“Whoof!” he said. “You got me all worked up! I didn’t see in the least what you were getting at!”
Poirot said:
“I was examining the case against Elinor Carlisle. Now I know it. Morphine was administered to Mary Gerrard; and, as far as I can see, it must have been given in the sandwiches. Nobody touched those sandwiches except Elinor Carlisle. Elinor Carlisle had a motive for killing Mary Gerrard, and she is, in your opinion, capable of killing Mary Gerrard, and in all probability she did kill Mary Gerrard. I see no reason for believing otherwise.
“That, mon ami, is one side of the question. Now we will proceed to stage two. We will dismiss all those considerations from our mind and we will approach the matter from the opposite angle: If Elinor Carlisle did not kill Mary Gerrard, who did? Or did Mary Gerrard commit suicide?”
Peter Lord sat up. A frown creased his forehead. He said:
“You weren’t quite accurate just now.”
“I? Not accurate?”
Poirot sounded affronted.
Peter Lord pursued relentlessly:
“No. You said nobody but Elinor Carlisle touched those sandwiches. You don’t know that.”
“There was no one else in the house.”
“As far as we know. But you are excluding a short period of time. There was a time during which Elinor Carlisle left the house to go down to the Lodge. During that period of time the sandwiches were on a plate in the pantry, and somebody could have tampered with them.”
Poirot drew a deep breath.
He said:
“You are right, my friend. I admit it. There was a time during which somebody could have had access to the plate of sandwiches. We must try to form some idea who that somebody could be; that is to say, what kind of person….”
He paused.
“Let us consider this Mary Gerrard. Someone, not Elinor Carlisle, desires her death. Why? Did anyone stand to gain by her death? Had she money to leave?”
Peter Lord shook his head.
“Not now. In another month she would have had two thousand pounds. Elinor Carlisle was making that sum over to her because she believed her aunt would have wished it. But the old lady’s estate isn’t wound up yet.”
Poirot said:
“Then we can wash out the money angle. Mary Gerrard was beautiful, you say. With that there are always complications. She had admirers?”
“Probably. I don’t know much about it.”
“Who would know?”
Peter Lord grinned.
“I’d better put you on to Nurse Hopkins. She’s the town crier. She knows everything that goes on in Maidensford.”
“I was going to ask you to give me your impressions of the two nurses.”
“Well, O’Brien’s Irish, good nurse, competent, a bit silly, could be spiteful, a bit of a liar—the imaginative kind that’s not so much deceitful, but just has to make a good story out of everything.”
Poirot nodded.
“Hopkins is a sensible, shrewd, middle-aged woman, quite kindly and competent, but a sight too much interested in other people’s business!”
“If there had been trouble over some young man in the village, would Nurse Hopkins know about it?”
“You bet!”
He added slowly:
“All the same, I don’t believe there can be anything very obvious in that line. Mary hadn’t been home long. She’d been away in Germany for two years.”
“She was twenty-one?”
“Yes.”
“There may be some German complication.”
Peter Lord’s face brightened.
He said eagerly:
“You mean that some German fellow may have had it in for her? He may have followed her over here, waited his time, and finally achieved his object?”
“It sounds a little melodramatic,” said Hercule Poirot doubtfully.
“But it’s possible?”
“Not very probable, though.”
Peter Lord said:
“I don’t agree. Someone might get all het up about the girl, and see red when she turned him down. He may have fancied she treated him badly. It’s an idea.”
“It is an idea, yes,” said Hercule Poirot, but his tone was not encouraging.
Peter Lord said pleadingly:
“Go on, M. Poirot.”
“You want me, I see, to be the conjurer. To take out of the empty hat rabbit after rabbit.”
“You can put it that way if you like.”
“There is another possibility,” said Hercule Poirot.
“Go on.”
“Someone abstracted a tube of morphine from Nurse Hopkins’ case that evening in June. Suppose Mary Gerrard saw the person who did it?”
“She would have said so.”
“No, no, mon cher. Be reasonable. If Elinor Carlisle, or Roderick Welman, or Nurse O’Brien, or even any of the servants, were to open that case and abstract a little glass tube, what would anyone think? Simply that the person in question had been sent by the nurse to fetch something from it. The matter would pass straight out of Mary Gerrard’s mind again, but it is possible that, later, she might recollect the fact and might mention it casually to the person in question—oh, without the least suspicion in the world. But to the person guilty of the murder of Mrs. Welman, imagine the effect of that remark! Mary had seen: Mary must be silenced at all costs! I can assure you, my friend, that anyone who has once committed a murder finds it only too easy to commit another!”
Peter Lord said with a frown:
“I’ve believed all along that Mrs. Welman took the stuff herself….”
“But she was paralysed—helpless—she had just had a second stroke.”
“Oh, I know. My idea was that, having got hold of morphine somehow or other, she kept it by her in a receptacle close at hand.”
“But in that case she must have got hold of the morphine before her second attack and the nurse missed it afterwards.”
“Hopkins may only have missed the morphine that morning. It might have been taken a couple of days before, and she hadn’t noticed it.”
“How would the old lady have got hold of it?”
“I don’t know. Bribed a servant, perhaps. If so, that servant’s never going to tell.”
“You don’t think either of the nurses were bribable?”
Lord shook his head.
“Not on your life! To begin with, they’re both very strict about their professional ethics—and in addition they’d be scared to death to do such a thing. They’d know the danger to themselves.”
Poirot said:
“That is so.”
He added thoughtfully:
“It looks, does it not, as though we return to our muttons? Who is the most likely person to have taken that morphine tube? Elinor Carlisle. We may say that she wished to make sure of inheriting a large fortune. We may be more generous and say that she was actuated by pity, that she took the morphine and administered it in compliance with her aunt’s often-repeated request; but she took it—and Mary Gerrard saw her do it. And so we are back at the sandwiches and the empty house, and we have Elinor Carlisle once more—but this time with a different motive: to save her neck.”
Peter Lord cried out:
“That’s fantastic. I tell you, she isn’t that kind of person! Money doesn’t really mean anything to her—or to Roderick Welman, either, I’m bound to admit. I’ve heard them both say as much!”
“You have? That is very interesting. That is the kind of statement I always look upon with a good deal of suspicion myself.”
Peter Lord said:
“Damn you, Poirot, must you always twist everything round so that it comes back to that girl?”
“It is not I that twist things round: they come round of themselves. It is like the pointer at the fair. It swings round, and when it comes to rest it points always at the same name—Elinor Carlisle.”
Peter Lord said:
“No!”
Hercule Poirot shook hi
s head sadly.
Then he said:
“Has she relations, this Elinor Carlisle? Sisters, cousins? A father or mother?”
“No. She’s an orphan—alone in the world….”
“How pathetic it sounds! Bulmer, I am sure, will make great play with that! Who, then, inherits her money if she dies?”
“I don’t know. I haven’t thought.”
Poirot said reprovingly:
“One should always think of these things. Has she made a will, for instance?”
Peter Lord flushed. He said uncertainly:
“I—I don’t know.”
Hercule Poirot looked at the ceiling and joined his fingertips.
He remarked:
“It would be well, you know, to tell me.”
“Tell you what?”
“Exactly what is in your mind—no matter how damaging it may happen to be to Elinor Carlisle.”
“How do you know—?”
“Yes, yes, I know. There is something—some incident in your mind! It will be as well to tell me, otherwise I shall imagine it is something worse than it is!”
“It’s nothing, really—”
“We will agree it is nothing. But let me hear what it is.”
Slowly, unwillingly, Peter Lord allowed the story to be dragged from him—that scene of Elinor leaning in at the window of Nurse Hopkins’ cottage, and of her laughter.
Poirot said thoughtfully:
“She said that, did she, ‘So you’re making your will, Mary? That’s funny—that’s very funny.’ And it was very clear to you what was in her mind…She had been thinking, perhaps, that Mary Gerrard was not going to live long….”
Peter Lord said:
“I only imagined that. I don’t know.”
Poirot said:
“No, you did not only imagine it….”
Three
Hercule Poirot sat in Nurse Hopkins’ cottage.
Dr. Lord had brought him there, had introducd him and had then, at a glance from Poirot, left him to a tête-à-tête.
Having, to begin with, eyed his foreign appearance somewhat askance, Nurse Hopkins was now thawing rapidly.
She said with a faintly gloomy relish:
“Yes, it’s a terrible thing. One of the most terrible things I’ve ever known. Mary was one of the most beautiful girls you’ve ever seen. Might have gone on the films any time! And a nice steady girl, too, and not stuck-up, as she might have been with all the notice taken of her.”
Poirot, inserting a question adroitly, said:
“You mean the notice taken of her by Mrs. Welman?”
“That’s what I mean. The old lady had taken a tremendous fancy to her—really, a tremendous fancy.”
Hercule Poirot murmured:
“Surprising, perhaps?”
“That depends. It might be quite natural, really. I mean…” Nurse Hopkins bit her lip and looked confused. “What I mean is, Mary had a very pretty way with her: nice soft voice and pleasant manners. And it’s my opinion it does an elderly person good to have a young face about.”
Hercule Poirot said:
“Miss Carlisle came down occasionally, I suppose, to see her aunt?”
Nurse Hopkins said sharply:
“Miss Carlisle came down when it suited her.”
Poirot murmured:
“You do not like Miss Carlisle.”
Nurse Hopkins cried out:
“I should hope not, indeed! A poisoner! A cold-blooded poisoner!”
“Ah,” said Hercule Poirot, “I see you have made up your mind.”
Nurse Hopkins said suspiciously:
“What do you mean? Made up my mind?”
“You are quite sure that it was she who administered morphine to Mary Gerrard?”
“Who else could have done it, I should like to know? You’re not suggesting that I did?”
“Not for a moment. But her guilt has not yet been proved, remember.”
Nurse Hopkins said with calm assurance:
“She did it all right. Apart from anything else, you could see it in her face. Queer she was, all the time. And taking me away upstairs and keeping me there—delaying as long as possible. And then when I turned on her, after finding Mary like that, it was there in her face as plain as anything. She knew I knew!”
Hercule Poirot said thoughtfully:
“It is certainly difficult to see who else could have done it. Unless of course, she did it herself.”
“What do you mean, did it herself? Do you mean that Mary committed suicide? I never heard such nonsense!”
Hercule Poirot said:
“One can never tell. The heart of a young girl, it is very sensitive, very tender.” He paused. “It would have been possible, I suppose? She could have slipped something into her tea without your noticing her?”
“Slipped it into her cup, you mean?”
“Yes. You weren’t watching her all the time.”
“I wasn’t watching her—no. Yes, I suppose she could have done that… But it’s all nonsense! What would she want to do a thing like that for?”
Hercule Poirot shook his head with a resumption of his former manner.
“A young girl’s heart…as I say, so sensitive. An unhappy love affair, perhaps—”
Nurse Hopkins gave a snort.
“Girls don’t kill themselves for love affairs—not unless they’re in the family way—and Mary wasn’t that, let me tell you!” She glared at him belligerently.
“And she was not in love?”
“Not she. Quite fancy free. Keen on her job and enjoying her life.”
“But she must have had admirers, since she was such an attractive girl.”
Nurse Hopkins said:
“She wasn’t one of these girls who are all S.A. and IT. She was a quiet girl!”
“But there were young men, no doubt, in the village who admired her.”
“There was Ted Bigland, of course,” said Nurse Hopkins.
Poirot extracted various details as to Ted Bigland.
“Very gone on Mary, he was,” said Nurse Hopkins. “But, as I told her, she was a cut above him.”
Poirot said:
“He must have been angry when she would not have anything to do with him?”
“He was sore about it, yes,” admitted Nurse Hopkins. “Blamed me for it, too.”
“He thought it was your fault?”
“That’s what he said. I’d a perfect right to advise the girl. After all, I know something of the world. I didn’t want the girl to throw herself away.”
Poirot said gently:
“What made you take so much interest in the girl?”
“Well, I don’t know…” Nurse Hopkins hesitated. She looked shy and a little ashamed of herself. “There was something—well—romantic about Mary.”
Poirot murmured:
“About her, perhaps, but not about her circumstances. She was the lodge keeper’s daughter, wasn’t she?”
Nurse Hopkins said:
“Yes—yes, of course. At least—”
She hesitated, looked at Poirot, who was gazing at her in the most sympathetic manner.
“As a matter of fact,” said Nurse Hopkins, in a burst of confidence, “she wasn’t old Gerrard’s daughter at all. He told me so. Her father was a gentleman.”
Poirot murmured:
“I see… And her mother?”
Nurse Hopkins hesitated, bit her lip, and then went on:
“Her mother had been a lady’s maid to old Mrs. Welman. She married Gerrard after Mary was born.”
“As you say, quite a romance—a mystery romance.”
Nurse Hopkins’ face lit up.
“Wasn’t it? One can’t help taking an interest in people when one knows something that nobody else does about them. Just by chance I happened to find out a good deal. As a matter of fact, it was Nurse O’Brien who set me on the track; but that’s another story. But, as you say, it’s interesting knowing past history. There’s many a tragedy tha
t goes unguessed at. It’s a sad world.”
Poirot sighed and shook his head.
Nurse Hopkins said with sudden alarm:
“But I oughtn’t to have gone talking like this. I wouldn’t have a word of this get out for anything! After all, it’s nothing to do with the case. As far as the world is concerned, Mary was Gerrard’s daughter, and there mustn’t be a hint of anything else. Damaging her in the eyes of the world after she’s dead! He married her mother, and that’s enough.”
Poirot murmured:
“But you know, perhaps, who her real father was?”
Nurse Hopkins said reluctantly:
“Well, perhaps I do; but, then again, perhaps I don’t. That is, I don’t know anything. I could take a guess. Old sins have long shadows, as they say! But I’m not one to talk, and I shan’t say another word.”
Poirot tactfully retired from the fray and attacked another subject.
“There is something else—a delicate matter. But I am sure I can rely on your discretion.”
Nurse Hopkins bridled. A broad smile appeared on her homely face.
Poirot continued:
“I speak of Mr. Roderick Welman. He was, so I hear, attracted by Mary Gerrard.”
Nurse Hopkins said:
“Bowled over by her!”
“Although at the time he was engaged to Miss Carlisle?”
“If you ask me,” said Nurse Hopkins, “he was never really sweet on Miss Carlisle. Not what I’d call sweet on her.”
Poirot asked, using an old-fashioned term:
“Did Mary Gerrard—er—encourage his advances?”
Nurse Hopkins said sharply:
“She behaved very well. Nobody could say she led him on!”
Poirot said:
“Was she in love with him?”
Nurse Hopkins said sharply:
“No, she wasn’t.”
“But she liked him?”
“Oh, yes, she liked him well enough.”
“And I suppose, in time, something might have come of it?”
Nurse Hopkins admitted that.
“That may be. But Mary wouldn’t have done anything in a hurry. She told him down here he had no business to speak like that to her when he was engaged to Miss Elinor. And when he came to see her in London she said the same.”
Poirot asked with an air of engaging candour:
“What do you think yourself of Mr. Roderick Welman?”
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