by Anne Hart
A man in his sixties and independently wealthy, Mr Satterthwaite was an inveterate snob, but a kindly one, and much cherished by the many millionaires, duchesses, and gourmets he counted among his friends. ‘Dear me, how interesting all this is,’ he was apt to exclaim. His bachelor home in Chelsea was beautiful, his art collection famous, and his Rolls-Royce gleamed as it transported him on his wonderful gossipy rounds. He was devoted to the opera, he was a keen amateur photographer, and he was the author of an elegant book, Homes of My Friends. The pattern of his life was described in The Mysterious Mr Quin:
Every year regularly on the second Sunday in January, Mr Satterthwaite left England for the Riviera. He was far more punctual than any swallow. In the month of April he returned to England. May and June he spent in London, and had never been known to miss Ascot. He left town after the Eton and Harrow match, paying a few country house visits before repairing to Deauville or Le Touquet. Shooting parties occupied most of September and October, and he usually spent a couple of months in town to wind up the year. He knew everybody and it may safely be said that everybody knew him.
‘My good friend Mr Satterthwaite,’ Poirot called him, and the conversations between these two small and observant men make interesting reading. It was not for nothing that Mr Satterthwaite was a sympathetic listener who ‘knew instinctively when the elements of drama were at hand’. To him Poirot confided more of his past life than to any other, including Hastings.
In the course of his career Poirot made a number of friendships of a more casual nature which often proved useful in subsequent cases or provided him with dining companions. Three of these – Mr Entwhistle, Mr Endicott and Mr Enderby – were lawyers with confusingly similar names.5
Another such friend, and a good friend of Mr Satterthwaite’s as well, was Colonel Johnson, ‘a big, red-faced man with a barrack-room voice and a hearty manner’. He and his ‘missus’ were hospitable people. In Three Act Tragedy he genially presided over a murder investigation as Chief Constable of Yorkshire and, some four years later, as Chief Constable of Middleshire, he invited Poirot for Christmas. Other intermittent friends were Alexander Simpson, who owned an art gallery in Mayfair and for whom Poirot retrieved a famous painting, and Dr Burton, a Fellow of All Souls, Oxford, whose chance remark inspired Poirot to emulate the Labours of Hercules. A sad friend was John Harrison, who lived in the country and was rescued by Poirot from a terrible deed in ‘Wasps’ Nest’; and a giddy friend was young Tony Chapell of ‘Yellow Iris’ who introduced Poirot to his nightclubing friends as ‘Poirot the police hound!’:
‘He’s got an appointment with a body, I believe, or is it an absconding financier, or the Rajah of Borrioboolagah’s great ruby?’
‘Ah, my friend, do you think I am never off duty? Can I not, for once, seek only to amuse myself?’
‘Perhaps you’ve got an appointment with Carter here. The latest from Geneva. International situation now acute. The stolen plans must be found or war will be declared tomorrow!’
Another cheeky friend, and a great admirer of Poirot’s methods, was a likeable young doctor, John Stillingfleet. In ‘The Dream’ he greeted Poirot ‘with a remarkable lack of medical decorum’ as ‘old horse’; in Sad Cypress it was his energetic insistence that brought Poirot into the case; and in Third Girl he flew off to Australia an engaged man thanks to the matchmaking of old ‘Moustaches’. ‘I wonder if you’ll ever commit a crime, Poirot?’ Stillingfleet once said.
‘I bet you could get away with it all right. As a matter of fact, it would be too easy for you – I mean the thing would be off as definitely too unsporting.’
‘That,’ said Poirot, ‘is a typically English idea.’
From time to time Poirot renewed acquaintance with old friends from his past life with the Belgian police. Such ‘an old crony’ was Pierre Combeau of Paris who, in The Big Four, obligingly pulled the communication cord on a train and ‘made a scene’ so that Poirot and Hastings, disguised as ‘two loafers in dirty blue blouses’ could jump off. In ‘The Erymanthian Boar’ Poirot did a great favour for an old friend, Lementeuil, the Swiss Commissaire of Police, in capturing a gang of thieves on a mountain top. On the Riviera M. Papopolous, Poirot’s ‘dear friend’ of seventeen years’ standing and a man renowned for his discretion in dealing in jewels, was persuaded to part with useful information in The Mystery of the Blue Train. And in Murder on the Orient Express there occurred a joyful reunion with an old Belgian friend, M. Bouc, ‘a short stout elderly man, his hair cut en brosse’. On this occasion, with the train crowded, M. Bouc, a director of the Compagnie Internationale des Wagons Lits, generously gave up his own sleeping compartment so that Poirot could be sure of a restful night.
In his latter years Poirot’s most stalwart and helpful friend was undoubtedly Superintendent Albert Spence. Fortuitously, Spence entered Poirot’s life at about the time Inspector Japp seems to have retired, and over a period of almost twenty-five years he proved to be a valuable source of police contacts and information. Though of the Oastshire Police when Poirot first worked with him in Taken at the Flood, Spence had once been of the Scotland Yard fraternity. ‘Chief Inspector Japp … always said you have a tortuous mind,’ he told Poirot on one ticklish occasion. His character and tactics as a police officer were quite different from Japp’s, however. Methodical, sceptical and fair-minded, he had ‘a quiet Oastshire voice’, a reassuring wry smile, and an easy manner with witnesses. His face was:
… a typical countryman’s face, unexpressive, self-contained, with shrewd but honest eyes. It was the face of a man with definite standards who would never be bothered by doubts of himself or by doubts of what constituted right and wrong.
In the Mrs McGinty case it will be recalled that Superintendent Spence took the unorthodox step of asking Poirot to re-investigate privately a murder charge already prepared for the courts. As Spence had suspected, a miscarriage of justice was well under way, and for its prevention he was always grateful. ‘You did me a good turn then, Poirot; a very good turn. I went to you for help and you didn’t let me down,’ he told him years later in Hallowe’en Party. Thereafter he stood ready to do all he could to help Poirot. Even after he retired to live in a ‘modern, perky little house’ with his sister (Spence was, of course, a bachelor) he continued to wield a modest influence. In Hallowe’en Party the senior partner of an old-fashioned law firm was astonished to find ‘a dandy, a fop, a foreigner’, most ‘unsuitably attired as to the feet in patent leather shoes’, calling with a letter of introduction from Superintendent Spence, formerly of Scotland Yard.
Like so many of Poirot’s friends, Spence, a ‘square, solid bulk’ of a man, loved to eat, though his tastes differed greatly from Poirot’s. In Mrs McGinty’s Dead:
Hercule Poirot and Superintendent Spence were celebrating at the La Vieille Grand’mère.’
As coffee was served Spence leaned back in his chair and gave a deep sigh of repletion.
‘Not at all bad grub here,’ he said approvingly. ‘A bit frenchified, perhaps, but after all where can you get a decent steak and chips nowadays?’
In Hallowe’en Party Poirot told Ariadne Oliver:
‘At six o’clock I drink tea and eat sausages with my friend Spence and his sister again in their house and we discuss.’
Fond as he was of Poirot, in such discussions the straightforward Superintendent Spence could often be found wagging ‘a heavy forefinger’ at Poirot’s convoluted ways. ‘Motive,’ said Poirot in Taken at the Flood, ‘has led us astray’:
‘If A has a motive for killing C and B has a motive for killing D – well, it does not seem to make sense, does it, that A should kill D and B should kill C?’
Spence groaned. ‘Go easy, M. Poirot, go easy. I don’t even begin to understand what you are talking about with your As and Bs and Cs.’
Thus Inspector Japp, Superintendent Battle, Colonel Race, Mr Satterthwaite, Superintendent Spence, et al. But, lest the reader think that all Poirot’s good friends were men,
it is time to turn our attention to two who decidedly were not – Countess Vera Rossakoff and Ariadne Oliver.
NOTES
1 In the course of the Poirot saga Japp rose in rank from Detective Inspector to Chief Inspector.
2 Also published under the title Easy to Kill.
3 Also published under the title Anna the Adventuress.
4 Also published under the title Remembered Death.
5 In Hickory Dickory Dock Mr Endicott thanked Poirot for his help in the ‘Abernethy business’, an earlier case that sounds suspiciously like After the Funeral in which the Abemethie family had a lawyer named Mr Entwhistle.
13
COUNTESS ROSSAKOFF AND MRS OLIVER
‘My dear – my very dear friend! What a joy to see you again!’
—Countess Vera Rossakoff, ‘The Capture of Cerberus’
In England Poirot made two significant women friends, the adventurer Countess Vera Rossakoff and the author Ariadne Oliver. As no recorded case of Poirot’s ever brought them together, it is unlikely that these two – so different in every way – would otherwise have met. It is not easy to picture Countess Rossakoff at a literary luncheon, or Mrs Oliver in a night-club, but if one is determined to imagine them together a marginally possible time would have been in the late 1930s when Countess Rossakoff lived for a short while in London, and a marginally possible place would have been at a Mayfair hairdressers. Hair was a subject that passionately interested them both, so perhaps one morning, while the Countess’s ‘luxuriant henna-red hair’ was being revived, in the very next chair sat Ariadne Oliver having her untidy grey hair coaxed into ‘a pseudo-Marquise style’. And if the two of them had happened to fall into conversation, I suspect the Countess would have whiled away the time dramatically complaining about her current misunderstandings with the police, and Mrs Oliver, attentive and astonished, would have nodded her head vigorously and exclaimed: ‘Now if a woman were the head of Scotland Yard –’
It was while working on a jewel-robbery case, ‘The Double Clue’, in the early 1920s that Poirot first encountered Countess Rossakoff. Like Poirot, the Countess was a refugee. ‘The Countess Rossakoff is a very charming Russian lady, a member of the old régime,’ was how Poirot’s client described her as he reviewed the guests who had attended a party at which his collection of antique jewellery had disappeared. At first Poirot was inclined to be sceptical. ‘Parbleu! … Any woman can call herself a Russian Countess,’ he told Hastings, but so smitten was he when he actually met the Countess that his doubts all melted away. In a vivid passage Hastings described her unheralded arrival at their rooms:
Without the least warning the door flew open, and a whirlwind in human form invaded our privacy, bringing with her a swirl of sables (it was as cold as only an English June day can be) and a hat rampant with slaughtered ospreys.
To probe the robbery further, Poirot and Hastings called on her at her suite at the Carlton Hotel next morning, and within minutes the quick-witted Countess, ‘arrayed in a marvellous négligé of barbaric design’, abandoned all attempts to hoodwink Poirot. ‘Ah, but you are the clever little man! Superb!’ she exclaimed, handing back the jewels. He was enthralled:
‘What a woman!’ cried Poirot enthusiastically as we descended the stairs. ‘Mon Dieu, quelle femme! Not a word of argument – of protestation, of bluff! One quick glance, and she had sized up the position correctly. I tell you, Hastings, a woman who can accept defeat like that – with a careless smile – will go far!’
From that moment on, though their paths crossed only a few more times, Countess Rossakoff was the hopeless passion of Poirot’s life. ‘A woman in a thousand – in a million!’ he called her, worshipping from afar. Observed Hastings drily: ‘Small men always admire big, flamboyant women –.’
Following the ticklish matter of the jewels, the Countess departed from the Carlton and was seen no more by Poirot until she surfaced in Paris a few years later in The Big Four, demurely dressed in ‘the heavy mourning that denotes a French widow’. ‘That she was arrayed against us, on the side of our bitterest enemies, never seemed to weigh in his judgement,’ wrote a shaken Hastings. The Countess, as it turned out, was playing a desperate game of her own. In their final battle with the Four she saved Poirot and Hastings from destruction, and in return Poirot reunited her with her little son whom she had thought dead.
Countess Rossakoff a mother? ‘What?’ cried Hastings. Replied Poirot airily:
‘But yes! You know my motto – Be prepared. As soon as I found that the Countess Rossakoff was mixed up with the Big Four, I had every possible inquiry made as to her antecedents. I learnt that she had had a child who was reported to have been killed, and I also found that there were discrepancies in the story which led me to wonder whether it might not, after all, be alive. In the end, I succeeded in tracing the boy, and by paying out a big sum I obtained possession of the child’s person. The poor little fellow was nearly dead of starvation. I placed him in a safe place, with kindly people, and took a snapshot of him in his new surroundings. And so, when the time came, I had my little coup de théâtre all ready!’1
There is a hint on the last page of The Big Four that Poirot was trying to summon up courage to propose marriage to the Countess, but whether he lost his nerve, or she turned him down, we shall never know. He did, however, shortly thereafter retreat to the country to grow marrows and did not see her again until to his astonishment, one evening in the late 1930s, he spied her in London on a passing escalator. By this time Gothic adventures such as The Big Four were well in Poirot’s past, but still, in his heart, no woman could ever compare with the Countess Rossakoff:
All these young women who surrounded him – so alike, so devoid of charm, so lacking in rich, alluring femininity! He demanded a more flamboyant appeal. Ah! to see a femme du monde, chic, sympathetic, spirituelle – a woman with ample curves, a woman ridiculously and extravagantly dressed!
In ‘The Capture of Cerberus’, on the escalator at Piccadilly Circus, Poirot fell in love with the Countess all over again:
Though it was something like twenty years since he had seen her last the magic still held. Granted that her make-up now resembled a scene-painter’s sunset, with the woman under the make-up well hidden from sight, to Hercule Poirot she still represented the sumptuous and the alluring.
‘I lead a life of the extreme, the most virtuous dullness. It is not so?’ the Countess demanded of Poirot when he finally caught up with her. It was most certainly not. Dressed in magnificent scarlet, she had carved out a new career as the manager of a spectacular night-club whose entrance was guarded by an alarming animal named Cerberus, ‘the largest and ugliest and blackest dog Poirot had ever seen’. On Hell’s walls:
… Orpheus and his jazz band played, while Eurydice looked hopefully toward the grill. On the opposite wall Osiris and Isis seemed to be throwing an Egyptian underworld boating party. On the third wall some bright young people were enjoying mixed bathing in a state of nature.
The Countess was overjoyed to see Poirot, and when he asked after Niki, the pathetic little boy of the long-ago snapshot:
The Countess’s face lit up with enthusiastic motherhood.
‘The beloved angel! So big now, such shoulders, so handsome! He is in America. He builds there – bridges, banks, hotels, department stores, railways, anything the Americans want!’
Poirot looked slightly puzzled.
‘He is then an engineer? Or an architect?’
‘What does it matter?’ demanded the Countess.
‘He is adorable! He is wrapped up in iron girders, and machinery, and things called stresses.’
In his visits to Hell it did not take Poirot long to perceive that the Countess was in grave danger on two fronts: she was about to be used as the scapegoat of a drug ring, and she was soon to become the mother-in-law of Alice Cunningham, a most unsympathetic young woman engaged to marry the far-off Niki. ‘I am writing a book on criminal psychology,’ Miss Cunningham told Poirot:
‘I find the night life of this place very illuminating. We have several criminal types who come here regularly. I have discussed their early life with some of them. Of course, you know all about Vera’s criminal tendencies – I mean that she steals?’
‘Why, yes – I know that,’ said Poirot, slightly taken aback.
‘I call it the Magpie complex myself. She takes, you know, always glittering things. Never money. Always jewels. I find that as a child she was petted and indulged but very much shielded. Life was unendurably dull for her – dull and safe. Her nature demanded drama – it craved for punishment. That is at the root of her indulgence in theft. She wants the importance, the notoriety of being punished!’
Poirot objected: ‘Her life can surely not have been safe and dull as a member of the ancien régime in Russia during the Revolution?’
A look of faint amusement showed in Miss Cunningham’s pale blue eyes.
‘Ah,’ she said. ‘A member of the ancien régime? She has told you that?’
‘She is undeniably an aristocrat,’ said Poirot staunchly, fighting back certain uneasy memories of the wildly varying accounts of her early life told him by the Countess herself.
‘One believes what one wishes to believe,’ remarked Miss Cunningham, casting a professional eye on him.
Poirot gallantly saved Countess Rossakoff from all this, and received a great deal of tearful gratitude in return. With her thoughts on her son, the Countess cried:
‘And but for you his mother would be in prison – in prison – with her hair cut off – sitting in a cell – and smelling of disinfectant …’
Surging forward, she clasped Poirot in her arms and embraced him with Slavonic fervour … The dog Cerberus beat his tail upon the floor.
Shortly after this episode the Countess Rossakoff disappeared once more – probably to America where, as Poirot managed to learn, Niki eventually became engaged to the daughter of a steel magnate. She did not appear in Poirot’s life again, but his admiration for her never faltered. In One, Two, Buckle My Shoe he asked himself mournfully: