Hercule Poirot 100 Years (1916 - 2016)

by Mark Place

  "Yes, I felt quite sure of it if you understand what I mean."

  "I do understand," said Poirot. "And so does Spence. One does come across these things sometimes. The proofs are there, the motive, the opportunity, the clues, the mise en scene, it's all there. A complete blueprint, as you might say. But all the same, those whose profession it is, know. They know that it's all wrong, just like a critic in the artistic world knows when a picture is all wrong. Knows when it's a fake and not the real thing."

  "There wasn't anything I could do about it, either," said Superintendent Garroway. "I looked into it, around it, up above it and down below it, as you might say. I talked to the people. There was nothing there. It looked like a suicide pact, it had all the marks of the suicide pact. Alternatively, of course, it could be a husband who shot a wife and then himself, or a wife who shot her husband and then herself. All those three things happen. When one comes across them, one knows they have happened. But in most cases one has some idea of why."

  "There wasn't any real idea of why in this case, was that it?" said Poirot.

  "Yes. That's it. You see, the moment you begin to inquire into a case, to inquire about people and things, you get a very good picture as a rule of what their lives have been like. This was a couple, aging, the husband with a good record, a wife affectionate, pleasant, on good terms together. That's a thing one soon finds out about. They were happy living together. They went for walks, they played picquet, and poker patience with each other in the evenings. They had children who caused them no particular anxiety. A boy in school in England and a girl in a pensionnat in Switzerland. There was nothing wrong with their lives as far as one could tell. From such medical evidence as one could obtain, there was nothing definitely wrong with their health. The husband had suffered from high blood pressure at one time, but was in good condition by the taking of suitable medicaments which kept him on an even keel. His wife was slightly deaf and had had a little minor heart trouble, nothing to be worried about. Of course it could be, as does happen sometimes, that one or other of them had fears for their health. There are a lot of people who are in good health but are quite convinced they have cancer, are quite sure that they won't live another year. Sometimes that leads to their taking their own life. The Ravenscrofts didn't seem that kind of people. They seemed well balanced and placid."

  "So what did you really think?" said Poirot.

  "The trouble is that I couldn't think. Looking back, I say to myself it was suicide. It could only have been suicide. For some reason or other they decided that life was unbearable to them. Not through financial trouble, not through health difficulties, not because of unhappiness. And there, you see, I came to a full stop. It had all the marks of suicide. I cannot see any other thing that could have happened except suicide. They went for a walk. On that walk they took a revolver with them. The revolver lay between the two bodies. There were blurred fingerprints of both of them. Both of them in fact had handled it, but there was nothing to show who had fired it last. One tends to think the husband perhaps shot his wife and then himself. That is only because it seems more likely. Well, why? A great many years have passed. When something reminds me now and again, something I read in the papers of bodies, a husband and wife's bodies somewhere, lying dead, having taken their own lives apparently, I think back and then I wonder again what happened in the Ravenscroft case. Twelve years ago or fourteen and I still remember the Ravenscroft case and wonder - well, just the one word, I think. Why - why - why? Did the husband really hate his wife, and had hated her for a long time? Did the wife really hate her husband and want to get rid of him? Did they go on hating each other until they could bear it no longer?" Garroway broke off another piece of bread and chewed at it.

  "You got some idea. Monsieur Poirot? Has somebody come to you and told you something that has awakened your interest particularly? Do you know something that might explain the 'Why'?"

  "No. All the same," said Poirot, "you must have had a theory. Come now, you had a theory?"

  "You're quite right, of course. One does have theories. One expects them all, or one of them at least, to work out, but they don't usually. I think that my theory was in the end that you couldn't look for the cause, because one didn't know enough. What did I know about them? General Ravenscroft was close on sixty; his wife was thirty-five. All I knew of them, strictly speaking, was the last five or six years of their lives. The General had retired on a pension. They had come back to England from abroad and all the evidence that came to me, all the knowledge, was of a brief period during which they had first a house at Bournemouth and then moved to where they lived in the home where the tragedy took place. They had lived there peacefully, happily, their children came home there for school holidays. It was a peaceful period, I should say, at the end of what one presumed as a peaceful life. But then I thought, but how much did I know of that peaceful life? I knew of their life after retirement in England, of their family. There was no financial motive, no motive of hatred, no motive of sexual involvement, of intrusive love affairs. No. But there was a period before that. What did I know about that? What I knew was a life spent mostly abroad with occasional visits home, a good record for the man, pleasant remembrances of her from friends of the wife's. There was no outstanding tragedy, dispute, nothing that one knew of. But then I mightn't have known. One doesn't know.

  There was a period of, say, twenty - thirty years, years from childhood to the time they married, the time they lived abroad in India and other places. Perhaps the root of the tragedy was there. There is a proverb my grandmother used to repeat: Old sins have long shadows. Was the cause of death some long shadow, a shadow from the past? That's not an easy thing to find out about. You find out about a man's record, what friends or acquaintances say, but you don't know any inner details. Well, I think little by little the theory grew up in my mind that that would have been the place to look, if I could have looked. Something that had happened then, in another country, perhaps. Something that had been thought to be forgotten, to have passed out of existence, but which still perhaps existed. A grudge from the past, some happening that nobody knew about, that had happened elsewhere, not in their life in England, but which may have been there. If one had known where to look for it."

  "Not the sort of thing, you mean," said Poirot, "that anybody would remember. I mean, remember nowadays. Something that no friends of theirs in England, perhaps, would have known about."

  "Their friends in England seem to have been mostly made since retirement, though I suppose old friends did come and visit them or see them occasionally. But one doesn't hear about things that happened in the past. People forget."

  "Yes," said Poirot thoughtfully. "People forget."

  "They're not like elephants," said Superintendent Garroway, giving a faint smile. "Elephants, they always say, remember everything."

  "It is odd that you should say that," said Poirot.

  "That I should say about long sins?"

  "Not so much that. It was your mention of elephants that interested me." Superintendent Garroway looked at Poirot with some surprise. He seemed to be waiting for more. Spence also cast a quick glance at his old friend. "Something that happened in India, perhaps," he suggested. "I mean - well, that's where elephants come from, isn't it? Or from Africa. Anyway, who's been talking to you about elephants?" he added.

  "A friend of mine happened to mention them," said Poirot.

  "Someone you know," he said to Superintendent Spence. "Mrs. Oliver."

  "Oh, Mrs. Ariadne Oliver. Well!" He paused. "Well what?" said Poirot. "Well, does she know something, then?" he asked.

  "I do not think so as yet," said Poirot, "but she might know something before very long."

  He added thoughtfully, "She's that kind of person. She gets around, if you know what I mean."

  "Yes," said Spence. "Yes. Has she got any ideas?" he asked.

  "Do you mean Mrs. Ariadne Oliver, the writer?" asked Garroway with some interest. "That's the one," said Spence
.

  "Does she know a good deal about crime? I know she writes crime stories. I've never known where she got her ideas from or her facts."

  "Her ideas," said Poirot, "come out of her head. Her facts - well, that's more difficult." He paused for a moment.

  "What are you thinking of, Poirot? Something in particular?"

  "Yes," said Poirot. "I ruined one of her stories once, or so she tells me. She had just had a very good idea about a fact, something that had to do with a long-sleeved woolen vest. I asked her something over the telephone and it put the idea for the story out other head. She reproaches me at intervals."

  "Dear, dear," said Spence. "Sounds rather like that parsley that sank into the butter on a hot day. You know. Sherlock Holmes and the dog who did nothing in the night-time."

  "Did they have a dog?" asked Poirot.

  "I beg your pardon?"

  "I said did they have a dog? General and Mrs. Ravenscroft. Did they take a dog for that walk with them on the day they were shot? The Ravenscrofts."

  "They had a dog - yes," said Garroway. "I suppose, I suppose they did take him for a walk most days."

  "If it had been one of Mrs. Oliver's stories," said Spence, "you ought to have found the dog howling over the two dead bodies. But that didn't happen." Garroway shook his head.

  "I wonder where the dog is now?" said Poirot.

  "Buried in somebody's garden, I expect," said Garroway. "It's fourteen years ago."

  "So we can't go and ask the dog, can we?" said Poirot. He added thoughtfully, "A pity. It's astonishing, you know, what dogs can know. Who was there exactly in the house? I mean on the day when the crime happened?"

  "I brought you a list," said Superintendent Garroway, "in case you like to consult it. Mrs. Whittaker, the elderly cook-housekeeper. It was her day out, so we couldn't get much from her that was helpful. A visitor was staying there who had been governess to the Ravenscroft children once, I believe. Mrs. Whittaker was rather deaf and slightly blind. She couldn't tell us anything of interest, except that recently Lady Ravenscroft had been in hospital or in a nursing home - for nerves but not illness, apparently. There was a gardener, too."

  "But a stranger might have come from outside. A stranger from the past. That's your idea, Superintendent Garroway?"

  "Not so much an idea as just a theory." Poirot was silent, he was thinking of a time when he had asked to go back into the past, had studied five people out of the past who had reminded him of the nursery rhyme "Five little pigs." Interesting it had been, and in the end rewarding, because he had found out the truth.

  Chapter 6

  AN OLD FRIEND REMEMBERS

  When Mrs. Oliver returned to the house the following morning, she found Miss Livingstone waiting for her.

  "There have been two telephone calls, Mrs. Oliver."

  "Yes?" said Mrs. Oliver.

  "The first one was from Crichton and Smith. They wanted to know whether you had chosen the lime-green brocade or the pale blue one."

  "I haven't made up my mind yet," said Mrs. Oliver. "Just remind me tomorrow morning, will you? I'd like to see it by night light."

  "And the other was from a foreigner, a Mr. Hercules Poirot, I believe."

  "Oh, yes," said Mrs. Oliver. "What did he want?"

  "He asked if you would be able to call and see him this afternoon."

  "That will be quite impossible," said Mrs. Oliver. "Ring him up, will you? I've got to go out again at once, as a matter of fact. Did he leave a telephone number?"

  "Yes, he did."

  "That's all right, then. We won't have to look it up again. All right. Just ring him. Tell him I'm sorry that I can't but that I'm out on the track of an elephant."

  "I beg your pardon?" said Miss Livingstone, "Say that I'm on the track of an elephant."

  "Oh, yes," said Miss Livingstone, looking shrewdly at her employer to see if she was right in the feelings that she sometimes had that Mrs. Ariadne Oliver, though a successful novelist, was at the same time not quite right in the head. "I've never hunted elephants before," said Mrs. Oliver. "It's quite an interesting thing to do, though."

  She went into the sitting room, opened the top volume of the assorted books on the sofa, most of them looking rather the worse for wear, since she had toiled through them the evening before and written out a paper with various addresses. "Well, one has got to make a start somewhere," she said. "On the whole I think that if Julia hasn't gone completely off her rocker by now, I might start with her. She always had ideas, and after all, she knew that part of the country because she lived near there. Yes, I think we'll start with Julia."

  "There are four letters for you here to sign," said Miss Livingstone.

  "I can't be bothered now," said Mrs. Oliver. "I really can't spare a moment. I've got to go down to Hampton Court, and it's quite a long ride."

  The Honorable Julia Carstairs, struggling with some slight difficulty out of her armchair, the difficulty that those over the age of seventy have when rising to their feet after prolonged rest, even a possible nap, stepped forward, peering a little to see who it was who had just been announced by the faithful retainer who shared the apartment which she occupied in her status of a member of "Homes for the Privileged." Being slightly deaf, the name had not come clearly to her. Mrs. Gulliver. Was that it? But she didn't remember a Mrs. Gulliver. She advanced on slightly shaky knees, still peering forward.

  "I don't expect you'll remember me, it's so many years since we met."

  Like many elderly people, Mrs. Carstairs could remember voices better than she did faces.

  "Why," she exclaimed, "it's - dear me, it's Ariadne! My dear, how very nice to see you."

  Greetings passed.

  "I just happened to be in this part of the world," explained Mrs. Oliver. "I had to come down to see someone not far from here. And then I remembered that looking in my address book last night I had seen that this was quite near where you had your apartment. Delightful, isn't it?" she added, looking round.

  "Not too bad," said Mrs. Carstairs. "Not quite all it's written up to be, you know. But it has many advantages. One brings one's own furniture and things like that, and there is a central restaurant where you can have a meal, or you can have your own things, of course. Oh, yes, it's very good, really. The grounds are charming and well-kept-up. But sit down, Ariadne; do sit down. You look very well. I saw you were at a literary lunch the other day, in the paper. How odd it is that one just sees something in the paper and almost the next day one meets the person. Quite extraordinary."

  "I know," said Mrs. Oliver, taking the chair that was offered her. "Things do go like that, don't they?"

  "You are still living in London?"

  Mrs. Oliver said yes, she was still living in London. She then entered into what she thought of in her own mind, with vague memories of going to dancing class as a child, the first figure of the Lancers. Advance, retreat, hands out, turn round twice, whirl round, and so on.

  She inquired after Mrs. Carstairs's daughter and about the two grandchildren, and she asked about the other daughter, what she was doing. She appeared to be doing it in New Zealand. Mrs. Carstairs did not seem to be quite sure what it was. Some kind of social research. Mrs. Carstairs pressed an electric bell that rested on the arm of her chair, and ordered Emma to bring tea. Mrs. Oliver begged her not to bother. Julia Carstairs said: "Of course Ariadne has got to have tea."

  The two ladies leaned back. The second and third figures of the Lancers. Old friends. Other people's children. The death of friends. “It must be years since I saw you last," said Mrs. Carstairs.

  "I think it was at the Llewellyns' wedding," said Mrs. Oliver.

  "Yes, that must have been about it. How terrible Moira looked as a bridesmaid. That dreadfully unbecoming shade of apricot they wore."

  "I know. It didn't suit them."

  "I don't think weddings are nearly as pretty as they used to be in our day. Some of them seem to wear such very peculiar clothes. The other day one of my friend
s went to a wedding and she said the bridegroom was dressed in some sort of quilted white satin and ruffles at his neck. Made of Valenciennes lace, I believe. Most peculiar. And the girl was wearing a very peculiar trouser suit. Also white, but it was stamped with green shamrocks all over. Well, my dear Ariadne, can you imagine it. Really, extraordinary. In church, too. If I'd been a clergyman, I'd have refused to marry them." Tea came. Talk continued.

  "I saw my goddaughter, Celia Ravenscroft, the other day," said Mrs. Oliver. "Do you remember the Ravenscrofts? Of course, it's a great many years ago."

  "The Ravenscrofts? Now wait a minute. That was that very sad tragedy, wasn't it? A double suicide, didn't they think it was? Near their house at Overcliffe."

  "You've got such a wonderful memory, Julia," said Mrs. Oliver. "Always had. Though I have difficulties with names sometimes. Yes, it was very tragic, wasn't it?"

  "Very tragic indeed."

  "One of my cousins knew them very well in India, Roddy Foster, you know. General Ravenscroft had had a most distinguished career. Of course he was a bit deaf by the time he retired. He didn't always hear what one said very well."

  "Do you remember them quite well?"

  "Oh, yes. One doesn't really forget people, does one? I mean, they lived at Overcliffe for quite five or six years."

  "I've forgotten her Christian name now," said Mrs. Oliver.

  "Muriel, I think. But everyone called her Molly. Yes, Muriel. So many people were called Muriel, weren't they, at about that time? She used to wear a wig, do you remember?"

  "Oh, yes," said Mrs. Oliver. "At least I can't quite remember, but I think I do."

  "I'm not sure she didn't try to persuade me to get one. She said it was so useful when you went abroad and traveled. She had four different wigs. One for evening and one for traveling and one - very strange, you know. You could put a hat on over it and not really disarrange it."