“The procedure has been quite correct,” said Poirot. “You have summoned the police, and until they arrive and take charge there is nothing for us to do—except to make sure that nobody disturbs the body or tampers with the evidence.”
As he said the last word he looked down into the pool where he could see the revolver lying on the concrete bottom, slightly distorted by the blue water.
The evidence, he thought, had perhaps already been tampered with before he, Hercule Poirot, had been able to prevent it.
But no—that had been an accident.
Sir Henry murmured distastefully:
“Think we’ve got to stand about? A bit chilly. It would be all right, I should think, if we went inside the pavilion?”
Poirot, who had been conscious of damp feet and a disposition to shiver, acquiesced gladly. The pavilion was at the side of the pool farthest from the house, and through its open door they commanded a view of the pool and the body and the path to the house along which the police would come.
The pavilion was luxuriously furnished with comfortable settees and gay native rugs. On a painted iron table a tray was set with glasses and a decanter of sherry.
“I’d offer you a drink,” said Sir Henry, “but I suppose I’d better not touch anything until the police come—not, I should imagine, that there’s anything to interest them in here. Still, it is better to be on the safe side. Gudgeon hadn’t brought out the cocktails yet, I see. He was waiting for you to arrive.”
The two sat down rather gingerly in two wicker chairs near the door so that they could watch the path from the house.
A constraint settled over them. It was an occasion on which it was difficult to make small talk.
Poirot glanced round the pavilion, noting anything that struck him as unusual. An expensive cape of platinum fox had been flung carelessly across the back of one of the chairs. He wondered whose it was. Its rather ostentatious magnificence did not harmonize with any of the people he had seen up to now. He could not, for instance, imagine it round Lady Angkatell’s shoulders.
It worried him. It breathed a mixture of opulence and self-advertisement—and those characteristics were lacking in anyone he had seen so far.
“I suppose we can smoke,” said Sir Henry, offering his case to Poirot.
Before taking the cigarette, Poirot sniffed the air.
French perfume—an expensive French perfume.
Only a trace of it lingered, but it was there, and again the scent was not the scent that associated itself in his mind with any of the occupants of The Hollow.
As he leaned forward to light his cigarette at Sir Henry’s lighter, Poirot’s glance fell on a little pile of matchboxes—six of them—stacked on a small table near one of the settees.
It was a detail that struck him as definitely odd.
Twelve
I
“Half past two,” said Lady Angkatell.
She was in the drawing room, with Midge and Edward. From behind the closed door of Sir Henry’s study came the murmur of voices. Hercule Poirot, Sir Henry and Inspector Grange were in there.
Lady Angkatell sighed:
“You know, Midge, I still feel one ought to do something about lunch. It seems, of course, quite heartless to sit down round the table as though nothing had happened. But after all, M. Poirot was asked to lunch—and he is probably hungry. And it can’t be upsetting to him that poor John Christow has been killed like it is to us. And I must say that though I really do not feel like eating myself, Henry and Edward must be extremely hungry after being out shooting all the morning.”
Edward Angkatell said: “Don’t worry on my account, Lucy, dear.”
“You are always considerate, Edward. And then there is David—I noticed that he ate a great deal at dinner last night. Intellectual people always seem to need a good deal of food. Where is David, by the way?”
“He went up to his room,” said Midge, “after he had heard what had happened.”
“Yes—well, that was rather tactful of him. I daresay it made him feel awkward. Of course, say what you like, a murder is an awkward thing—it upsets the servants and puts the general routine out—we were having ducks for lunch—fortunately they are quite nice eaten cold. What does one do about Gerda, do you think? Something on a tray? A little strong soup, perhaps?”
“Really,” thought Midge, “Lucy is inhuman!” And then with a qualm she reflected that it was perhaps because Lucy was too human that it shocked one so! Wasn’t it the plain unvarnished truth that all catastrophes were hedged round with these little trivial wonderings and surmises? Lucy merely gave utterance to the thoughts which most people did not acknowledge. One did remember the servants, and worry about meals. And one did, even, feel hungry. She felt hungry herself at this very moment! Hungry, she thought, and at the same time, rather sick. A curious mixture.
And there was, undoubtedly, just plain awkward embarrassment in not knowing how to react to a quiet, commonplace woman whom one had referred to, only yesterday, as “poor Gerda” and who was now, presumably, shortly to be standing in the dock accused of murder.
“These things happen to other people,” thought Midge. “They can’t happen to us.”
She looked across the room at Edward. “They oughtn’t,” she thought, “to happen to people like Edward. People who are so very unviolent.” She took comfort in looking at Edward. Edward, so quiet, so reasonable, so kind and calm.
Gudgeon entered, inclined himself confidentially and spoke in a suitably muted voice.
“I have placed sandwiches and some coffee in the dining room, my lady.”
“Oh, thank you, Gudgeon!”
“Really,” said Lady Angkatell as Gudgeon left the room. “Gudgeon is wonderful: I don’t know what I should do without Gudgeon. He always knows the right thing to do. Some really substantial sandwiches are as good as lunch—and nothing heartless about them, if you know what I mean!”
“Oh, Lucy, don’t.”
Midge suddenly felt warm tears running down her cheek. Lady Angkatell looked surprised, murmured:
“Poor darling. It’s all been too much for you.”
Edward crossed to the sofa and sat down by Midge. He put his arm round her.
“Don’t worry, little Midge,” he said.
Midge buried her face on his shoulder and sobbed there comfortably. She remembered how nice Edward had been to her when her rabbit had died at Ainswick one Easter holidays.
Edward said gently: “It’s been a shock. Can I get her some brandy, Lucy?”
“On the sideboard in the dining room. I don’t think—”
She broke off as Henrietta came into the room. Midge sat up. She felt Edward stiffen and sit very still.
What, thought Midge, does Henrietta feel? She felt almost reluctant to look at her cousin—but there was nothing to see. Henrietta looked, if anything, belligerent. She had come in with her chin up, her colour high, and with a certain swiftness.
“Oh, there you are, Henrietta,” cried Lady Angkatell. “I have been wondering. The police are with Henry and M. Poirot. What have you given Gerda? Brandy? Or tea and aspirin?”
“I gave her some brandy—and a hot-water bottle.”
“Quite right,” said Lady Angkatell approvingly. “That’s what they tell you in First Aid classes—the hot-water bottle, I mean, for shock—not the brandy; there is a reaction nowadays against stimulants. But I think that is only a fashion. We always gave brandy for shock when I was a girl at Ainswick. Though, really, I suppose, it can’t be exactly shock with Gerda. I don’t know really what one would feel if one had killed one’s husband—it’s the sort of thing one just can’t begin to imagine—but it wouldn’t exactly give one a shock. I mean, there wouldn’t be any element of surprise.”
Henrietta’s voice, icy cold, cut into the placid atmosphere.
She said: “Why are you all so sure that Gerda killed John?”
There was a moment’s pause—and Midge felt a curious shifting in the atm
osphere. There was confusion, strain and, finally, a kind of slow watchfulness.
Then Lady Angkatell said, her voice quite devoid of any inflection:
“It seemed—self-evident. What else do you suggest?”
“Isn’t it possible that Gerda came along to the pool, that she found John lying there, and that she had just picked up the revolver when—when we came upon the scene?”
Again there was that silence. Then Lady Angkatell asked:
“Is that what Gerda says?”
“Yes.”
It was not a simple assent. It had force behind it. It came out like a revolver shot.
Lady Angkatell raised her eyebrows, then she said with apparent irrelevancy:
“There are sandwiches and coffee in the dining room.”
She broke off with a little gasp as Gerda Christow came through the open door. She said hurriedly and apologetically:
“I—I really didn’t feel I could lie down any longer. One is—one is so terribly restless.”
Lady Angkatell cried:
“You must sit down—you must sit down at once.”
She displaced Midge from the sofa, settled Gerda there, put a cushion at her back.
“You poor dear,” said Lady Angkatell.
She spoke with emphasis, but the words seemed quite meaningless.
Edward walked to the window and stood there looking out.
Gerda pushed back the untidy hair from her forehead. She spoke in a worried, bewildered tone.
“I—I really am only just beginning to realize it. You know I haven’t been able to feel—I still can’t feel—that it’s real—that John—is dead.” She began to shake a little. “Who can have killed him? Who can possibly have killed him?”
Lady Angkatell drew a deep breath—then she turned her head sharply. Sir Henry’s door had opened. He came in accompanied by Inspector Grange, who was a large, heavily built man with a down-drooping, pessimistic moustache.
“This is my wife—Inspector Grange.”
Grange bowed and said:
“I was wondering, Lady Angkatell, if I could have a few words with Mrs. Christow—”
He broke off as Lady Angkatell indicated the figure on the sofa.
“Mrs. Christow?”
Gerda said eagerly:
“Yes, I am Mrs. Christow.”
“I don’t want to distress you, Mrs. Christow, but I would like to ask you a few questions. You can, of course, have your solicitor present if you prefer it—”
Sir Henry put in:
“It is sometimes wiser, Gerda—”
She interrupted:
“A solicitor? Why a solicitor? Why should a solicitor know anything about John’s death?”
Inspector Grange coughed. Sir Henry seemed about to speak. Henrietta put in:
“The inspector only wants to know just what happened this morning.”
Gerda turned to him. She spoke in a wondering voice:
“It seems all like a bad dream—not real. I—I haven’t been able to cry or anything. One just doesn’t feel anything at all.”
Grange said soothingly:
“That’s the shock, Mrs. Christow.”
“Yes, yes—I suppose it is. But you see it was all so sudden. I went out from the house and along the path to the swimming pool—”
“At what time, Mrs. Christow?”
“It was just before one o’clock—about two minutes to one. I know because I looked at that clock. And when I got there—there was John, lying there—and blood on the edge of the concrete.”
“Did you hear a shot, Mrs. Christow?”
“Yes,—no—I don’t know. I knew Sir Henry and Mr. Angkatell were out shooting. I—I just saw John—”
“Yes, Mrs. Christow?”
“John—and blood—and a revolver. I picked up the revolver—”
“Why?”
“I beg your pardon?”
“Why did you pick up the revolver, Mrs. Christow?”
“I—I don’t know.”
“You shouldn’t have touched it, you know.”
“Shouldn’t I?” Gerda was vague, her face vacant. “But I did. I held it in my hands.”
She looked down now at her hands as though she was, in fancy, seeing the revolver lying in them.
She turned sharply to the inspector. Her voice was suddenly sharp—anguished.
“Who could have killed John? Nobody could have wanted to kill him. He was—he was the best of men. So kind, so unselfish—he did everything for other people. Everybody loved him, Inspector. He was a wonderful doctor. The best and kindest of husbands. It must have been an accident—it must—it must!”
She flung out a hand to the room.
“Ask anyone, Inspector. Nobody could have wanted to kill John, could they?”
She appealed to them all.
Inspector Grange closed up his notebook.
“Thank you, Mrs. Christow,” he said in an unemotional voice. “That will be all for the present.”
Hercule Poirot and Inspector Grange went together through the chestnut woods to the swimming pool. The thing that had been John Christow but which was now “the body” had been photographed and measured and written about and examined by the police surgeon, and had now been taken away to the mortuary. The swimming pool, Poirot thought, looked curiously innocent. Everything about today, he thought, had been strangely fluid. Except John Christow—he had not been fluid. Even in death he had been purposeful and objective. The swimming pool was not now preeminently a swimming pool, it was the place where John Christow’s body had lain and where his lifeblood had welled away over concrete into artificially blue water.
Artificial—for a moment Poirot grasped at the word. Yes, there had been something artificial about it all. As though—
A man in a bathing suit came up to the inspector.
“Here’s the revolver, sir,” he said.
Grange took the dripping object gingerly.
“No hope of fingerprints now,” he remarked, “but luckily it doesn’t matter in this case. Mrs. Christow was actually holding the revolver when you arrived, wasn’t she, M. Poirot?”
“Yes.”
“Identification of the revolver is the next thing,” said Grange. “I should imagine Sir Henry will be able to do that for us. She got it from his study, I should say.”
He cast a glance round the pool.
“Now, let’s have that again to be quite clear. The path below the pool comes up from the farm and that’s the way Lady Angkatell came. The other two, Mr. Edward Angkatell and Miss Savernake, came down from the woods—but not together. He came by the left-hand path, and she by the right-hand one which leads out of the long flower walk above the house. But they were both standing on the far side of the pool when you arrived?”
“Yes.”
“And this path here, beside the pavilion, leads on to Podder’s Lane. Right—we’ll go along it.”
As they walked, Grange spoke, without excitement, just with knowledge and quiet pessimism.
“Never like these cases much,” he said. “Had one last year—down near Ashridge. Retired military man, he was—distinguished career. Wife was the nice quiet, old-fashioned kind, sixty-five, grey hair—rather pretty hair with a wave in it. Did a lot of gardening. One day she goes up to his room, gets out his service revolver, and walks out into the garden and shoots him. Just like that! A good deal behind it, of course, that one had to dig out. Sometimes they think up some fool story about a tramp! We pretend to accept it, of course, keep things quiet whilst we’re making inquiries, but we know what’s what.”
“You mean,” said Poirot, “that you have decided that Mrs. Christow shot her husband.”
Grange gave him a look of surprise.
“Well, don’t you think so?”
Poirot said slowly: “It could all have happened as she said.”
Inspector Grange shrugged his shoulders.
“It could have—yes. But it’s a thin story. And they all think she k
illed him! They know something we don’t.” He looked curiously at his companion. “You thought she’d done it all right, didn’t you, when you arrived on the scene?”
Poirot half-closed his eyes. Coming along the path…Gudgeon stepping…Gerda Christow standing over her husband with the revolver in her hand and that blank look on her face. Yes, as Grange had said, he had thought she had done it…had thought, at least, that that was the impression he was meant to have.
Yes, but that was not the same thing.
A scene staged—set to deceive.
Had Gerda Christow looked like a woman who had just shot her husband? That was what Inspector Grange wanted to know.
And with a sudden shock of surprise, Hercule Poirot realized that in all his long experience of deeds of violence he had never actually come face to face with a woman who had just killed her husband. What would a woman look like in such circumstances? Triumphant, horrified, satisfied, dazed, incredulous, empty?
Any one of these things, he thought.
Inspector Grange was talking. Poirot caught the end of his speech.
“—Once you get all the facts behind the case, and you can usually get all that from the servants.”
“Mrs. Christow is going back to London?”
“Yes. There’s a couple of kids there. Have to let her go. Of course, we keep a sharp eye on her, but she won’t know that. She thinks she’s got away with it all right. Looks rather a stupid kind of woman to me….”
Did Gerda Christow realize, Poirot wondered, what the police thought—and what the Angkatells thought? She had looked as though she did not realize anything at all. She had looked like a woman whose reactions were slow and who was completely dazed and heartbroken by her husband’s death.
They had come out into the lane.
Poirot stopped by his gate. Grange said:
“This your little place? Nice and snug. Well, good-bye for the present, M. Poirot. Thanks for your cooperation. I’ll drop in some time and give you the lowdown on how we’re getting on.”
His eye travelled up the lane.
“Who’s your neighbour? That’s not where our new celebrity hangs out, is it?”
The Hollow Page 10