“My God,” he said, “is that the sort of thing you have to put up with? I heard that damned woman talking to you behind the curtain. How can you stick it, Midge? Why didn’t you throw the damned frocks at her head?”
“I’d soon lose my job if I did things like that.”
“But don’t you want to fling things at a woman of that kind?”
Midge drew a deep breath.
“Of course I do. And there are times, especially at the end of a hot week during the summer sales, when I am afraid that one day I shall let go and just tell everyone exactly where they get off—instead of ‘Yes, Madam,’ ‘No, Madam’—‘I’ll see if we have anything else, Madam.’”
“Midge, dear little Midge, you can’t put up with all this!”
Midge laughed a little shakily.
“Don’t be upset, Edward. Why on earth did you have to come here? Why not ring up?”
“I wanted to see for myself. I’ve been worried.” He paused and then broke out, “Why, Lucy wouldn’t talk to a scullery maid the way that woman talked to you. It’s all wrong that you should have to put up with insolence and rudeness. Good God, Midge, I’d like to take you right out of it all down to Ainswick. I’d like to hail a taxi, bundle you into it, and take you down to Ainswick now by the 2:15.”
Midge stopped. Her assumed nonchalance fell from her. She had had a long tiring morning with trying customers, and Madame at her most bullying. She turned on Edward with a sudden flare of resentment.
“Well, then, why don’t you? There are plenty of taxis!”
He stared at her, taken aback by her sudden fury. She went on, her anger flaming up:
“Why do you have to come along and say these things? You don’t mean them. Do you think it makes it any easier after I’ve had the hell of a morning to be reminded that there are places like Ainswick? Do you think I’m grateful to you for standing there and babbling about how much you’d like to take me out of it all? All very sweet and insincere. You don’t really mean a word of it. Don’t you know that I’d sell my soul to catch the 2:15 to Ainswick and get away from everything? I can’t bear even to think of Ainswick, do you understand? You mean well, Edward, but you’re cruel! Saying things—just saying things….”
They faced each other, seriously incommoding the lunchtime crowd in Shaftesbury Avenue. Yet they were conscious of nothing but each other. Edward was staring at her like a man suddenly aroused from sleep.
He said: “All right then, damn it. You’re coming to Ainswick by the 2:15!”
He raised his stick and hailed a passing taxi. It drew into the kerb. Edward opened the door, and Midge, slightly dazed, got in. Edward said: “Paddington Station” to the driver and followed her in.
They sat in silence. Midge’s lips were set together. Her eyes were defiant and mutinous. Edward stared straight ahead of him.
As they waited for the traffic lights in Oxford Street, Midge said disagreeably:
“I seem to have called your bluff.”
Edward said shortly:
“It wasn’t bluff.”
The taxi started forward again with a jerk.
It was not until the taxi turned left in Edgware Road into Cambridge Terrace that Edward suddenly regained his normal attitude to life.
He said: “We can’t catch the 2:15,” and tapping on the glass he said to the driver: “Go to the Berkeley.”
Midge said coldly: “Why can’t we catch the 2:15? It’s only twenty-five past one now.”
Edward smiled at her.
“You haven’t got any luggage, little Midge. No nightgowns or toothbrushes or country shoes. There’s a 4:15, you know. We’ll have some lunch now and talk things over.”
Midge sighed.
“That’s so like you, Edward. To remember the practical side. Impulse doesn’t carry you very far, does it? Oh, well, it was a nice dream while it lasted.”
She slipped her hand into his and gave him her old smile.
“I’m sorry I stood on the pavement and abused you like a fish-wife,” she said. “But you know, Edward, you were irritating.”
“Yes,” he said. “I must have been.”
They went into the Berkeley happily side by side. They got a table by the window and Edward ordered an excellent lunch.
As they finished their chicken, Midge sighed and said: “I ought to hurry back to the shop. My time’s up.”
“You’re going to take decent time over your lunch today, even if I have to go back and buy half the clothes in the shop!”
“Dear Edward, you are really rather sweet.”
They ate Crêpes Suzette, and then the waiter brought them coffee. Edward stirred his sugar in with his spoon.
He said gently:
“You really do love Ainswick, don’t you?”
“Must we talk about Ainswick? I’ve survived not catching the 2:15—and I quite realize that there isn’t any question of the 4:15—but don’t rub it in.”
Edward smiled. “No, I’m not proposing that we catch the 4:15. But I am suggesting that you come to Ainswick, Midge. I’m suggesting that you come there for good—that is, if you can put up with me.”
She stared at him over the rim of her coffee cup—put it down with a hand that she managed to keep steady.
“What do you really mean, Edward?”
“I’m suggesting that you should marry me, Midge. I don’t suppose that I’m a very romantic proposition. I’m a dull dog, I know that, and not much good at anything. I just read books and potter around. But although I’m not a very exciting person, we’ve known each other a long time and I think that Ainswick itself would—well, would compensate. I think you’d be happy at Ainswick, Midge. Will you come?”
Midge swallowed once or twice, then she said:
“But I thought—Henrietta—” and stopped.
Edward said, his voice level and unemotional:
“Yes, I’ve asked Henrietta to marry me three times. Each time she has refused. Henrietta knows what she doesn’t want.”
There was a silence, and then Edward said:
“Well, Midge dear, what about it?”
Midge looked up at him. There was a catch in her voice. She said:
“It seems so extraordinary—to be offered heaven on a plate as it were, at the Berkeley!”
His face lighted up. He laid his hand over hers for a brief moment.
“Heaven on a plate,” he said. “So you feel like that about Ainswick. Oh, Midge, I’m glad.”
They sat there happily. Edward paid the bill and added an enormous tip. The people in the restaurant were thinning out. Midge said with an effort:
“We’ll have to go. I suppose I’d better go back to Madame Alfrege. After all, she’s counting on me. I can’t just walk out.”
“No, I suppose you’ll have to go back and resign or hand in your notice or whatever you call it. You’re not to go on working there, though. I won’t have it. But first I thought we’d better go to one of those shops in Bond Street where they sell rings.”
“Rings?”
“It’s usual, isn’t it?”
Midge laughed.
In the dimmed lighting of the jeweller’s shop, Midge and Edward bent over trays of sparkling engagement rings, whilst a discreet salesman watched them benignantly.
Edward said, pushing away a velvet-covered tray:
“Not emeralds.”
Henrietta in green tweeds—Henrietta in an evening dress like Chinese jade….
No, not emeralds.
Midge pushed away the tiny stabbing pain at her heart.
“Choose for me,” she said to Edward.
He bent over the tray before them. He picked out a ring with a single diamond. Not a very large stone, but a stone of beautiful colour and fire.
“I’d like this.”
Midge nodded. She loved this display of Edward’s unerring and fastidious taste. She slipped it on her finger as Edward and the shopman drew aside.
Edward wrote out a cheque for three hundred
and forty-two pounds and came back to Midge smiling.
He said: “Let’s go and be rude to Madame Alfrege.”
Twenty-five
“But, darling, I am so delighted!”
Lady Angkatell stretched out a fragile hand to Edward and touched Midge softly with the other.
“You did quite right, Edward, to make her leave that horrid shop and bring her right down here. She’ll stay here, of course, and be married from here. St. George’s, you know, three miles by the road, though only a mile through the woods, but then one doesn’t go to a wedding through woods. And I suppose it will have to be the vicar—poor man, he has such dreadful colds in the head every autumn. The curate, now, has one of those high Anglican voices, and the whole thing would be far more impressive—and more religious, too, if you know what I mean. It is so hard to keep one’s mind reverent when somebody is saying things through their noses.”
It was, Midge decided, a very Lucyish reception. It made her want to both laugh and cry.
“I’d love to be married from here, Lucy,” she said.
“Then that’s settled, darling. Off-white satin, I think, and an ivory prayer book—not a bouquet. Bridesmaids?”
“No. I don’t want a fuss. Just a very quiet wedding.”
“I know what you mean, darling, and I think perhaps you are right. With an autumn wedding it’s nearly always chrysanthemums—such an uninspiring flower, I always think. And unless one takes a lot of time to choose them carefully bridesmaids never match properly, and there’s nearly always one terribly plain one who ruins the whole effect—but one has to have her because she’s usually the bridegroom’s sister. But of course—” Lady Angkatell beamed, “Edward hasn’t got any sisters.”
“That seems to be one point in my favour,” said Edward, smiling.
“But children are really the worst at weddings,” went on Lady Angkatell, happily pursuing her own train of thought. “Everyone says: ‘How sweet!’ but, my dear, the anxiety! They step on the train, or else they howl for Nannie, and quite often they’re sick. I always wonder how a girl can go up the aisle in a proper frame of mind, while she’s so uncertain about what is happening behind her.”
“There needn’t be anything behind me,” said Midge cheerfully. “Not even a train. I can be married in a coat and skirt.”
“Oh, no, Midge, that’s so like a widow. No, off-white satin and not from Madame Alfrege’s.”
“Certainly not from Madame Alfrege’s,” said Edward.
“I shall take you to Mireille,” said Lady Angkatell.
“My dear Lucy, I can’t possibly afford Mireille.”
“Nonsense, Midge. Henry and I are going to give you your trousseau. And Henry, of course, will give you away. I do hope the band of his trousers won’t be too tight. It’s nearly two years since he last went to a wedding. And I shall wear—”
Lady Angkatell paused and closed her eyes.
“Yes, Lucy?”
“Hydrangea blue,” announced Lady Angkatell in a rapt voice. “I suppose, Edward, you will have one of your own friends for best man, otherwise, of course, there is David. I cannot help feeling it would be frightfully good for David. It would give him poise, you know, and he would feel we all liked him. That, I am sure, is very important with David. It must be disheartening, you know, to feel you are clever and intellectual and yet nobody likes you any the better for it! But of course it would be rather a risk. He would probably lose the ring, or drop it at the last minute. I expect it would worry Edward too much. But it would be nice in a way to keep it to the same people we’ve had here for the murder.”
Lady Angkatell uttered the last few words in the most conversational of tones.
“Lady Angkatell has been entertaining a few friends for a murder this autumn,” Midge could not help saying.
“Yes,” said Lucy meditatively. “I suppose it did sound like that. A party for the shooting. You know, when you come to think of it, that’s just what it has been!”
Midge gave a faint shiver and said:
“Well, at any rate, it’s over now.”
“It’s not exactly over—the inquest was only adjourned. And that nice Inspector Grange has got men all over the place simply crashing through the chestnut woods and startling all the pheasants, and springing up like jacks in the box in the most unlikely places.”
“What are they looking for?” asked Edward. “The revolver that Christow was shot with?”
“I imagine that must be it. They even came to the house with a search warrant. The inspector was most apologetic about it, quite shy, but of course I told him we should be delighted. It was really most interesting. They looked absolutely everywhere. I followed them round, you know, and I suggested one or two places which even they hadn’t thought of. But they didn’t find anything. It was most disappointing. Poor Inspector Grange, he is growing quite thin and he pulls and pulls at that moustache of his. His wife ought to give him specially nourishing meals with all this worry he is having—but I have a vague idea that she must be one of those women who care more about having the linoleum really well polished than in cooking a tasty little meal. Which reminds me, I must go and see Mrs. Medway. Funny how servants cannot bear the police. Her cheese soufflé last night was quite uneatable. Soufflés and pastry always show if one is off balance. If it weren’t for Gudgeon keeping them all together I really believe half the servants would leave. Why don’t you two go and have a nice walk and help the police look for the revolver?”
Hercule Poirot sat on the bench overlooking the chestnut groves above the pool. He had no sense of trespassing since Lady Angkatell had very sweetly begged him to wander where he would at any time. It was Lady Angkatell’s sweetness which Hercule Poirot was considering at this moment.
From time to time he heard the cracking of twigs in the woods above or caught sight of a figure moving through the chestnut groves below him.
Presently Henrietta came along the path from the direction of the lane. She stopped for a moment when she saw Poirot, then she came and sat down by him.
“Good morning, M. Poirot. I have just been to call upon you. But you were out. You look very Olympian. Are you presiding over the hunt? The inspector seems very active. What are they looking for, the revolver?”
“Yes, Miss Savernake.”
“Will they find it, do you think?”
“I think so. Quite soon now, I should say.”
She looked at him inquiringly.
“Have you an idea, then, where it is?”
“No. But I think it will be found soon. It is time for it to be found.”
“You do say odd things, M. Poirot!”
“Odd things happen here. You have come back very soon from London, Mademoiselle.”
Her face hardened. She gave a short, bitter laugh.
“The murderer returns to the scene of the crime? That is the old superstition, isn’t it? So you do think that I—did it! You don’t believe me when I tell you that I wouldn’t—that I couldn’t kill anybody?”
Poirot did not answer at once. At last he said thoughtfully:
“It has seemed to me from the beginning that either this crime was very simple—so simple that it was difficult to believe its simplicity (and simplicity, Mademoiselle, can be strangely baffling) or else it was extremely complex. That is to say, we were contending against a mind capable of intricate and ingenious inventions, so that every time we seemed to be heading for the truth, we were actually being led on a trail that twisted away from the truth and led us to a point which—ended in nothingness. This apparent futility, this continual barrenness, is not real—it is artificial, it is planned. A very subtle and ingenious mind is plotting against us the whole time—and succeeding.”
“Well?” said Henrietta. “What has that to do with me?”
“The mind that is plotting against us is a creative mind, Mademoiselle.”
“I see—that’s where I come in?”
She was silent, her lips set together bitterly. From
her jacket pocket she had taken a pencil and now she was idly drawing the outline of a fantastic tree on the white painted wood of the bench, frowning as she did so.
Poirot watched her. Something stirred in his mind—standing in Lady Angkatell’s drawing room on the afternoon of the crime, looking down at a pile of bridge markers, standing by a painted iron table in the pavilion the next morning, and a question that he had put to Gudgeon.
He said:
“That is what you drew on your bridge marker—a tree.”
“Yes.” Henrietta seemed suddenly aware of what she was doing. “Ygdrasil, M. Poirot.” She laughed.
“Why do you call it Ygdrasil?”
She explained the origin of Ygdrasil.
“And so, when you ‘doodle’ (that is the word, is it not?) it is always Ygdrasil you draw?”
“Yes. Doodling is a funny thing, isn’t it?”
“Here on the seat—on the bridge marker on Saturday evening—in the pavilion on Sunday morning….”
The hand that held the pencil stiffened and stopped. She said in a tone of careless amusement:
“In the pavilion?”
“Yes, on the round iron table there.”
“Oh, that must have been on—on Saturday afternoon.”
“It was not on Saturday afternoon. When Gudgeon brought the glasses out to the pavilion about twelve o’clock on Sunday morning, there was nothing drawn on the table. I asked him and he is quite definite about that.”
“Then it must have been”—she hesitated for just a moment—“of course, on Sunday afternoon.”
But still smiling pleasantly, Hercule Poirot shook his head.
“I think not. Grange’s men were at the pool all Sunday afternoon, photographing the body, getting the revolver out of the water. They did not leave until dusk. They would have seen anyone go into the pavilion.”
Henrietta said slowly:
“I remember now. I went along there quite late in the evening—after dinner.”
Poirot’s voice came sharply:
“People do not ‘doodle’ in the dark, Miss Savernake. Are you telling me that you went into the pavilion at night and stood by a table and drew a tree without being able to see what you were drawing?”