"Like this?"
Poirot darted nimbly forward and pulled at the screen. It was a handsome affair of painted leather. It already slightly obscured the view of the chest, and as Poirot adjusted it, it hid the chest altogether.
"That's right, sir," said the valet. "It was like that."
"And the next morning?"
"It was still like that. I remember. I moved it away and it was then I saw the stain. The carpet's gone to be cleaned, sir. That's why the boards are bare."
Poirot nodded.
"I see," he said. "I thank you."
He placed a crisp piece of paper in the valet's palm.
"Thank you, sir."
"Poirot," I said when we were out in the street, "that point about the screen - is that a point helpful to Rich?"
"It is a further point against him," said Poirot ruefully. "The screen hid the chest from the room. It also hid the stain on the carpet. Sooner or later the blood was bound to soak through the wood and stain the carpet. The screen would prevent discovery for the moment. Yes - but there is something there that I do not understand. The valet, Hastings, the valet."
"What about the valet? He seemed a most intelligent fellow."
"As you say, most intelligent. Is it credible, then, that Major Rich failed to realize that the valet would certainly discover the body in the morning? Immediately after the deed he had no time for anything granted. He shoves the body into the chest, pulls the screen in front of it and goes through the evening hoping for the best. But after the guests are gone? Surely, then is the time to dispose of the body."
"Perhaps he hoped the valet wouldn't notice the stain?"
"That, mon ami, is absurd. A stained carpet is the first thing a good servant would be bound to notice. And Major Rich, he goes to bed and snores there comfortably and does nothing at all about the matter.
Very remarkable and interesting, that."
"Curtiss might have seen the stains when he was changing the records the night before?" I suggested.
"That is unlikely. The screen would throw deep shadow just there. No, but I begin to see. Yes, dimly I begin to see."
"See what?" I asked eagerly.
"The possibilities, shall we say, of an alternative explanation. Our next visit may throw light on things."
Our next visit was to the doctor who had examined the body. His evidence was a mere recapitulation of what he had already given at the inquest. Deceased had been stabbed to the heart with long thin knife something like a stiletto. The knife had been left in the wound.
Death had been instantaneous. The knife was the property of Major Rich and usually lay on his writing table. There were no fingerprints on it, the doctor understood. It had been either wiped or held in a handkerchief. As regards time, any time between seven and eight seemed indicated.
"He could not, for instance, have been killed after midnight?" asked Poirot.
"No. That I can say. Ten o'clock at the outside - but seven-thirty to eight seems clearly indicated."
"There is a second hypothesis possible," Poirot said when we were back home. "I wonder if you see it, Hastings. To me it is very plain, and I only need one point to clear up the matter for good and all."
"It's no good," I said. "I'm not there."
"But make an effort, Hastings. Make an effort.''
"Very well," I said. "At seven-forty Clayton is alive and well. The last person to see him alive is Rich - "
"So we assume."
"Well, isn't it so?"
"You forget, mon ami, that Major Rich denies that. He states explicitly that Clayton had gone when he came in."
"But the valet says that he would have heard Clayton leave because of the bang of the door. And also, if Clayton had left, when did he return?
He couldn't have returned after midnight because the doctor says positively that he was dead at least two hours before that. That only leaves one alternative."
"Yes, mon ami?" said Poirot.
"That in the five minutes Clayton was alone in the sitting room, someone else came in and killed him. But there we have the same objection. Only someone with a key could come in without the valet's knowing, and in the same way the murderer on leaving would have had to bang the door, and that again the valet would have heard."
"Exactly," said Poirot. "And therefore - "
"And therefore - nothing," I said. "I can see no other solution."
"It is a pity," murmured Poirot. "And it is really so exceedingly simple as the clear blue eyes of Madame Clayton."
"You really believe - "
"I believe nothing - until I have got proof. One little proof will convince me."
He took up the telephone and called Japp at Scotland Yard.
Twenty minutes later we were standing before a little heap of assorted objects laid out on a table. They were the contents of the dead man's pockets.
There was a handkerchief, a handful of loose change, a pocketbook containing three pounds ten shillings, a couple of bills and a worn snapshot of Marguerita Clayton. There was also a pocket-knife, a gold pencil and a cumbersome wooden tool.
It was on this latter that Poirot swooped. He unscrewed it and several small blades fell out.
"You see, Hastings, a gimlet and all the rest of it. Ah! it would be a matter of a very few minutes to bore a few holes in the chest with this.'
"Those holes we saw?"
"Precisely."
"You mean it was Clayton who bored them himself?''
"Mais oui, mais oui! What did they suggest to you, those holes? They were not to see through, because they were at the back of the chest.
What were they for, then? Clearly for air? But you do not make air holes for a dead body, so clearly they were not made by the murderer.
They suggest one thing - and one thing only - that a man was going to hide in that chest. And at once, on that hypothesis, things become intelligible. Mr. Clayton is jealous of his wife and Rich. He plays the old, old trick of pretending to go away. He watches Rich go out, then he gains admission, is left alone to write a note, quickly bores those holes and hides inside the chest. His wife is coming there that night. Possibly Rich will put the others off, possibly she will remain after the others have gone, or pretend to go and return. Whatever it is, Clayton will know. Anything is preferable to the ghastly torment of suspicion he is enduring."
"Then you mean that Rich killed him after the others had gone? But the doctor said that was impossible.''
"Exactly. So you see, Hastings, he must have been killed during the evening."
"But everyone was in the room!"
"Precisely," said Poirot gravely. "You see the beauty of that?
'Everyone was in the room.' What an alibi! What sangfroid - what nerve - what audacity!''
"I still don't understand."
"Who went behind that screen to wind up the phonograph and change the records? The phonograph and the chest were side by side, remember. The others are dancing - the phonograph is playing. And the man who does not dance lifts the lid of the chest and thrusts the knife he has just slipped into his sleeve deep into the body of the man who was hiding there."
"Impossible! The man would cry out."
"Not if he were drugged first?"
"Drugged?"
"Yes. Who did Clayton have a drink with at seven-thirty? Ah! Now you see. Curtiss! Curtiss has inflamed Clayton's mind with suspicions against his wife and Rich. Curtiss suggests this plan - the visit to Scotland, the concealment in the chest, the final touch of moving the screen. Not so that Clayton can raise the lid a little and get relief - no, so that he, Curtiss, can raise that lid unobserved. The plan is Curtiss', and observe the beauty of it, Hastings. If Rich had observed the screen was out of place and moved it back - well, no harm is done. He can make another plan. Clayton hides in the chest, the mild narcotic that Curtiss had administered takes effect. He sinks into unconsciousness.
Curtiss lifts up the lid and strikes - and the phonograph goes on playing Walking My Baby Back
Home."
I found my voice. "Why? But why?"
Poirot shrugged his shoulders.
"Why did a man shoot himself? Why did two Italians fight a duel?
Curtiss is of a dark passionate temperament. He wanted Marguerita Clayton. With her husband and Rich out of the way, she would, or so he thought, turn to him."
He added musingly:
"These simple childlike women... they are very dangerous. But mon Dieu! what an artistic masterpiece! It goes to my heart to hang a man like that. I may be a genius myself, but I am capable of recognizing genius in other people. A perfect murder, mon ami. I, Hercule Poirot, say it to you. A perfect murder. Épatant!''
WHILE THE LIGHT LASTS
The Ford car bumped from rut to rut, and the hot African sun poured down unmercifully. On either side of the so-called road stretched an unbroken line of trees and scrub, rising and falling in gently undulating lines as far as the eye could reach, the coloring a soft, deep yellowgreen, the whole effect languorous and strangely quiet. Few birds stirred the slumbering silence. Once a snake wriggled across the road in front of the car, escaping the driver's efforts at destruction with sinuous ease. Once a native stepped out from the bush, dignified and upright, behind him a woman with an infant bound closely to her broad back and a complete household equipment, including a frying pan, balanced magnificently on her head.
All these things George Crozier had not failed to point out to his wife, who had answered him with a monosyllabic lack of attention which irritated him.
"Thinking of that fellow," he deduced wrathfully. It was thus that he was wont to allude in his own mind to Deirdre Crozier's first husband, killed in the first year of the war. Killed, too, in the campaign against German West Africa. Natural she should, perhaps - he stole a glance at her, her fairness, the pink and white smoothness of her cheek, the rounded lines of her figure - rather more rounded perhaps than they had been in those far-off days when she had passively permitted him to become engaged to her, and then, in that first emotional scare of war, had abruptly cast him aside and made a war wedding of it with that lean, sunburned boy lover of hers, Tim Nugent.
Well, well, the fellow was dead - gallantly dead - and he, George Crozier, had married the girl he had always meant to marry. She was fond of him, too; how could she help it when he was ready to gratify her every wish and had the money to do it, too! He reflected with some complacency on his last gift to her, at Kimberley, where, owing to his friendship with some of the directors of De Beers, he had been able to purchase a diamond which, in the ordinary way, would not have been in the market, a stone not remarkable as to size, but of a very exquisite and rare shade, a peculiar deep amber, almost old gold, a diamond such as you might not find in a hundred years. And the look in her eyes when he gave it to her! Women were all the same about diamonds.
The necessity of holding on with both hands to prevent himself being jerked out brought George Crozier back to the realities. He ejaculated for perhaps the fourteenth time, with the pardonable irritation of a man who owns two Rolls-Royce cars and who has exercised his stud on the highways of civilization: "Good Lord, what a car! What a road!" He wet on angrily:
"Where the devil is this tobacco estate, anyway? It's over an hour since we left Bulawayo."
"Lost in Rhodesia," said Deirdre lightly between two involuntary leaps into the air.
But the coffee-colored driver, appealed to, responded with the cheering news that their destination was just round the next bend of the road.
The manager of the estate, Mr. Walter, was waiting on the stoop to receive them with the touch of deference due to George Crozier's prominence in Union Tobacco. He introduced his daughter-in-law, who shepherded Deirdre through the cool, darkening hall to a bedroom beyond, where she could remove the veil with which she was always careful to shield her complexion when motoring. As she unfastened the pits in her usual leisurely, graceful fashion, Deirdre's eyes swept round the whitewashed ugliness of the bare room. No luxuries here, and Deirdre, who loved comfort as a cat loves cream, shivered a little. On the wall a text confronted her. "What shall it profit a man if he gain the whole world and lose his s soul?" it demanded of all and sundry, and Deirdre, pleasantly conscious that the question had nothing to do with her, turned to accompany her shy and rather silent guide. She noted, but not in the least maliciously, the spreading hips and the unbecoming cheap cotton gown. And with a glow of quiet appreciation her eyes dropped to the exquisite, costly simplicity of her own French white linen. Beautiful clothes, especially when worn by herself, roused in her the joy of the artist.
The two men were waiting for her.
"It won't bore you to come round, too, Mrs. Crozier?"
"Not at all. I've never been over a tobacco factory."
They stepped out into the still Rhodesian afternoon.
"These are the seedlings here; we plant them out as required. You see "
The manager's voice droned on, interpolated by her husband's sharp staccato questions - output, stamp duty, problems of colored labor. She ceased to listen.
This was Rhodesia, this was the land Tim had loved, where he and she were to have gone together after the war was over. If he had not been killed! As always, the bitterness of revolt surged up in her at that thought. Two short months - that was all they had had. Two months of happiness - if that mingled rapture and pain were happiness. Was love ever happiness? Did not a thousand tortures beset the lover's heart?
She had lived intensely in that short space, but had she ever known the peace, the leisure, the quiet contentment of her present life? And for the first time she admitted, somewhat unwillingly, that perhaps all had been for the best.
"I wouldn't have liked living out here. I mightn't have been able to make Tim happy. I might have disappointed him. George loves me, and I'm very fond of him, and he's very, very good to me. Why, look at that diamond he bought me only the other day." And, thinking of it, her eyelids drooped a little in pure pleasure.
"This is where we thread the leaves." Walters led the way into a low, long shed. On the floor were vast heaps of green leaves, and white-clad black "boys" squatted round them, picking and rejecting with deft fingers, sorting them into sizes, and stringing them by means of primitive needles on a long line of string. They worked with a cheerful leisureliness, jesting amongst themselves, and showing their white teeth as they laughed.
"Now, out here -"
They passed through the shed into the daylight again, where the lines of leaves hung drying in the sun. Deirdre sniffed delicately at the faint, almost imperceptible fragrance that filled the air.
Walters led the way into other sheds where the tobacco, kissed by the sun into faint yellow discoloration, underwent its further treatment.
Dark here, with the brown swinging masses above, ready to fall to powder at a rough touch. The fragrance was stronger, almost overpowering it seemed to Deirdre, and suddenly a sort of terror came upon her, a fear of she knew not what, that drove her from that menacing, scented obscurity out into the sunlight. Crozier noted her pallor.
"What's the matter, my dear, don't you feel well? The sun, perhaps.
Better not come with us round the plantations? Eh?"
Walters was solicitous. Mrs. Crozier had better go back to the house and rest. He called to a man a little distance away.
"Mr. Arden - Mrs. Crozier. Mrs. Crozier's feeling a little done up with the heat, Arden. Just take her back to the house, will you?"
The momentary feeling of dizziness was passing. Deirdre walked by Arden's side. She had as yet hardly glanced at him.
"Deirdre!"
Her heart gave a leap, and then stood still. Only one person had ever spoken her name like that, with the faint stress on the first syllable that made of it a caress.
She turned and stared at the man by her side. He was burned almost black by the sun, he walked with a limp, and on the cheek nearer her was a long scar which altered his expression, but she knew him.
"Tim!"
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br /> For an eternity, it seemed to her, they gazed at each other, mute and trembling, and then, without knowing how or why, they were in each other's arms. Time rolled back for them. Then they drew apart again, and Deirdre, conscious as she put it of the idiocy of the question, said:
"Then you're not dead?"
"No, they must have mistaken another chap for me. I was badly knocked on the head, but I came to and managed to crawl into the bush. After that I don't know what happened for months and months, but a friendly tribe looked after me, and at last I got my proper wits again and managed to get back to civilization."
He paused. "I found you'd been married six months."
Deirdre cried out:
"Oh, Tim, understand, please understand! It was so awful, the loneliness - and the poverty. I didn't mind being poor with you, but when I was alone I hadn't the nerve to stand up against the sordidness of it all."
"It's all right, Deirdre; I did understand. I know you always have had a hankering after the fleshpots. I took you from them once - but the second time, well - my nerve failed. I was pretty badly broken up, you see, could hardly walk without a crutch, and then there was this scar."
She interrupted him passionately.
"Do you think I would have cared for that?"
"No, I know you wouldn't. I was a fool. Some women did mind, you know.
I made up my mind I'd manage to get a glimpse of you. If you looked happy, if I thought you were contented to be with Crozier - why, then I'd remain dead. I did see you. You were just getting into a big car. You had on some lovely sable furs - things I'd never be able to give you if I worked my fingers to the bone - and - well - you seemed happy enough. I hadn't the same strength and courage, the same belief in myself, that I'd had before the war. All I could see was myself, broken and useless, barely able to earn enough to keep you - and you looked so beautiful, Deirdre, such a queen amongst women, so worthy to have furs and jewels and lovely clothes and all the hundred and one luxuries Crozier could give you. That - and - well, the pain - of seeing you together, decided me. Everyone believed me dead. I would stay dead."
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