After offering his guest a cigarette and lighting his own pipe, Alistair Blunt came to the point quite simply and directly.
He said:
“There’s a good deal that I’m not satisfied about. I’m referring, of course, to this Sainsbury Seale woman. For reasons of their own—reasons no doubt which are perfectly justified—the authorities have called off the hunt. I don’t know exactly who Albert Chapman is or what he’s doing—but whatever it is, it’s something pretty vital and it’s the sort of business that might land him in a tight spot. I don’t know the ins and outs of it, but the P.M. did just mention that they can’t afford any publicity whatever about this case and that the sooner it fades out of the public’s memory the better.
“That’s quite O.K. That’s the official view, and they know what’s necessary. So the police have got their hands tied.”
He leaned forward in his chair.
“But I want to know the truth, M. Poirot. And you’re the man to find it out for me. You aren’t hampered by officialdom.”
“What do you want me to do, M. Blunt?”
“I want you to find this woman—Sainsbury Seale.”
“Alive or dead?”
Alistair Blunt’s eyebrows rose.
“You think it’s possible that she is dead?”
Hercule Poirot was silent for a minute or two, then he said, speaking slowly and with weight:
“If you want my opinion—but it is only an opinion, remember—then, yes, I think she is dead….”
“Why do you think so?”
Hercule Poirot smiled slightly.
He said:
“It would not make sense to you if I said it was because of a pair of unworn stockings in a drawer.”
Alistair Blunt stared at him curiously.
“You’re an odd man, M. Poirot.”
“I am very odd. That is to say, I am methodical, orderly and logical—and I do not like distorting facts to support a theory—that, I find—is unusual!”
Alistair Blunt said:
“I’ve been turning the whole thing over in my mind—it takes me a little time always to think a thing out. And the whole business is deuced odd! I mean—that dentist chap shooting himself, and then this Chapman woman packed away in her own fur chest with her face smashed in. It’s nasty! It’s damned nasty! I can’t help feeling that there’s something behind it all.”
Poirot nodded.
Blunt said:
“And you know—the more I think of it—I’m quite sure that woman never knew my wife. It was just a pretext to speak to me. But why? What good did it do her? I mean—bar a small subscription—and even that was made out to the society, not to her personally. And yet I do feel—that—that it was engineered—just meeting me on the steps of the house. It was all so pat. So suspiciously well-timed! But why? That’s what I keep asking myself—why?”
“It is indeed the word—why? I too ask myself—and I cannot see it—no, I cannot see it.”
“You’ve no ideas at all on the subject?”
Poirot waved an exasperated hand.
“My ideas are childish in the extreme. I tell myself, it was perhaps a ruse to indicate you to someone—to point you out. But that again is absurd—you are quite a well-known man—and anyway how much more simple to say ‘See, that is he—the man who entered now by that door.’”
“And anyway,” said Blunt, “why should anyone want to point me out?”
“Mr. Blunt, think back once more on your time that morning in the dentist’s chair. Did nothing that Morley said strike an unusual note? Is there nothing at all that you can remember which might help as a clue?”
Alistair Blunt frowned in an effort of memory. Then he shook his head.
“I’m sorry. I can’t think of anything.”
“You’re quite sure he didn’t mention this woman—this Miss Sainsbury Seale?”
“No.”
“Or the other woman—Mrs. Chapman?”
“No—no—we didn’t speak of people at all. We mentioned roses, gardens needing rain, holidays—nothing else.”
“And no one came into the room while you were there?”
“Let me see—no, I don’t think so. On other occasions I seem to remember a young woman being there—fair-haired girl. But she wasn’t there this time. Oh, another dentist fellow came in, I remember—the fellow with an Irish accent.”
“What did he say or do?”
“Just asked Morley some question and went out again. Morley was a bit short with him, I fancy. He was only there a minute or so.”
“And there is nothing else you can remember? Nothing at all?”
“No. He was absolutely normal.”
Hercule Poirot said thoughtfully:
“I, too, found him absolutely normal.”
There was a long pause. Then Poirot said:
“Do you happen to remember, Monsieur, a young man who was in the waiting room downstairs with you that morning?”
Alistair Blunt frowned.
“Let me see—yes, there was a young man—rather restless he was. I don’t remember him particularly, though. Why?”
“Would you know him again if you saw him?”
Blunt shook his head.
“I hardly glanced at him.”
“He didn’t try to enter into conversation with you at all?”
“No.”
Blunt looked with frank curiosity at the other.
“What’s the point? Who is this young man?”
“His name is Howard Raikes.”
Poirot watched keenly for any reaction, but he saw none.
“Ought I to know his name? Have I met him elsewhere?”
“I do not think you have met him. He is a friend of your niece, Miss Olivera’s.”
“Oh, one of Jane’s friends.”
“Her mother, I gather, does not approve of the friendship.”
Alistair Blunt said absently:
“I don’t suppose that will cut any ice with Jane.”
“So seriously does her mother regard the friendship that I gather she brought her daughter over from the States on purpose to get her away from this young man.”
“Oh!” Blunt’s face registered comprehension. “It’s that fellow, is it?”
“Aha, you become more interested now.”
“He’s a most undesirable young fellow in every way, I believe. Mixed up in a lot of subversive activities.”
“I understand from Miss Olivera that he made an appointment that morning in Queen Charlotte Street, solely in order to get a look at you.”
“To try and get me to approve of him?”
“Well—no—I understand the idea was that he should be induced to approve of you.”
“Well, of all the damned cheek!”
Poirot concealed a smile.
“It appears you are everything that he most disapproves of.”
“He’s certainly the kind of young man I disapprove of! Spends his time tub-thumping and talking hot air, instead of doing a decent job of work!”
Poirot was silent for a minute, then he said:
“Will you forgive me if I ask you an impertinent and very personal question?”
“Fire ahead.”
“In the event of your death, what are your testamentary dispositions?”
Blunt stared. He said sharply:
“Why do you want to know that?”
“Because, it is just possible,” he shrugged his shoulders—“that it might be relevant to this case.”
“Nonsense!”
“Perhaps. But perhaps not.”
Alistair Blunt said coldly:
“I think you are being unduly melodramatic, M. Poirot. Nobody has been trying to murder me—or anything like that!”
“A bomb on your breakfast table—a shot in the street—”
“Oh those! Any man who deals in the world’s finance in a big way is liable to that kind of attention from some crazy fanatic!”
“It might possibly be a cas
e of someone who is not a fanatic and not crazy.”
Blunt stared.
“What are you driving at?”
“In plain language, I want to know who benefits by your death.”
Blunt grinned.
“Chiefly the St. Edward’s Hospital, the Cancer Hospital, and the Royal Institute for the Blind.”
“Ah!”
“In addition, I have left a sum of money to my niece by marriage, Mrs. Julia Olivera; an equivalent sum, but in trust, to her daughter, Jane Olivera, and also a substantial provision for my only surviving relative, a second cousin, Helen Montressor, who was left very badly off and who occupies a small cottage on the estate here.”
He paused and then said:
“This, M. Poirot, is strictly in confidence.”
“Naturally, Monsieur, naturally.”
Alistair Blunt added sarcastically:
“I suppose you do not suggest, M. Poirot, that either Julia or Jane Olivera or my cousin Helen Montressor, are planning to murder me for my money?”
“I suggest nothing—nothing at all.”
Blunt’s slight irritation subsided. He said:
“And you’ll take on that other commission for me?”
“The finding of Miss Sainsbury Seale? Yes, I will.”
Alistair Blunt said heartily:
“Good man.”
VII
In leaving the room Poirot almost cannoned into a tall figure outside the door.
He said: “I beg your pardon, Mademoiselle.”
Jane Olivera drew apart a little.
She said. “Do you know what I think of you, M. Poirot?”
“Eh bien—Mademoiselle—”
She did not give time to finish. The question, indeed, had but a rhetorical value. All that it meant was that Jane Olivera was about to answer it herself.
“You’re a spy, that’s what you are! A miserable, low, snooping spy, nosing round and making trouble!”
“I assure you, Mademoiselle—”
“I know just what you’re after! And I know now just what lies you tell! Why don’t you admit it straight out? Well, I’ll tell you this—you won’t find out anything—anything at all! There’s nothing to find out! No one’s going to harm a hair on my precious uncle’s head. He’s safe enough. He’ll always be safe. Safe and smug and prosperous—and full of platitudes! He’s just a stodgy John Bull, that’s what he is—without an ounce of imagination or vision.”
She paused, then, her agreeable, husky voice deepening, she said venomously: “I loathe the sight of you—you bloody little bourgeois detective!”
She swept away from him in a whirl of expensive model drapery.
Hercule Poirot remained, his eyes very wide open, his eyebrows raised and his hand thoughtfully caressing his moustaches.
The epithet bourgeois was, he admitted, well-applied to him. His outlook on life was essentially bourgeois, and always had been, but the employment of it as an epithet of contempt by the exquisitely turned out Jane Olivera gave him, as he expressed it to himself, furiously to think.
He went, still thinking, into the drawing room.
Mrs. Olivera was playing patience.
She looked up as Poirot entered, surveyed him with the cold look she might have bestowed upon a black beetle and murmured distantly:
“Red knave on black queen.”
Chilled, Poirot retreated. He reflected mournfully:
“Alas, it would seem that nobody loves me!”
He strolled out of the window into the garden. It was an enchanting evening with a smell of night-scented stocks in the air. Poirot sniffed happily and strolled along a path that ran between two herbaceous borders.
He turned a corner and two dimly-seen figures sprang apart.
It would seem that he had interrupted a pair of lovers.
Poirot hastily turned and retraced his steps.
Even out here, it would seem, his presence was de trop.
He passed Alistair Blunt’s window and Alistair Blunt was dictating to Mr. Selby.
There seemed definitely only one place for Hercule Poirot.
He went up to his bedroom.
He pondered for some time on various fantastic aspects of the situation.
Had he or had he not made a mistake in believing the voice on the telephone to be that of Mrs. Olivera? Surely the idea was absurd!
He recalled the melodramatic revelations of quiet little Mr. Barnes. He speculated on the mysterious whereabouts of Mr. Q.X.912, alias Albert Chapman. He remembered, with a spasm of annoyance, the anxious look in the eyes of the maidservant, Agnes—
It was always the same way—people would keep things back! Usually quite unimportant things, but until they were cleared out of the way, impossible to pursue a straight path.
At the moment the path was anything but straight!
And the most unaccountable obstacle in the way of clear thinking and orderly progress was what he described to himself as the contradictory and impossible problem of Miss Sainsbury Seale. For, if the facts that Hercule Poirot had observed were true facts—then nothing whatever made sense!
Hercule Poirot said to himself, with astonishment in the thought:
“Is it possible that I am growing old?”
ELEVEN, TWELVE, MEN MUST DELVE
I
After passing a troubled night, Hercule Poirot was up and about early on the next day. The weather was perfect and he retraced his steps of last night.
The herbaceous borders were in full beauty and though Poirot himself leaned to a more orderly type of flower arrangement—a neat arrangement of beds of scarlet geraniums such as are seen at Ostend—he nevertheless realized that here was the perfection of the English garden spirit.
He pursued his way through a rose garden, where the neat layout of the beds delighted him—and through the winding ways of an alpine rock garden, coming at last to the walled kitchen gardens.
Here he observed a sturdy woman clad in a tweed coat and skirt, black browed, with short cropped black hair who was talking in a slow, emphatic Scots voice to what was evidently the head gardener. The head gardener, Poirot observed, did not appear to be enjoying the conversation.
A sarcastic inflection made itself heard in Miss Helen Montressor’s voice, and Poirot escaped nimbly down a side path.
A gardener who had been, Poirot shrewdly suspected, resting on his spade, began digging with fervour. Poirot approached nearer. The man, a young fellow, dug with ardour, his back to Poirot who paused to observe him.
“Good morning,” said Poirot amiably.
A muttered “Morning, sir,” was the response, but the man did not stop working.
Poirot was a little surprised. In his experience a gardener, though anxious to appear zealously at work as you approached, was usually only too willing to pause and pass the time of day when directly addressed.
It seemed, he thought, a little unnatural. He stood there for some minutes, watching the toiling figure. Was there, or was there not, something a little familiar about the turn of those shoulders? Or could it be, thought Hercule Poirot, that he was getting into a habit of thinking that both voices and shoulders were familiar when they were really nothing of the kind? Was he, as he had feared last night, growing old?
He passed thoughtfully onward out of the walled garden and paused to regard a rising slope of shrubbery outside.
Presently, like some fantastic moon, a round object rose gently over the top of the kitchen garden wall. It was the egg-shaped head of Hercule Poirot, and the eyes of Hercule Poirot regarded with a good deal of interest the face of the young gardener who had now stopped digging and was passing a sleeve across his wet face.
“Very curious and very interesting,” murmured Hercule Poirot as he discreetly lowered his head once more.
He emerged from the shrubbery and brushed off some twigs and leaves that were spoiling the neatness of his apparel.
Yes, indeed, very curious and interesting that Frank Carter, who had a secret
arial job in the country, should be working as a gardener in the employment of Alistair Blunt.
Reflecting on these points, Hercule Poirot heard a gong in the distance and retraced his steps towards the house.
On the way there he encountered his host talking to Miss Montressor who had just emerged from the kitchen garden by the farther door.
Her voice rose clear and distinct:
“It’s verra kind of you, Alistairr, but I would preferr not to accept any invitations this week while your Amerrican relations are with you!”
Blunt said:
“Julia’s rather a tactless woman, but she doesn’t mean—”
Miss Montressor said calmly:
“In my opinion her manner to me is verra insolent, and I will not put up with insolence—from American women or any others!”
Miss Montressor moved away, Poirot came up to find Alistair Blunt looking as sheepish as most men look who are having trouble with their female relations. He said ruefully:
“Women really are the devil! Good morning, M. Poirot. Lovely day, isn’t it?”
They turned towards the house and Blunt said with a sigh: “I do miss my wife!”
In the dining room, he remarked to the redoubtable Julia:
“I’m afraid, Julia, you’ve rather hurt Helen’s feelings.”
Mrs. Olivera said grimly:
“The Scotch are always touchy.”
Alistair Blunt looked unhappy.
Hercule Poirot said:
“You have a young gardener, I noticed, whom I think you must have taken on recently.”
“I daresay,” said Blunt. “Yes, Burton, my third gardener, left about three weeks ago, and we took this fellow on instead.”
“Do you remember where he came from?”
“I really don’t. MacAlister engaged him. Somebody or other asked me to give him a trial, I think. Recommended him warmly. I’m rather surprised, because MacAlister says he isn’t much good. He wants to sack him again.”
“What is his name?”
“Dunning—Sunbury—something like that.”
“Would it be a great impertinence to ask what you pay him?”
“Not at all. Two pounds fifteen, I think it is.”
“Not more?”
“Certainly not more—might be a bit less.”
“Now that,” said Poirot, “is very curious.”