‘As far as I know, that is the truth,’ said Poirot.
‘When Lopez arrived at the Fête, Lady Stubbs had already disappeared.’
‘If she didn’t want to meet him, she could have easily gone to her room, and pleaded a headache.’
‘Easily.’
‘So it was more than not just wanting to meet him … To run away, she must really have feared him very much.’
‘Yes.’
‘And that puts Lopez in a more sinister light … Still – if she’s only run away, we’re bound to pick her up before long. I can’t understand why we haven’t already done so …’
Unspoken, there hovered between them an implication of a more sinister possibility …
‘To go back to the murdered girl,’ said Poirot. ‘You have questioned her family? They can suggest no reason for the crime?’
‘Nothing whatever.’
‘She had not been –’ Poirot paused delicately.
‘No, no, nothing of that kind.’
‘I am glad.’ Poirot was remembering Marlene’s remarks about sex maniacs.
‘Hadn’t even got a boy friend,’ said the Inspector.
‘Or so her people say. Probably true enough – the things she scribbled on those Comics show a bit of wishful thinking.’
He gestured towards the pile of Comics that Poirot had last seen in the boathouse and which were now reposing at the Inspector’s elbow.
Poirot asked: ‘You permit?’ and Bland nodded.
Poirot ran rapidly through the sheets. In a straggling childish hand, Marlene had scrawled her comments on life.
‘Jackie Blake goes with Susan Barnes.’ ‘Peter pinches girls at the pictures.’ ‘Georgie Porgie kisses hikers in the woods.’ ‘Betty Fox like boys …’ ‘Albert goes with Doreen.’
He found the remarks pathetic in their young crudity. He replaced the pile of papers on the table, and as he did so, he was suddenly assailed with feeling of something missing. Something – there was something that ought –
The elusive impression faded as Bland spoke.
‘There was no struggle to speak of. Looks as though she just let someone put that cord around her neck without suspecting it was anything but a joke.’
Poirot said:
‘That is easily accounted for – if she knew the person. In a way, it was what she expected. She was to be the murder victim, you see. She would have let herself be “arranged” for the part by any of the people connected with the Fête.’
‘By Lady Stubbs, for instance?’
‘Yes.’
Poirot went on: ‘Or by Mrs. Oliver, or Mrs. Legge, or Miss Brewis or Mrs. Masterton. Or for that matter, by Sir George, or Captain Warborough, or Alec Legge, or even Michael Weyman.’
‘Yes,’ said Bland, ‘it’s a wide field. Only two people have an absolute alibi, Sir George was on duty at the Shows all afternoon, never left the front lawn, and the same goes for Captain Warborough. Miss Brewis might just have done it. She went between the house and the garden, and she could have been absent for as long as ten minutes without being noticed. Mrs. Legge could have left the Fortune Telling tent, though it is unlikely; there was a fairly steady stream of clients there. Mrs. Oliver and Michael Weyman and Alec Legge were wandering about all over the place – no alibis of any kind. However I suppose you’ll insist that we absolve your lady novelist of the crime.’
‘One can make no exceptions,’ said Poirot. ‘Mrs. Oliver, after all, arranged this Murder Hunt. She arranged for the girl to be isolated in the boathouse, far away from the crowds by the house.’
‘Good Lord, M. Poirot, do you mean –’
‘No, I do not mean. I am trying to get at something which is still very nebulous … which so far has baffled me. There is another point, the key. When Mrs. Oliver and I discovered the body, Mrs. Oliver unlocked the door with a key. There was another key which was to be the last “clue”. Was that in place?’
Bland nodded.
‘Yes. It was in a small Chinese pottery theatre in the hydrangea walk. Nobody had got to that clue yet. There was a third key in the house – drawer in the front hall.’
‘Where everyone could get it! And in any case, if someone she knew tapped on the door and asked her to open it, Marlene would have done so. If Mrs. Masterton, say, or Mrs. Folliat –’
‘Mrs. Masterton was very much in evidence at the Fête. So was Mrs. Folliat.’
‘I noticed that Mrs. Folliat was – how shall I say – playing the hostess.’
‘Tis her house by rights,’ said Constable Hoskins severely. ‘Always been Folliats at Greenshore.’
Poirot stared at him. He missed what Inspector Bland had been saying and only heard the end of his speech.
‘– no earthly reason why that girl should have been killed. We’ll know better where we are when we’ve run Lady Stubbs to the ground.’
‘If you do,’ said Poirot.
Bland laughed confidently.
‘Alive or dead – we’ll find her all right,’ he said. ‘Dash it all, a woman can’t just disappear into space.’
‘I wonder,’ said Poirot. ‘I very much wonder …’
VII
The weeks went by, and it seemed that Inspector Bland’s confident statement was proved wrong. A woman could disappear into space! Nowhere was there any sign of Lady Stubbs, alive or dead. In her cyclamen clinging Ascot frock and her high heels and her great black shady hat, she had strolled away from the crowded lawn of her house – and no human eye had seen her again. Her frantic husband besieged police headquarters, Scotland Yard was asked for assistance by the Chief Constable, but Hattie Stubbs was not found. In the publicity given to the disappearance of Lady Stubbs the unsolved murder of Marlene Tucker faded into the background. Occasionally there was a paragraph to the effect that the police were anxious to interview or had interviewed someone, but none of the interviews led to anything.
Little by little, the public lost interest in both the murder of Marlene and the disappearance of Lady Stubbs.
It was on an October afternoon, two months after the day of the Fête, that Detective Inspector Bland rang up Hercule Poirot. He explained that he was passing through London, and asked if he could drop in and see M. Poirot.
Poirot replied most cordially.
He replaced the receiver, hesitated, then rang Mrs. Oliver’s number.
‘But do not,’ he hastened to add when he had made his demand to speak to her, ‘disturb her if she is at work.’
He remembered how bitterly Mrs. Oliver had once reproached him for interrupting a train of creative thought and how the world, in consequence, had been deprived of an intriguing mystery, centring round an old fashioned long-sleeved woollen vest.
Mrs. Oliver’s voice, however, spoke almost immediately.
‘It’s splendid that you’ve rung me up,’ she said. ‘I was just going to give a Talk on “How I write my Books” and now I shall get my secretary to ring up and say I’m unavoidably detained.’
‘But, Madame, you must not let me prevent –’
‘It’s not a case of preventing. I should have made the most awful fool of myself. I mean, what can you say about how you write books? I mean, first you’ve got to think of something and then when you’ve thought of it, you’ve got to force yourself to sit and write it. That’s all! It would have taken me just three minutes to explain that, and the Talk would have ended – and everybody would have been very fed up. I can’t imagine why everybody is so keen for authors to talk about writing – I should have thought it was an author’s business to write, not talk.”
‘And yet it is about how you write that I want to ask you now –’
‘You can ask, but I probably shan’t know the answers. I mean one just writes. Just a minute – I’ve got a frightfully silly hat on, for the Talk, and I must take it off. It scratches my forehead!’
There was a momentary pause and the voice of Mrs. Oliver resumed in a relieved voice.
‘Hats are really a symbol nowa
days, aren’t they? I mean one doesn’t wear them for sensible reasons any more – to keep one’s head warm, or shield one from the sun, or hide one’s face from people one doesn’t want to meet – I beg your pardon, M. Poirot, did you say something?’
‘It was an ejaculation only. It is extraordinary,’ said Poirot and his voice was awed. ‘Always – always – you give me ideas … So also, did my friend Hastings who I have not seen for many years … But no more of all that. Let me ask you instead a question. Do you know an Atom Scientist, Madame?’
‘Do I know an Atom Scientist?’ said Mrs. Oliver in a surprised voice. ‘I don’t know. I suppose I may. I mean I know some Professors and things – I’m never quite sure what they actually do.’
‘Yet you made an Atom Scientist one of the suspects at your Murder Hunt?’
‘Oh, that. Well, that was just to be up to date. I mean, when I went to buy presents for my nephews last Christmas there was nothing but science fiction and the stratosphere, and supersonic toys! And so I thought: better have an atom scientist as the chief suspect. After all, if I had wanted a little technical jargon I could have always got it from Alec Legge.’
‘Alec Legge? That is the husband of Peggy Legge – is he an Atomic scientist?’
‘Yes, he is. Not Harwell – Wales somewhere, or Bristol. It’s just a holiday cottage they have on the Dart. So of course I do know an Atom Scientist after all.’
‘And it was meeting him at Greenshore that probably put the idea of an Atomic Scientist in to your head. But his wife is not Yugoslavian?’
‘Oh no! Peggy’s as English as English.’
‘Then what put the idea of a Yugoslavian wife into your head?’
‘I really don’t know … refugees perhaps … or all those foreign girls at the Hostel next door – always trespassing through the woods and speaking broken English.’
‘I see – yes, I see … I see now a lot of things. There is something else – there was a clue, you said, written on one of the Comics you had provided for Marlene.’
‘Yes.’
‘Was that clue something like –’ he forced his memory back –‘“Johnny goes with Doreen – Georgie Porgie kisses a hiker – Betty is sweet on Tom”?’
‘Good gracious, no, no – nothing silly like that. Mine was a perfectly straight clue. Look in the hikers rucksack!’
‘Epatant!’ said Poirot – ‘Naturally that had to be suppressed! Now one more thing. You have said that various changes were suggested in your scenario, some you resisted and some you accepted. Was it originally your idea to have the body discovered in the boathouse? Think carefully.’
‘No it wasn’t,’ said Mrs. Oliver. ‘I arranged for the Body to be in that little old fashioned summerhouse quite near the house, behind the rhododendrons. But they all said that it would be better to have the last clue far away and isolated, and as I’d just made a great fuss about the Folly Clue, and it didn’t seem to me to matter, I gave in.’
‘The Folly,’ said Poirot softly. ‘One comes back always to the Folly. Young Michael Weyman standing there the day I arrived, saying that it should never have been put where it was put … Sir George’s Folly …’
‘He had it put there because the trees had blown down. Michael Weyman told us so.’
‘He also told us that the foundations were rotten – I think, Madame, that that is what you felt in that house – It is the reason you sent for me – It is not what you could see that was rotten – it was that which was concealed below the surface – You felt it – and you were right.”
‘I don’t really know what you are talking about, Monsieur Poirot.’
‘Have you ever reflected, Madame, on the enormous part that Hearsay plays in life. “Mr. A said,” “Mrs. B. told us.” “Miss C. explained why –” and so on. And if the known facts seem to fit with what we have been told, then we never question them. There are so many things that do not concern us, and so we do not bother to uncover the actual facts.’
‘M. Poirot,’ Mrs. Oliver spoke excitedly. ‘You sound like you knew something.’
‘I think really I have known it for some time,’ said Poirot dreamily. ‘So many small unrelated facts – but all pointing the same way. Excuse me, Madame, my front door bell rings. It is Inspector Bland who arrives to see me.’
He replaced the receiver and went to let his guest in.
VIII
‘Two months now,’ said Bland, leaning back in his chair and sipping gingerly at the cup of China tea with which Poirot had provided him.
‘Two months – and there hasn’t been a trace of her. It’s not so easy to disappear in this country as all that. Not if we can get on the trail straight away. And we were on the trail. It’s no good saying that she went off on that fellow’s yacht. She didn’t. We searched that boat very carefully, and she wasn’t on it – alive or dead.’
‘What kind of a yacht was it?’ asked Poirot.
Bland looked at him suspiciously.
‘It wasn’t rigged up for smuggling, if that’s what you mean. No fancy hidden partitions or secret cubby holes.’
‘That is not what I mean. I only asked what kind if yacht – big or small?’
‘Oh it was a terrific affair – must have cost the earth. All very smart and newly painted – and luxury fittings.’
‘Exactly,’ said Poirot. He sounded pleased.
‘What are you getting at, M. Poirot?’
‘Paul Lopez is a rich man. That is very significant.’
‘Perhaps. But I don’t see why. What do you think has happened to Lady Stubbs, M. Poirot?’
‘I have no doubt whatever – Lady Stubbs is dead.’
Bland nodded his head slowly.
‘Yes, I think so too. We found that hat of hers. Fished it out of the river. It was straw and it floated. As for the body, tide was running out hard that afternoon. It will have been carried out to sea. It will wash up somewhere someday – though it mayn’t be easy to identify after all this time. Yes, I’m clear on that. She went into the Dart – but was it suicide or murder?’
‘Again, there is no doubt – it was murder,’ said Hercule Poirot.
‘Who murdered her?’
‘Have you no ideas as to that?’
‘I’ve a very good idea, but no evidence. I think she was murdered by Paul Lopez. He came up to Greenshore in a small launch by himself, remember. I think he came ashore by the boathouse and that she slipped down there to meet him. It seems fantastic that he could conk her on the head or stab her and push her body into the water and not be seen doing it – when you consider how many craft there are on the river in the summer – but I suppose the truth is if you’re not expecting to see anyone murdered you don’t see it! Plenty of horse play and shrieks and people shoving each other off boats, and it’s all taken to be holiday fun! The one person who did see it happen was Marlene Tucker. She saw it from the window of the boathouse, and so – she had to be killed too.’
He paused and looked enquiringly at Poirot.
‘But we’ve no evidence,’ he said. ‘And Lopez has gone home. We had nothing to hold him on. We don’t even know why he killed Hattie Stubbs. There was no monetary gain. She didn’t own any property out there and she hadn’t any money of her own – only a settlement that Sir George had made about six months after their marriage. We went into all the finances. Sir George is a very rich man – his wife was practically penniless.’
He gave an exasperated sigh.
‘So where’s the motive, Monsieur Poirot? What did Lopez stand to gain?’
‘Poirot leaned back in his chair, joined the tips of his fingers and spoke in a soft monotone.
‘Let us take certain facts in chronological order. Greenshore House is for sale. It is brought by Sir George Stubbs who has recently married a girl from the West Indies; an orphan educated in Paris and chaperoned after the death of her parents by Mrs. Folliat, the widow of a former owner of Greenshore House. Sir George is probably induced to buy the house under the influence
of Mrs. Folliat whom he permits to live in the Lodge. According to a very old man formerly in service with the Folliats, there will always be Folliats at Greenshore House.’
‘You mean old Merdle? Lived in the cottage down by the quay?’
‘Lived? Is he dead?’
‘Took a drop too much one night, they think, coming back from Dartsway opposite; he missed his footing getting out of his boat and was drowned.’
Poirot remarked, ‘An accident? I wonder …’
‘You think it wasn’t an accident? Did he know something, perhaps, about his granddaughter’s death?’
‘His granddaughter?’ Poirot sat bolt upright. His eyes shone green with excitement. Was Marlene Tucker his granddaughter?
‘Yes. His only daughter’s child.’
‘Of course,’ said Poirot. ‘Of course … I should have guessed that …’
Bland moved restively.
‘Look here, M. Poirot, I don’t understand …’
Poirot raised an authoritative hand.
‘Let me continue. Sir George brings his young wife to Greenshore. The day before their arrival there had been a terrible gale. Trees down everywhere. A month or two later Sir George erected what is sometimes called a Folly – just where a very big oak tree had come out bodily by the roots. It was a very unsuitable place, according to an architect, for such a thing to be put.’
‘Daresay George Stubbs didn’t know any better.’
‘And yet somebody told me that he was a man of quite good taste, surprisingly so …’
‘M. Poirot, what is all this getting at?’
‘I am trying to reconstruct a story – the story as it must be.’
‘But look here, M. Poirot – aren’t we getting a long way from murder.’
‘It is the story of a murder. But we have to begin at the beginning …’
Hercule Poirot and the Greenshore Folly Page 6