Norma murmured: “Poor David. When I first met him I thought he was wonderful.”
“That picture,” said Poirot dreamily. “Always, always, I came back to that in my mind. Why had Restarick brought it up to his office? What special significance did it have for him? Enfin, I do not admire myself for being so dense.”
“I don’t understand about the pictures.”
“It was a very clever idea. It served as a kind of certificate of identity. A pair of portraits, husband and wife, by a celebrated and fashionable portrait painter of his day. David Baker, when they come out of store, replaces Restarick’s portrait with one of Orwell, making him about twenty years younger in appearance. Nobody would have dreamed that the portrait was a fake; the style, the brush strokes, the canvas, it was a splendidly convincing bit of work. Restarick hung it over his desk. Anyone who knew Restarick years ago, might say: ‘I’d hardly have known you!’ Or ‘You’ve changed quite a lot,’ would look up at the portrait, but would only think he himself had really forgotten what the other man had looked like!”
“It was a great risk for Restarick—or rather Orwell—to take,” said Mrs. Oliver thoughtfully.
“Less than you might think. He was never a claimant, you see, in the Tichborne sense. He was only a member of a well-known City firm, returning home after his brother’s death to settle up his brother’s affairs after having spent some years abroad. He brought with him a young wife recently acquired abroad, and took up residence with an elderly, half blind but extremely distinguished uncle by marriage who had never known him well after his schoolboy days, and who accepted him without question. He had no other near relations, except for the daughter whom he had last seen when she was a child of five. When he originally left for South Africa, the office staff had had two very elderly clerks, since deceased. Junior staff never remains anywhere long nowadays. The family lawyer is also dead. You may be sure that the whole position was studied very carefully on the spot by Frances after they had decided on their coup.
“She had met him, it seems, in Kenya about two years ago. They were both crooks, though with entirely different interests. He went in for various shoddy deals as a prospector—Restarick and Orwell went together to prospect for mineral deposits in somewhat wild country. There was a rumour of Restarick’s death (probably true) which was later contradicted.”
“A lot of money in the gamble, I suspect?” said Stillingfleet.
“An enormous amount of money was involved. A terrific gamble—for a terrific stake. It came off. Andrew Restarick was a very rich man himself and he was his brother’s heir. Nobody questioned his identity. And then—things went wrong. Out of the blue, he got a letter from a woman who, if she ever came face to face with him, would know at once that he wasn’t Andrew Restarick. And a second piece of bad fortune occurred—David Baker started to blackmail him.”
“That might have been expected, I suppose,” said Stillingfleet thoughtfully.
“They didn’t expect it,” said Poirot. “David had never blackmailed before. It was the enormous wealth of this man that went to his head, I expect. The sum he had been paid for faking the portrait seemed to him grossly inadequate. He wanted more. So Restarick wrote him large cheques, and pretended that it was on account of his daughter—to prevent her from making an undesirable marriage. Whether he really wanted to marry her, I do not know—he may have done. But to blackmail two people like Orwell and Frances Cary was a dangerous thing to do.”
“You mean those two just cold-bloodedly planned to kill two people—quite calmly—just like that?” demanded Mrs. Oliver.
She looked rather sick.
“They might have added you to their list, Madame,” said Poirot.
“Me? Do you mean that it was one of them who hit me on the head? Frances, I suppose? Not the poor Peacock?”
“I do not think it was the Peacock. But you had been already to Borodene Mansions. Now you perhaps follow Frances to Chelsea, or so she thinks, with a rather dubious story to account for yourself. So she slips out and gives you a nice little tap on the head to put paid to your curiosity for a while. You would not listen when I warned you there was danger about.”
“I can hardly believe it of her! Lying about in attitudes of a Burne-Jones heroine in that dirty studio that day. But why—” She looked at Norma—then back at Poirot. “They used her—deliberately—worked upon her, drugged her, made her believe that she had murdered two people. Why?”
“They wanted a victim…” said Poirot.
He rose from his chair and went to Norma.
“Mon enfant, you have been through a terrible ordeal. It is a thing that need never happen to you again. Remember that now, you can have confidence in yourself always. To have known, at close quarters, what absolute evil means, is to be armoured against what life can do to you.”
“I suppose you are right,” said Norma. “To think you are mad—really to believe it, is a frightening thing…” She shivered. “I don’t see, even now, why I escaped—why anyone managed to believe that I hadn’t killed David—not when even I believed I had killed him?”
“Blood was wrong,” said Dr. Stillingfleet in a matter-of-fact tone. “Starting to coagulate. Shirt was ‘stiff with it,’ as Miss Jacobs said, not wet. You were supposed to have killed him not more than about five minutes before Frances’s screaming act.”
“How did she—” Mrs. Oliver began to work things out. “She had been to Manchester—”
“She came home by an earlier train, changed into her Mary wig and makeup on the train. Walked into Borodene Mansions and went up in the lift as an unknown blonde. Went into the flat where David was waiting for her, as she had told him to do. He was quite unsuspecting, and she stabbed him. Then she went out again, and kept watch until she saw Norma coming. She slipped into a public cloakroom, changed her appearance, and joined a friend at the end of the road and walked with her, said good-bye to her at Borodene Mansions and went up herself and did her stuff—quite enjoying doing it, I expect. By the time the police had been called and got there, she didn’t think anyone would suspect the time lag. I must say, Norma, you gave us all a hell of a time that day. Insisting on having killed everyone the way you did!”
“I wanted to confess and get it all over…Did you—did you think I might really have done it, then?”
“Me? What do you take me for? I know what my patients will do or won’t do. But I thought you were going to make things damned difficult. I didn’t know how far Neele was sticking his neck out. Didn’t seem proper police procedure to me. Look at the way he gave Poirot here his head.”
Poirot smiled.
“Chief Inspector Neele and I have known each other for many years. Besides, he had been making inquiries about certain matters already. You were never really outside Louise’s door. Frances changed the numbers. She reversed the 6 and the 7 on your own door. Those numbers were loose, stuck on with spikes. Claudia was away that night. Frances drugged you so that the whole thing was a nightmare dream to you.
“I saw the truth suddenly. The only other person who could have killed Louise was the real ‘third girl,’ Frances Cary.”
“You kept half recognising her, you know,” said Stillingfleet, “when you described to me how one person seemed to turn into another.”
Norma looked at him thoughtfully.
“You were very rude to people,” she said to Stillingfleet. He looked slightly taken aback.
“Rude?”
“The things you said to everyone. The way you shouted at them.”
“Oh well, yes, perhaps I was…I’ve got in the way of it. People are so damned irritating.”
He grinned suddenly at Poirot.
“She’s quite a girl, isn’t she?”
Mrs. Oliver rose to her feet with a sigh.
“I must go home.” She looked at the two men and then at Norma. “What are we going to do with her?” she asked.
They both looked startled.
“I know she’s staying wit
h me at the moment,” she went on. “And she says she’s quite happy. But I mean there it is, quite a problem. Lots and lots of money because your father—the real one, I mean—left it all to you. And that will cause complications, and begging letters and all that. She could go and live with old Sir Roderick, but that wouldn’t be fun for a girl—he’s pretty deaf already as well as blind—and completely selfish. By the way, what about his missing papers, and the girl, and Kew Gardens?”
“They turned up where he thought he’d already looked—Sonia found them,” said Norma, and added, “Uncle Roddy and Sonia are getting married—next week—”
“No fool like an old fool,” said Stillingfleet.
“Aha!” said Poirot. “So the young lady prefers life in England to being embroiled in la politique. She is perhaps wise, that little one.”
“So that’s that,” said Mrs. Oliver with finality. “But to go on about Norma, one has to be practical. One’s got to make plans. The girl can’t know what she wants to do all by herself. She’s waiting for someone to tell her.”
She looked at them severely.
Poirot said nothing. He smiled.
“Oh, her?” said Dr. Stillingfleet. “Well, I’ll tell you, Norma. I’m flying to Australia Tuesday week. I want to look around first—see if what’s been fixed up for me is going to work, and all that. Then I’ll cable you and you can join me. Then we get married. You’ll have to take my word for it that it’s not your money I want. I’m not one of those doctors who want to endow whacking great research establishments and all that. I’m just interested in people. I think, too, that you’d be able to manage me all right. All that about my being rude to people—I hadn’t noticed it myself. It’s odd, really, when you think of all the mess you’ve been in—helpless as a fly in treacle—yet it’s not going to be me running you, it’s going to be you running me.”
Norma stood quite still. She looked at John Stillingfleet very carefully, as though she was considering something that she knew from an entirely different point of view.
And then she smiled. It was a very nice smile—like a happy young nannie.
“All right,” she said.
She crossed the room to Hercule Poirot.
“I was rude, too,” she said. “The day I came here when you were having breakfast. I said to you that you were too old to help me. That was a rude thing to say. And it wasn’t true.…”
She put her hands on his shoulders and kissed him.
“You’d better get us a taxi,” she said to Stillingfleet.
Dr. Stillingfleet nodded and left the room. Mrs. Oliver collected a handbag and a fur stole and Norma slipped on a coat and followed her to the door.
“Madame, un petit moment—”
Mrs. Oliver turned. Poirot had collected from the recesses of the sofa a handsome coil of grey hair.
Mrs. Oliver exclaimed vexedly: “It’s just like everything that they make nowadays, no good at all! Hairpins, I mean. They just slip out, and everything falls off!”
She went out frowning.
A moment or two later she poked her head round the door again. She spoke in a conspiratorial whisper:
“Just tell me—it’s all right, I’ve sent her on down—did you send that girl to this particular doctor on purpose?”
“Of course I did. His qualifications are—”
“Never mind his qualifications. You know what I mean. He and she—Did you?”
“If you must know, yes.”
“I thought so,” said Mrs. Oliver. “You do think of things, don’t you.”
* * *
The Agatha Christie Collection
THE HERCULE POIROT MYSTERIES
Match your wits with the famous Belgian detective.
The Mysterious Affair at Styles
The Murder on the Links
Poirot Investigates
The Murder of Roger Ackroyd
The Big Four
The Mystery of the Blue Train
Peril at End House
Lord Edgware Dies
Murder on the Orient Express
Three Act Tragedy
Death in the Clouds
The A.B.C. Murders
Murder in Mesopotamia
Cards on the Table
Murder in the Mews
Dumb Witness
Death on the Nile
Appointment with Death
Hercule Poirot’s Christmas
Sad Cypress
One, Two, Buckle My Shoe
Evil Under the Sun
Five Little Pigs
The Hollow
The Labors of Hercules
Taken at the Flood
The Underdog and Other Stories
Mrs. McGinty’s Dead
After the Funeral
Hickory Dickory Dock
Dead Man’s Folly
Cat Among the Pigeons
The Clocks
Third Girl
Hallowe’en Party
Elephants Can Remember
Curtain: Poirot’s Last Case
Explore more at www.AgathaChristie.com
* * *
* * *
The Agatha Christie Collection
THE MISS MARPLE MYSTERIES
Join the legendary spinster sleuth from St. Mary Mead in solving murders far and wide.
The Murder at the Vicarage
The Body in the Library
The Moving Finger
A Murder Is Announced
They Do It with Mirrors
A Pocket Full of Rye
4:50 From Paddington
The Mirror Crack’d from Side to Side
A Caribbean Mystery
At Bertram’s Hotel
Nemesis
Sleeping Murder
Miss Marple: The Complete Short Stories
THE TOMMY AND TUPPENCE MYSTERIES
Jump on board with the entertaining crime-solving couple from Young Adventurers Ltd.
The Secret Adversary
Partners in Crime
N or M?
By the Pricking of My Thumbs
Postern of Fate
Explore more at www.AgathaChristie.com
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* * *
The Agatha Christie Collection
Don’t miss a single one of Agatha Christie’s stand-alone novels and short-story collections.
The Man in the Brown Suit
The Secret of Chimneys
The Seven Dials Mystery
The Mysterious Mr. Quin
The Sittaford Mystery
Parker Pyne Investigates
Why Didn’t They Ask Evans?
Murder Is Easy
The Regatta Mystery and Other Stories
And Then There Were None
Towards Zero
Death Comes as the End
Sparkling Cyanide
The Witness for the Prosecution and Other Stories
Crooked House
Three Blind Mice and Other Stories
They Came to Baghdad
Destination Unknown
Ordeal by Innocence
Double Sin and Other Stories
The Pale Horse
Star over Bethlehem: Poems and Holiday Stories
Endless Night
Passenger to Frankfurt
The Golden Ball and Other Stories
The Mousetrap and Other Plays
The Harlequin Tea Set
Explore more at www.AgathaChristie.com
* * *
About the Author
Agatha Christie is the most widely published author of all time and in any language, outsold only by the Bible and Shakespeare. Her books have sold more than a billion copies in English and another billion in a hundred foreign languages. She is the author of eighty crime novels and short-story collections, nineteen plays, two memoirs, and six novels written under the name Mary Westmacott.
She first tried her hand at detective fiction while working in a hospital dispensary during World War I, creating the now
legendary Hercule Poirot with her debut novel The Mysterious Affair at Styles. With The Murder in the Vicarage, published in 1930, she introduced another beloved sleuth, Miss Jane Marple. Additional series characters include the husband-and-wife crime-fighting team of Tommy and Tuppence Beresford, private investigator Parker Pyne, and Scotland Yard detectives Superintendent Battle and Inspector Japp.
Many of Christie’s novels and short stories were adapted into plays, films, and television series. The Mousetrap, her most famous play of all, opened in 1952 and is the longest-running play in history. Among her best-known film adaptations are Murder on the Orient Express (1974) and Death on the Nile (1978), with Albert Finney and Peter Ustinov playing Hercule Poirot, respectively. On the small screen Poirot has been most memorably portrayed by David Suchet, and Miss Marple by Joan Hickson and subsequently Geraldine McEwan and Julia McKenzie.
Christie was first married to Archibald Christie and then to archaeologist Sir Max Mallowan, whom she accompanied on expeditions to countries that would also serve as the settings for many of her novels. In 1971 she achieved one of Britain’s highest honors when she was made a Dame of the British Empire. She died in 1976 at the age of eighty-five. Her one hundred and twentieth anniversary was celebrated around the world in 2010.
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