Hercule Poirot 100 Years (1916 - 2016)

by Mark Place

  "What did you think had happened to startle her?"

  "On reflection, afterwards, I thought she had seen something."

  "You thought she had seen something," repeated Poirot, thoughtfully. "Such as?"

  "The direction of her eyes, as I have told you, was towards the door of the library. It seems to me possible that she may have seen that door open or the handle turn, or indeed she might have seen something slightly more than that. She might have seen somebody who was opening that door and preparing to come out of it. She may have seen someone she did not expect to see."

  "Were you looking at the door yourself?"

  "No. I was looking in the opposite direction up the stairs towards Mrs Drake."

  "And you think definitely that she saw something that startled her?"

  "Yes. No more than that, perhaps. A door opening. A person, just possibly an unlikely person, emerging. Just sufficient to make her relinquish her grasp on the very heavy vase full of water and flowers, so that she dropped it."

  "Did you see anyone come out of that door?"

  "No. I was not looking that way. I do not think anyone actually did come out into the hall. Presumably whoever it was drew back into the room."

  "What did Mrs Drake do next?"

  "She made a sharp exclamation of vexation, came down the stairs and said to me,

  "Look what I've done now! What a mess!" She kicked some of the broken glass away. I helped her sweep it in a broken pile into a corner. It wasn't practicable to clear it all up at that moment. The children were beginning to come out of the Snapdragon room. I fetched a glass cloth and mopped her up a bit, and shortly after that the party came to an end."

  "Mrs Drake did not say anything about having been startled or make any reference as to what might have startled her?"

  "No. Nothing of the kind."

  "But you think she was startled."

  "Possibly, Monsieur Poirot, you think that I am making a rather unnecessary fuss about something of no importance whatever?"

  "No," said Poirot, "I do not think that at all. I have only met Mrs Drake once," he added thoughtfully, "when I went to her house with my friend, Mrs Oliver, to visit - as one might say, if one wishes to be melodramatic - the scene of the crime. It did not strike me during the brief period I had for observation that Mrs Drake could be a woman who is easily startled. Do you agree with my view?"

  "Certainly. That is why I, myself, since have wondered."

  "You asked no special questions at the time?"

  "I had no earthly reason to do so. If your hostess has been unfortunate enough to drop one of her best glass vases, and it has smashed to smithereens, it is hardly the part of a guest to say 'What on earth made you do that?', thereby accusing her of a clumsiness which I can assure you is not one of Mrs Drake's characteristics."

  "And after that, as you have said, the party came to an end. The children and their mothers or friends left, and Joyce could not be found. We know now that Joyce was behind the library door and that Joyce was dead. So who could it have been who was about to come out of the library door, a little while earlier, shall we say, and then hearing voices in the hall shut the door again and made an exit later when there were people milling about in the hall making their farewells, putting on their coats and all the rest of it? It was not until after the body had been found, I presume, Miss Whittaker, that you had time to reflect on what you had seen?"

  "That is so." Miss Whittaker rose to her feet. "I'm afraid there's nothing else that I can tell you. Even this may be a very foolish little matter."

  "But noticeable. Everything noticeable is worth remembering. By the way, there is one question I should like to ask you. Two, as a matter of fact."

  Elizabeth Whittaker sat down again.

  "Go on," she said, "ask anything you like."

  "Can you remember exactly the order in which the various events occurred at the party?"

  "I think so." Elizabeth Whittaker reflected for a moment or two. "It started with a broomstick competition. Decorated broomsticks. There were three or four different small prizes for that. Then there was a kind of contest with balloons, punching them and batting them about. A sort of mild horse-play to get the children warmed up. There was a looking-glass business where the girls went into a small room and held a mirror where a boy's or young man's face reflected in it."

  "How was that managed?"

  "Oh, very simply. The transom of the door had been removed, and so different faces looked through and were reflected in the mirror a girl was holding."

  "Did the girls know who it was they saw reflected in the glass?"

  "I presume some of them did and some of them didn't. A little make-up was employed on the male half of the arrangement. You know, a mask or a wig, sideburns, a beard, some greasepaint effects. Most of the boys were probably known to the girls already and one or two strangers might have been included. Anyway, there was a lot of quite happy giggling," said Miss Whittaker, showing for a moment or two a kind of academic contempt for this kind of fun.

  "After that there was an obstacle race and then there was flour packed into a glass tumbler and reversed, sixpence laid on top and everyone took a slice off. When the flour collapsed that person was out of the competition and the others remained until the last one claimed the sixpence. After that there was dancing, and then there was supper. After that, as a final climax, came the Snapdragon."

  "When did you yourself see the girl Joyce last?"

  "I've no idea," said Elizabeth Whittaker. "I don't know her very well. She's not in my class. She wasn't a very interesting girl so I wouldn't have been watching her. I do remember I saw her cutting the flour because she was so clumsy that she capsized it almost at once. So - she was alive then but that was quite early on."

  "You did not see her go into the library with anyone?"

  "Certainly not. I should have mentioned it before if I had. That at least might have been significant and important."

  "And now," said Poirot, "for my second question or questions. How long have you been at the school here?"

  "Six years this next autumn."

  "And you teach?"

  "Mathematics and Latin."

  "Do you remember a girl who was teaching here two years ago Janet White by name?"

  Elizabeth Whittaker stiffened. She half rose from her chair, then sat down again. "But that but that has nothing to do with all this, surely?"

  "It could have," said Poirot. "But how? In what way?"

  Scholastic circles were less well informed than village gossip, Poirot thought. "Joyce claimed before witnesses to have seen a murder done some years ago. Could that possibly have been the murder of Janet White, do you think? How did Janet White die?"

  "She was strangled, walking home from the school one night."

  "Alone?"

  "Probably not alone."

  "But not with Nora Ambrose?"

  "What do you know about Nora Ambrose?"

  "Nothing as yet," said Poirot, "but I should like to. What were they like, Janet White and Nora Ambrose?"

  "Over-sexed," said Elizabeth Whittaker, "but in different ways. How could Joyce have seen anything of the kind or know anything about it? It took place in a lane near the Quarry Wood. She wouldn't have been more than ten or eleven years old."

  "Which one had the boy friend?" asked Poirot. "Nora or Janet?"

  "All this is past history."

  "Old sins have long shadows," quoted Poirot. "As we advance through life, we learn the truth of that saying. Where is Nora Ambrose now?"

  "She left the school and took another post in the north of England - she was, naturally, very upset. They were great friends."

  "The police never solved the case?"

  Miss Whittaker shook her head. She got up and looked at her watch. "I must go now."

  "Thank you for what you have told me."

  Chapter 11

  Hercule Poirot looked up at the façade of Quarry House. A solid, well-built example of mid Vic
torian architecture. He had a vision of its interior - a heavy mahogany sideboard, a central rectangular table also of heavy mahogany, a billiard room, perhaps, a large kitchen with adjacent scullery, stone flags on the floor, a massive coal range now no doubt replaced by electricity or gas.

  He noted that most of the upper windows were still curtained. He rang the front-door bell. It was answered by a thin, grey-haired woman who told him that Colonel and Mrs Weston were away in London and would not be back until next week. He asked about the Quarry Woods and was told that they were open to the public without charge. The entrance was about five minutes' walk along the road. He would see a notice-board on an iron gate. He found his way there easily enough, and passing through the gate began to descend a path that led downwards through trees and shrubs. Presently he came to a halt and stood there lost in thought. His mind was not only on what he saw, on what lay around him. Instead he was cunning over one or two sentences, and reflecting over one or two facts that had given him at the time, as he expressed it to himself, furiously to think. A forged will, a forged will and a girl. A girl who had disappeared, the girl in whose favour the Will had been forged.

  A young artist who had come here professionally to make out of an abandoned quarry of rough stone a garden, a sunk garden. Here again, Poirot looked round him and nodded his head with approval of the phrase. A Quarry Garden was an ugly term. It suggested the noise of blasting rock, the carrying away by lorries of vast masses of stone for road making. It had behind it industrial demand. But a Sunk Garden - that was different. It brought with it vague remembrances in his own mind. So Mrs Llewellyn-Smythe had gone on a National Trust tour of gardens in Ireland. He himself, he remembered, had been in Ireland five or six years ago. He had gone there to investigate a robbery of old family silver. There had been some interesting points about the case which had aroused his curiosity, and having (as usual) - Poirot added this bracket to his thoughts - solved his mission with full success, he had put in a few days travelling around and seeing the sights. He could not remember now the particular garden he had been to see.

  Somewhere, he thought, not very far from Cork. Killarney? No, not Killarney. Somewhere not far from Bantry Bay. And he remembered it because it had been a garden quite different from the gardens which he had so far acclaimed as the great successes of this age, the gardens of the Chateaux in France, the formal beauty of Versailles. Here, he remembered, he had started with a little group of people in a boat. A boat difficult to get into if two strong and able boatmen had not practically lifted him in. They had rowed towards a small island, not a very interesting island, Poirot had thought, and began to wish that he had not come. His feet were wet and cold and that wind was blowing through the crevices of his mackintosh.

  What beauty, he had thought, what formality, what symmetrical arrangement of great beauty could there be on this rocky island with its sparse trees? A mistake - definitely a mistake. They had landed at the little wharf. The fishermen had landed him with the same adroitness they had shown before. The remaining members of the party had gone on ahead, talking and laughing. Poirot, readjusting his mackintosh in position and tying up his shoes again, had followed them up the rather dull path with shrubs and bushes and a few sparse trees on either side. A most uninteresting park, he thought.

  And then, rather suddenly, they had come out from among the scrub on to a terrace with steps leading down from it. Below it he had looked down into what struck him at once as something entirely magical. Something as it might have been if elemental beings such as he believed were common in Irish poetry, had come out of their hollow hills and had created there, not so much by toil and hard labour as by waving a magic wand, a garden. You looked down into the garden. Its beauty, the flowers and bushes, the artificial water below in the fountain, the path round it, enchanted, beautiful and entirely unexpected.

  He wondered how it had been originally. It seemed too symmetrical to have been a quarry. A deep hollow here in the raised ground of the island, but beyond it you could see the waters of the Bay and the hills rising the other side, their misty tops an enchanting scene. He thought perhaps that it might have been that particular garden which had stirred Mrs Llewellyn-Smythe to possess such a garden of her own, to have the pleasure of taking an unkempt quarry set in this smug, tidy, elementary and essentially conventional countryside of that part of England. And so she had looked about for the proper kind of well-paid slave to do her bidding. And she had found the professionally qualified young man called Michael Garfield and had brought him here and had paid him no doubt a large fee, and had in due course built a house for him. Michael Garfield, thought Poirot, looking round him, had not failed her.

  He went and sat down on a bench, a bench which had been strategically placed. He pictured to himself what the sunken quarry would look like in the spring. There were young beech trees and birches with their white shivering barks. Bushes of thorn and white rose, little juniper trees. But now it was autumn, and autumn had been catered for also. The gold and red of acers, a parrot or two, a path that led along a winding way to fresh delights. There were flowering bushes of gorse or Spanish broom - Poirot was not famous for knowing the names of either flowers or shrubs - only roses and tulips could he approve and recognise. But everything that grew here had the appearance of having grown by its own will. It had not been arranged or forced into submission. And yet, thought Poirot, that is not really so. All has been arranged, all has been planned to this tiny little plant that grows here and to that large towering bush that rises up so fiercely with its golden and red leaves. Oh yes. All has been planned here and arranged. What is more, I would say that it had obeyed. He wondered then whom it had obeyed.

  Mrs Llewellyn-Smythe or Mr Michael Garfield? It makes a difference, said Poirot to himself, yes, it makes a difference. Mrs Llewellyn-Smythe was knowledgeable, he felt sure. She had gardened for many years, she was no doubt a Fellow of the Royal Horticultural Society, she went to shows, she consulted catalogues, she visited gardens. She took journeys abroad, no doubt, for botanical reasons. She would know what she wanted, she would say what she wanted. Was that enough? Poirot thought it was not quite enough. She could have given orders to gardeners and made sure her orders were carried out. But did she know - really know - see in her mind's eye exactly what her orders would look like when they had been carried out?

  Not in the first year of their planting, not even the second, but things that she would see two years later, three years later, perhaps, even six or seven years later. Michael Garfield, thought Poirot, Michael Garfield knows what she wants because she has told him what she wants, and he knows how to make this bare quarry of stone and rock blossom as a desert can blossom. He planned and he brought it about; he had no doubt the intense pleasure that comes to an artist who is commissioned by a client with plenty of money. Here was his conception of a fairy-land tucked away in a conventional and rather dull hillside, and here it would grow up. Expensive shrubs for which large cheques would have to be written, and rare plants that perhaps would only be obtainable through the goodwill of a friend, and here, too, the humble things that were needed and which cost next to nothing at all. In spring on the bank just to his left there would be primroses, their modest green leaves all bunched together up the side of it told him that.

  "In England," said Poirot, "people show you their herbaceous borders and they take you to see their roses and they talk at inordinate length about their iris gardens, and to show they appreciate one of the great beauties of England, they take you on a day when the sun shines and the beech trees are in leaf, and underneath them are all the bluebells. Yes, it is a very beautiful sight, but I have been shown it, I think, once too often. I prefer -" the thought broke off in his mind as he thought back to what he had preferred. A drive through Devon lanes. A winding road with great banks going up each side of it, and on those banks a great carpet and showing of primroses. So pale, so subtly and timidly yellow, and coming from them that sweet, faint, elusive smell that the primro
se has in large quantities, which is the smell of spring almost more than any other smell. And so it would not be all rare shrubs here. There would be spring and autumn, there would be little wild cyclamen and there would be autumn crocus here too. It was a beautiful place.

  He wondered about the people who lived in Quarry House now. He had their names, a retired elderly Colonel and his wife, but surely, he thought, Spence might have told him more about them. He had the feeling that whoever owned this now had not got the love of it that dead Mrs Llewellyn-Smythe had had. He got up and walked along the path a little way. It was an easy path, carefully levelled, designed, he thought, to be easy for an elderly person to walk where she would at will, without undue amount of steep steps, and at a convenient angle at convenient intervals a seat that looked rustic but was much less rustic than it looked. In fact, the angle for the back and for one's feet was remarkably comfortable. Poirot thought to himself, I'd like to see this Michael Garfield.

  He made a good thing of this. He knew his job, he was a good planner and he got experienced people to carry his plans out, and he managed, I think, to get his patron's plans so arranged that she would think that the whole planning had been hers. But I don't think it was only hers. It was mostly his. Yes, I'd like to see him. If he's still in the cottage - or the bungalow - that was built for him, I suppose - his thought broke off. He stared. Stared across a hollow that lay at his feet where the path ran round the other side of it. Stared at one particular golden red branching shrub which framed something that Poirot did not know for a moment was really there or was a mere effect of shadow and sunshine and leaves.

  What am I seeing? thought Poirot. Is this the result of enchantment? It could be. In this place here, it could be. Is it a human being I see, or is it - what could it be? His mind reverted to some adventures of his many years ago which he had christened "The Labours of Hercules". Somehow, he thought, this was not an English garden in which he was sitting. There was an atmosphere here. He tried to pin it down. It had qualities of magic, of enchantment, certainly of beauty, bashful beauty, yet wild. Here, if you were staging a scene in the theatre, you would have your nymphs, your fauns, you would have Greek beauty, you would have fear too. Yes, he thought, in this sunk garden there is fear. What did Spence's sister say?