Agatha Christie's Poirot
Page 25
‘Nothing is so sad,’ Hastings wrote, ‘as the devastation wrought by age.’ In this respect he himself was still faring rather well. From his wheelchair Poirot surveyed his longtime pupil critically, ‘his head a little to one side’:
‘Yes, just the same – the straight back, the broad shoulders, the grey of the hair – très distingué. You know, my friend, you have worn well. Les femmes, they still take an interest in you? Yes?’
‘Really, Poirot,’ I protested.
Then, as in the old days, the meeting was briskly called to order:
‘Just now,’ said Poirot, ‘you asked why I had come here. You may not have observed that I gave you no answer. I will give you the answer now. I am here to hunt down a murderer.’
I stared at him with even more astonishment. For a moment I thought he was rambling.
‘You really mean that?’
‘But certainly I mean it. For what other reason did I urge you to join me? My limbs, they are no longer active, but my brain, as I told you, is unimpaired. My rule, remember, has been always the same – sit back and think. That I still can do – in fact it is the only thing possible for me. For the more active side of the campaign I shall have with me my invaluable Hastings.’
‘You really mean it?’ I gasped.
‘Of course I mean it. You and I, Hastings, are going hunting once again.’
Unlocking his dispatch case, Poirot produced a pile of notes and newspaper clippings, his research on five recent murders, all apparently solved. In studying their circumstances, however, the cunning old spider had detected a common thread:
‘I intend, Hastings, to be very careful in what I say. Let me put it this way. There is a certain person – X. In none of these cases did X (apparently) have any motive in doing away with the victim. In one case, as far as I have been able to find out, X was actually two hundred miles away when the crime was committed. Nevertheless I will tell you this. X was on intimate terms with Etherington, X lived for a time in the same village as Riggs, X was acquainted with Mrs Bradley. I have a snap of X and Freda Clay walking together in the street, and X was near the house when old Matthew Litchfield died. What do you say to that?’
I stared at him. I said slowly: ‘Yes, it’s a bit too much. Coincidence might account for two cases, or even three, but five is a bit too thick. There must, unlikely as it seems, be some connection between these different murders.’
‘You assume, then, what I have assumed?’
‘That X is the murderer? Yes.’
‘In that case, Hastings, you will be willing to go with me one step farther. Let me tell you this. X is in this house.’
Quite naturally, Hastings wanted to know who X was. He should have known better.
To my intense annoyance Poirot shook his head very decidedly. ‘That my friend, I do not tell.’
‘Nonsense. Why not?’
Poirot’s eyes twinkled. ‘Because, mon cher, you are still the same old Hastings. You have still the speaking countenance. I do not wish, you see, that you should sit staring at X with your mouth hanging open, your face saying plainly: “This – this that I am looking at – is a murderer.”’
‘You might give me credit for a little dissimulation at need.’
‘When you try to dissimulate, it is worse. No, no, mon ami, we must be very incognito, you and I. Then, when we pounce, we pounce.’
So began their last great adventure, with Poirot pretty well confined to his room and Hastings in the dark. ‘I realized at once,’ he wrote, ‘that my part was destined to be a far more active one than usual. I had to be, as it were, Poirot’s eyes and ears’. Besides reporting on everything that went on downstairs, Hastings persisted, to Poirot’s annoyance, in trying to spot the culprit. ‘I have not demanded your presence here, Hastings,’ he thundered ex cathedra, ‘in order to watch you clumsily and laboriously following the way I have already trodden.’ Instead:
‘You are active, you can get about, you can follow people about, talk to them, spy upon them unobserved—’ (I nearly uttered an indignant protest, but quelled it. It was too old an argument) – ‘You can listen to conversations, you have knees that will still bend and permit you to kneel and look through keyholes – ’
‘I will not look through keyholes,’ I interrupted hotly. Poirot closed his eyes. ‘Very well, then. You will not look through keyholes. You will remain the English gentleman and someone will be killed. It does not matter, that. Honour comes first with an Englishman. Your honour is more important than somebody else’s life. Bien! It is understood.’
‘No, but dash it all, Poirot –’
‘The days passed,’ wrote Hastings. Though it was summer, an air of dampness and dejection seemed to hang over the recycled Styles. Some of this unease was probably caused by the food, for Styles, as Poirot pointed out, ‘is not, you comprehend, the Ritz’:
‘… the cooking, it is English at its worst. Those Brussels sprouts so enormous, so hard, that the English like so much. The potatoes boiled and either hard or falling to pieces. The vegetables that taste of water, water, and again water. The complete absence of the salt and pepper in any dish –’
In the interests of the case Hastings diligently appeared at every meal, smoked in the smoking room, played bridge in the drawing-room, and accompanied on expeditions any fellow guest who wanted a companion. In between he rushed upstairs to the room at the end of the hall to report.
The people assembled that summer at Styles were a classic collection. First there were the Luttrells, who owned and ran Styles as a retirement enterprise. Colonel Luttrell was a ‘very tall, attenuated old man, with a cadaverous face, mild blue eyes and a habit of irresolutely tugging at his little white moustache’. He was much hounded by his wife, in Poirot’s opinion. Mrs Luttrell managed everything, and had ‘curly white hair, pink cheeks, and a pair of cold pale blue eyes’.
As to the guests, Hastings firmly believed that the one who could be most trusted was Sir William Boyd Carrington, a retired ‘Governor of a province in India, where he had been a signal success. He was also renowned as a first-class shot and big game hunter. The sort of man,’ Hastings reflected sadly, ‘that we no longer seemed to breed in these degenerate days.’ Then there was Norton, a grey-haired man with a boyish face and a stammer, who was devoted to bird-watching and hurried about with field-glasses and cries of ‘There’s a pair of n-nesting black caps down by the sycamore.’ And there was Miss Elizabeth Cole, ‘a tall, still handsome woman of thirty-three or four’ who sometimes played Bach and Mozart to Poirot on the drawing-room piano when he felt well enough to come down, and on whom he had his eye as a possible match for Hastings. And there was Major Allerton, ‘a good-looking man in the early forties, broad-shouldered, bronzed of face, with an easy way of talking, most of what he said holding a double implication. He had the pouches under his eyes that come with a dissipated way of life.’ Wrote Hastings severely, ‘I knew instinctively that Allerton was a rotter,’ and he became very angry indeed when he began to suspect that Allerton had dishonourable intentions toward Judith Hastings, his daughter.
Ostensibly, Judith’s presence was the reason Poirot had suggested to her father that the three of them spend the summer en famille as, by coincidence, her work had brought her to Styles not long after Poirot’s arrival. ‘Judith is tall,’ reported a rather intimidated Hastings, ‘she holds her head high, she has level dark brows, and a very lovely line of cheek and jaw, severe in its austerity.’ Judith had already been living some time in England where she had obtained a B.Sc. and clearly had her consciousness raised by the new wave of feminism. ‘Is it very bad?’ she asked absent-mindedly when ‘Uncle Hercule’ complained of the Styles cuisine. Scolded Poirot:
‘You should not have to ask that, my child. Is it that you think of nothing but the test tubes and the microscopes? Your middle finger it is stained with methyline blue. It is not a good thing for your husband if you take no interest in his stomach.’
‘I dare say I shan’t have
a husband.’
‘Certainly you will have a husband. What did the bon Dieu create you for?’
‘Many things, I hope,’ said Judith.
Her employer was a brilliant scientist, Dr John Franklin, ‘a tall, angular young man of thirty-five, with a decided jaw, reddish hair, and bright blue eyes’. He and his invalid wife had come to Styles for a summer of country air, and in an old studio in the garden he pursued, with Judith’s help, his research into a rare tropical disease. His wife, Barbara Franklin, spent her days decoratively ‘on a day bed, propped up with pillows, and wearing a very dainty négligé of white and pale blue’. Her attendant, Nurse Craven, was, Hastings noted approvingly, ‘a tall, good-looking young woman with a fine colour and a handsome head of auburn hair’.
‘My narrative of the days spent at Styles must necessarily be somewhat rambling,’ wrote Hastings. Upstairs, perched in his wheelchair, Poirot brooded:
‘I am terribly afraid. And I am powerless – or nearly so. And the days go by. There is danger, Hastings, and it is very close.’
It was indeed, for an accidental shooting followed by two murders sent Styles rocketing into the headlines once again, and those who compose obituaries would, in due course, scramble to the international wire services with an even more sensational story – the death by heart attack of the legendary Hercule Poirot.3
‘It is with a heavy heart that I take up my pen to write these the last words …’ Thus did Dr Watson announce to the world the ‘death’ of Sherlock Holmes in ‘The Final Problem’. For the devotees of Hercule Poirot, however, there was not to be even the consolation of a faint question mark, for Hastings left no doubt, in that second summer of mysteries at Styles, that the life of their dear and elegant little Belgian detective had come to an irrevocable end:
‘Cher ami!’ Poirot had said to me as I left the room.
They were the last words I was ever to hear him say. For when Curtiss came to attend to his master he found that master dead …
Poirot was buried – very neatly one may be sure – in Styles St Mary, ‘the spot’, wrote the stricken Hastings, ‘where he had lived when he first came to this country’. This was not the first funeral Hastings had arranged for his friend. Years before, in the case of The Big Four, he had been deliberately led to believe that ‘the unique, the inimitable’ Hercule Poirot was dead. The words he wrote then could equally have described the final funeral at Styles:
It was a solemn and moving ceremony, and the extraordinary number of floral tributes passed belief. They came from high and low alike, and bore striking testimony to the place my friend had made for himself in the country of his adoption. For myself, I was frankly overcome by emotion as I stood by the grave side and thought of all our varied experiences and the happy days we had passed together.
No doubt, as before, the dashing Countess Rossakoff sent an enormous wreath of crimson roses to the funeral of her little friend, and no doubt there were gathered at the graveside, with Hastings and Judith and the other surviving guests, a surprised and saddened Miss Lemon, and Mrs Oliver, and Superintendent Spence, and Mr Goby, and many others of Poirot’s friends and associates.
‘I could hardly imagine life without Poirot …’ wrote Hastings.
And what of George? ‘Talk to my valet George’, commanded a posthumous note that fluttered into Hastings’s hand as he sorted through Poirot’s dispatch box.
And what of X? ‘In the duel between Poirot and X, X had won,’ Hastings had concluded bitterly, completely forgetting, in his grief, one of the last smiles of Hercule Poirot and his words: ‘But you and I, Hastings, go on, working underground, like moles. And, sooner or later, we get X.’
And so they did. Such style, Poirot.
A POIROT BIBLIOGRAPHY
BOOKS
‘Miss Lemon, where are you now that I need you?’ must be the cry of any Poirot bibliographer. Listed here are most of the first appearances in print in the English language of the various editions of novels, short story collections, plays and omnibus volumes wholly or in part devoted to Hercule Poirot. Many of these editions have been reissued numerous times and are still in print.
(PB) indicates a paperback edition.
The ABC Murders:
London: Collins, 1936.
New York: Dodd, Mead, 1936.
London: Crime Club, 1939.
New York: Pocket Books, 1941. (PB)
Harmondsworth (UK): Penguin, 1948. (PB)
London: Pan, 1958. (PB)
London: Fontana, 1962. (PB)
London: Collins, 1976 (Greenway edition).
New York: Pocket Books, 1976. (PB)
London: Collins, 1980.
Boston: G.K. Hall Large Print Books, 1988.
London: Collins, 1990 (centenary edition).
London: HarperCollins, 1996 (diamond anniversary edition). (PB)
See also omnibus Volumes Agatha Christie Omnibus; Five Complete Hercule Poirot Novels; Murder-Go-Round; Surprise Endings by Hercule Poirot.
The Adventure of the Christmas Pudding and a Selection of Entrées: (short stories):
London and Don Mills (Canada): Collins, 1960.
London: Fontana, 1963. (PB)
London: Pan, 1971. (PB)
London: Collins, 1981.
After the Funeral:
London: Collins, 1953.
London: Fontana, 1956. (PB)
Leicester (UK): Ulverscroft Large Print Edition, 1968.
See also omnibus volume A Poirot Quintet.
Also published under the title Funerals are Fatal:
New York: Black, 1953.
New York: Dodd, Mead, 1953. (Red Badge Detective).
New York: Pocket Books, 1954. (PB)
See also omnibus volume Murder-Go-Round.
Agatha Christie Crime Collection (includes Lord Edgware Dies; Murder in Mesopotamia; The Murder of Roger Ackroyd; Mrs McGinty’s Dead):
London: Hamlyn, 1969. 2 vols.
Agatha Christie Murder by the Box (includes The Regatta Mystery and Other Stories):
New York: Berkley, 1988. (PB)
An Agatha Christie Omnibus (includes The Mysterious Affair at Styles; Murder on the Links; Poirot Investigates):
London: John Lane, 1931.
Agatha Christie Omnibus (includes The Mysterious Affair at Styles; Perit at End House The ABC Murders; One, Two, Buckle My Shoe):
London: Diamond Books, 1993.
The Agatha Christie Omnibus of Crime (includes The Mystery of the Blue Train; The Murder of Roger Ackroyd):
London: Collins, 1932.
Agatha Christie’s Best Loved Sleuths (includes Murder in Three Acts; Murder on the Links; There is a Tide):
New York: Berkley, 1988. (PB)
Agatha Christie’s Crime Reader (includes selections from Poirot Investigates):
Cleveland (US): World Publishing, 1944.
Agatha Christie’s Detectives: Five Complete Novels (includes Dead Man’s Folly; Sad Cypress):
New York: Avenel, 1982.
New York: Chatham River Press, 1985.
Agatha Christie’s Poirot, Book 1 (10 short stories):
London: Fontana, 1993. (PB)
Also published under the title
Hercule Poirot’s Casebook:
London: Fontana, 1989. (PB)
Agatha Christie’s Poirot, Book 2 (8 short stories):
London: Fontana, 1990. (PB)
Agatha Christie’s Poirot, Book 3 (10 short stories):
London: Fontana, 1991. (PB)
Agatha Christie’s Poirot, Book 4 (8 short stories:
London: Fontana, 1993. (PB)
Alibi (dramatization by Michael Morton of The Murder of Roger Ackroyd):
London: French, 1929.
Appointment with Death:
London: Collins, 1938.
New York: Dodd, Mead, 1938.
New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1938.
New York: Dell, 1946. (PB)
Harmondsworth (UK): Penguin, 1948. (PB)
Londo
n: Pan, 1957. (PB)
London: Fontana, 1960. (PB)
New York: Dell, 1971 (New Dell Edition).
Leicester (UK): Ulverscroft Large Print Edition, 1975.
New York: Berkley, 1984. (PB)
See also omnibus volume Make Mine Murder.
The Best of Poirot (contains Murder on the Orient Express; Cards on the Table; Hercule Poirot’s Christmas; Five Little Pigs; The Labours of Hercules):
London: Collins, 1980.
The Big Four:
London: Collins, 1927.
New York: Dodd, Mead, 1927.
Harmondsworth (UK): Penguin, 1957. (PB)
London: Pan, 1961. (PB)
New York: Avon, 1964. (PB)
London: Fontana, 1965. (PB)
New York: Dell, 1965. (PB)
Leicester (UK): Ulverscroft Large Print Edition, 1974.
New York: Berkley, 1984. (PB)
See also omnibus volume 1920s Agatha Christie, Volume 3.
Black Coffee; a Play in Three Acts:
London: Ashley, 1934.
London: French, 1952.
London and New York: French, 1961.
Blood Will Tell: see Mrs McGinty’s Dead
Cards on the Table:
London: Collins, 1936.
New York: Dodd, Mead, 1937.
New York: Dell, 1949. (PB)
London: Pan, 1951. (PB)
London: Fontana, 1957. (PB)
London: Collins, 1968 (Greenway edition).
New York: Dodd, Mead, 1968 (Greenway edition).
Leicester (UK): Ulverscroft Large Print Edition, 1969.