I like to send round cards at Christmas time to a few old friends.”
“I appreciate that,” said Poirot.
Spence said, “I’m an old man now.”
“We are both old men.”
“Not much grey in your hair,” said Spence.
“I attend to that with a bottle,” said Hercule Poirot. “There is no need to appear in public with grey hair unless you wish to do so.”
“Well, I don’t think jet black would suit me,” said Spence.
“I agree,” said Poirot. “You look most distinguished with grey hair.”
“I should never think of myself as a distinguished man.”
“I think of you as such. Why have you come to live in Woodleigh Common?”
“As a matter of fact, I came here to join forces with a sister of mine. She lost her husband, her children are married and living abroad, one in Australia and the other in South Africa. So I moved in here. Pensions don’t go far nowadays, but we do pretty comfortably living together. Come and sit down.”
He led the way on to the small glazed-in verandah where there were chairs and a table or two. The autumn sun fell pleasantly upon this retreat.
“What shall I get you?” said Spence. “No fancy stuff here, I’m afraid. No blackcurrant or rose hip syrup or any of your patent things. Beer? Or shall I get Elspeth to make you a cup of tea? Or I can do you a shandy or Coca-Cola or some cocoa if you like it. My sister, Elspeth, is a cocoa drinker.”
“You are very kind. For me, I think a shandy. The ginger beer and the beer? That is right, is it not?”
“Absolutely so.”
He went into the house and returned shortly afterwards carrying two large glass mugs. “I’m joining you,” he said.
He drew a chair up to the table and sat down, placing the two glasses in front of himself and Poirot.
“What was it you said just now?” he said, raising his glass. “We won’t say ‘Here’s to crime.’ I’ve done with crime, and if you mean the crime I think you do, in fact which I think you have to do, because I don’t recall any other crime just lately. I don’t like the particular form of murder we’ve just had.”
“No. I do not think you would do so.”
“We are talking about the child who had her head shoved into a bucket?”
“Yes,” said Poirot, “that is what I am talking about.”
“I don’t know why you come to me,” said Spence. “I’m nothing to do with the police nowadays. All that’s over many years ago.”
“Once a policeman,” said Hercule Poirot, “always a policeman. That is to say, there is always the point of view of the
policeman behind the point of view of the ordinary man. I know, I who talk to you. I, too, started in the police force in my country.”
“Yes, so you did. I remember now your telling me. Well, I suppose one’s outlook is a bit slanted, but it’s a long time since I’ve had any active connection.”
“But you hear the gossip,” said Poirot. “You have friends of your own trade. You will hear what they think or suspect or what they know.”
Spence sighed.
“One knows too much,” he said, “that is one of the troubles nowadays. There is a crime, a crime of which the pattern is familiar, and you know, that is to say the active police officers know, pretty well who’s probably done that crime. They don’t tell the newspapers but they make their inquiries, and they know. But whether they’re going to get any further than that—well, things have their difficulties.”
“You mean the wives and the girl friends and the rest of it?”
“Partly that, yes. In the end, perhaps, one gets one’s man. Sometimes a year or two passes. I’d say, you know, roughly, Poirot, that more girls nowadays marry wrong ’uns than they ever used to in my time.”
Hercule Poirot considered, pulling his moustaches.
“Yes,” he said, “I can see that that might be so. I suspect that girls have always been partial to the bad lots, as you say, but in the past there were safeguards.”
“That’s right. People were looking after them. Their mothers looked after them. Their aunts and their older sisters looked after them. Their younger sisters and brothers knew what was going on. Their fathers were not averse to kicking the wrong young men out of the house. Sometimes, of course, the girls used to run away with one of the bad lots. Nowadays there’s no need even to do that. Mother doesn’t know who the girl’s out with, father’s not told who the girl is out with, brothers know who the girl is out with but they think ‘more fool her.’ If the parents refuse consent, the couple go before a magistrate and manage to get permission to marry, and then when the young man who everyone knows is a bad lot proceeds to prove to everybody, including his wife, that he is a bad lot, the fat’s in the fire! But love’s love; the girl doesn’t want to think that her Henry has these revolting habits, these criminal tendencies, and all the rest of it. She’ll lie for him, swear black’s white for him and everything else. Yes, it’s difficult. Difficult for us, I mean. Well, there’s no good going on saying things were better in the old days. Perhaps we only thought so. Anyway, Poirot, how did you get yourself mixed up in all this? This isn’t your part of the country, is it? Always thought you lived in London. You used to when I knew you.”