Hercule Poirot 100 Years (1916 - 2016)

by Mark Place

  His finger went out pointing. ‘But Miss Rich—Miss Rich was not here last term, was she?’

  ‘I—no. I was ill.’ She spoke hurriedly. ‘I was away for a term.’

  ‘That is the thing we did not know,’ said Hercule Poirot, ‘until a few days ago somebody mentioned it casually. When questioned by the police originally, you merely said that you had been at Meadowbank for a year and a half. That in itself is true enough. But you were absent last term. You could have been in Ramat—I think you were in Ramat. Be careful. It can be verified, you know, from your passport.’

  There was a moment’s silence, then Eileen Rich looked up.

  ‘Yes,’ she said quietly. ‘I was in Ramat. Why not?’

  ‘Why did you go to Ramat, Miss Rich?’

  ‘You already know. I had been ill. I was advised to take a rest—to go abroad. I wrote to Miss Bulstrode and explained that I must take a term off. She quite understood.’

  ‘That is so,’ said Miss Bulstrode. ‘A doctor’s certificate was enclosed which said that it would be unwise for Miss Rich to resume her duties until the following term.’

  ‘So—you went to Ramat?’ said Hercule Poirot.

  ‘Why shouldn’t I go to Ramat?’ said Eileen Rich. Her voice trembled slightly. ‘There are cheap fares offered to schoolteachers. I wanted a rest. I wanted sunshine. I went out to Ramat. I spent two months there. Why not? Why not, I say? ’

  ‘You have never mentioned that you were at Ramat at the time of the Revolution.’

  ‘Why should I? What has it got to do with anyone here? I haven’t killed anyone, I tell you. I haven’t killed anyone.’

  ‘You were recognized, you know,’ said Hercule Poirot. ‘Not recognized definitely, but indefinitely. The child Jennifer was very vague. She said she thought she’d seen you in Ramat but concluded it couldn’t be you because, she said, the person she had seen was fat, not thin.’ He leaned forward, his eyes boring into Eileen Rich’s face.

  ‘What have you to say, Miss Rich?’

  She wheeled round. ‘I know what you’re trying to make out!’ she cried. ‘You’re trying to make out that it wasn’t a secret agent or anything of that kind who did these murders. That it was someone who just happened to be there, someone who happened to see this treasure hidden in a tennis racquet. Someone who realized that the child was coming to Meadowbank and that she’d have an opportunity to take for herself this hidden thing. But I tell you it isn’t true !’

  ‘I think that is what happened. Yes,’ said Poirot. ‘Someone saw the jewels being hidden and forgot all other duties or interests in the determination to possess them!’

  ‘It isn’t true, I tell you. I saw nothing—’

  ‘Inspector Kelsey.’ Poirot turned his head.

  Inspector Kelsey nodded—went to the door, opened it, and Mrs Upjohn walked into the room.

  II

  ‘How do you do, Miss Bulstrode,’ said Mrs Upjohn, looking rather embarrassed. ‘I’m sorry I’m looking rather untidy, but I was somewhere near Ankara yesterday and I’ve just flown home. I’m in a terrible mess and I really haven’t had time to clean myself up or do anything .’

  ‘That does not matter,’ said Hercule Poirot. ‘We want to ask you something.’

  ‘Mrs Upjohn,’ said Kelsey, ‘when you came here to bring your daughter to the school and you were in Miss Bulstrode’s sitting-room, you looked out of the window—the window which gives on the front drive—and you uttered an exclamation as though you recognized someone you saw there. That is so, is it not?’

  Mrs Upjohn stared at him. ‘When I was in Miss Bulstrode’s sitting-room? I looked—oh, yes, of course!

  Yes, I did see someone.’

  ‘Someone you were surprised to see?’

  ‘Well, I was rather…You see, it had all been such years ago.’

  ‘You mean the days when you were working in Intelligence towards the end of the war?’

  ‘Yes. It was about fifteen years ago. Of course, she looked much older, but I recognized her at once. And I wondered what on earth she could be doing here.’

  ‘Mrs Upjohn, will you look round this room and tell me if you see that person here now?’

  ‘Yes, of course,’ said Mrs Upjohn. ‘I saw her as soon as I came in. That’s her.’

  She stretched out a pointing finger. Inspector Kelsey was quick and so was Adam, but they were not quick enough. Ann Shapland had sprung to her feet. In her hand was a small wicked-looking automatic and it pointed straight at Mrs Upjohn. Miss Bulstrode, quicker than the two men, moved sharply forward, but swifter still was Miss Chadwick. It was not Mrs Upjohn that she was trying to shield, it was the woman who was standing between Ann Shapland and Mrs Upjohn.

  ‘No, you shan’t,’ cried Chaddy, and flung herself on Miss Bulstrode just as the small automatic went off.

  Miss Chadwick staggered, then slowly crumpled down. Miss Johnson ran to her. Adam and Kelsey had got hold of Ann Shapland now. She was struggling like a wild cat, but they wrested the small automatic from her.

  Mrs Upjohn said breathlessly: ‘They said then that she was a killer. Although she was so young. One of the most dangerous agents they had. Angelica was her code name.’

  ‘You lying bitch!’ Ann Shapland fairly spat out the words.

  Hercule Poirot said: ‘She does not lie. You are dangerous. You have always led a dangerous life. Up to now, you have never been suspected in your own identity. All the jobs you have taken in your own name have been perfectly genuine jobs, efficiently performed—but they have all been jobs with a purpose, and that purpose has been the gaining of information. You have worked with an Oil Company, with an archaeologist whose work took him to a certain part of the globe, with an actress whose protector was an eminent politician. Ever since you were seventeen you have worked as an agent—though for many different masters. Your services have been for hire and have been highly paid. You have played a dual role. Most of your assignments have been carried out in your own name, but there were certain jobs for which you assumed different identities. Those were the times when ostensibly you had to go home and be with your mother.

  ‘But I strongly suspect, Miss Shapland, that the elderly woman I visited who lives in a small village with a nurse-companion to look after her, an elderly woman who is genuinely a mental patient with a confused mind, is not your mother at all. She has been your excuse for retiring from employment and from the circle of your friends. The three months this winter that you spent with your “mother” who had one of her “bad turns” covers the time when you went out to Ramat. Not as Ann Shapland but as Angelica de Toredo, a Spanish, or near-Spanish cabaret dancer. You occupied the room in the hotel next to that of Mrs Sutcliffe and somehow you managed to see Bob Rawlinson conceal the jewels in the racquet. You had no opportunity of taking the racquet then for there was the sudden evacuation of all British people, but you had read the labels on their luggage and it was easy to find out something about them. To obtain a secretarial post here was not difficult. I have made some inquiries. You paid a substantial sum to Miss Bulstrode’s former secretary to vacate her post on the plea of a “breakdown”. And you had quite a plausible story. You had been commissioned to write a series of articles on a famous girls’ school “from within”.

  ‘It all seemed quite easy, did it not? If a child’s racquet was missing, what of it? Simpler still, you would go out at night to the Sports Pavilion, and abstract the jewels. But you had not reckoned with Miss Springer. Perhaps she had already seen you examining the racquets. Perhaps she just happened to wake that night. She followed you out there and you shot her. Later, Mademoiselle Blanche tried to blackmail you, and you killed her. It comes natural to you, does it not, to kill?’

  He stopped. In a monotonous official voice, Inspector Kelsey cautioned his prisoner.

  She did not listen. Turning towards Hercule Poirot, she burst out in a low-pitched flood of invective that startled everyone in the room.

  ‘Whew!’ said Adam, as Kelsey took
her away. ‘And I thought she was a nice girl!’

  Miss Johnson had been kneeling by Miss Chadwick.

  ‘I’m afraid she’s badly hurt,’ she said. ‘She’d better not be moved until the doctor comes.’

  Chapter 24

  Poirot Explains

  Mrs Upjohn, wandering through the corridors of Meadowbank School, forgot the exciting scene she had just been through. She was for the moment merely a mother seeking her young. She found her in a deserted classroom. Julia was bending over a desk, her tongue protruding slightly, absorbed in the agonies of composition. She looked up and stared. Then flung herself across the room and hugged her mother.

  ‘Mummy!’

  Then, with the self-consciousness of her age, ashamed of her unrestrained emotion, she detached herself and spoke in a carefully casual tone—indeed almost accusingly.

  ‘Aren’t you back rather soon , Mummy?’

  ‘I flew back,’ said Mrs Upjohn, almost apologetically, ‘from Ankara.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Julia. ‘Well—I’m glad you’re back.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Mrs Upjohn, ‘I am very glad too.’

  They looked at each other, embarrassed. ‘What are you doing?’ said Mrs Upjohn, advancing a little closer.

  ‘I’m writing a composition for Miss Rich,’ said Julia. ‘She really does set the most exciting subjects.’

  ‘What’s this one?’ said Mrs Upjohn. She bent over.

  The subject was written at the top of the page. Some nine or ten lines of writing in Julia’s uneven and sprawling hand-writing came below. ‘Contrast the Attitudes of Macbeth and Lady Macbeth to Murder’ read Mrs Upjohn.

  ‘Well,’ she said doubtfully, ‘you can’t say that the subject isn’t topical!’

  She read the start of her daughter’s essay. ‘Macbeth,’ Julia had written, ‘liked the idea of murder and had been thinking of it a lot, but he needed a push to get him started. Once he’d got started he enjoyed murdering people and had no more qualms or fears. Lady Macbeth was just greedy and ambitious. She thought she didn’t mind what she did to get what she wanted. But once she’d done it she found she didn’t like it after all.’

  ‘Your language isn’t very elegant,’ said Mrs Upjohn. ‘I think you’ll have to polish it up a bit, but you’ve certainly got something there.’

  II

  Inspector Kelsey was speaking in a slightly complaining tone.

  ‘It’s all very well for you, Poirot,’ he said. ‘You can say and do a lot of things we can’t: and I’ll admit the whole thing was well stage managed. Got her off her guard, made her think we were after Rich, and then, Mrs Upjohn’s sudden appearance made her lose her head. Thank the lord she kept that automatic after shooting Springer. If the bullet corresponds—’

  ‘It will, mon ami , it will,’ said Poirot.

  ‘Then we’ve got her cold for the murder of Springer. And I gather Miss Chadwick’s in a bad way. But look here, Poirot, I still can’t see how she can possibly have killed Miss Vansittart. It’s physically impossible. She’s got a cast iron alibi—unless young Rathbone and the whole staff of the Nid Sauvage are in it with her.’

  Poirot shook his head. ‘Oh, no,’ he said. ‘Her alibi is perfectly good. She killed Miss Springer and Mademoiselle Blanche. But Miss Vansittart—’ he hesitated for a moment, his eyes going to where Miss Bulstrode sat listening to them. ‘Miss Vansittart was killed by Miss Chadwick.’

  ‘Miss Chadwick?’ exclaimed Miss Bulstrode and Kelsey together.

  Poirot nodded. ‘I am sure of it.’

  ‘But—why?’

  ‘I think,’ said Poirot, ‘Miss Chadwick loved Meadowbank too much…’ His eyes went across to Miss Bulstrode.

  ‘I see…’ said Miss Bulstrode. ‘Yes, yes, I see…I ought to have known.’ She paused. ‘You mean that she—?’

  ‘I mean,’ said Poirot, ‘that she started here with you, that all along she has regarded Meadowbank as a joint venture between you both.’

  ‘Which in one sense it was,’ said Miss Bulstrode.

  ‘Quite so,’ said Poirot. ‘But that was merely the financial aspect. When you began to talk of retiring she regarded herself as the person who would take over.’

  ‘But she’s far too old,’ objected Miss Bulstrode.

  ‘Yes,’ said Poirot, ‘she is too old and she is not suited to be a headmistress. But she herself did not think so. She thought that when you went she would be headmistress of Meadowbank as a matter of course. And then she found that was not so. That you were considering someone else that you had fastened upon Eleanor Vansittart. And she loved Meadowbank. She loved the school and she did not like Eleanor Vansittart. I think in the end she hated her.’

  ‘She might have done,’ said Miss Bulstrode. ‘Yes, Eleanor Vansittart was—how shall I put it?—she was always very complacent, very superior about everything. That would be hard to bear if you were jealous. That’s what you mean, isn’t it? Chaddy was jealous.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Poirot. ‘She was jealous of Meadowbank and jealous of Eleanor Vansittart. She couldn’t bear the thought of the school and Miss Vansittart together. And then perhaps something in your manner led her to think that you were weakening?’

  ‘I did weaken,’ said Miss Bulstrode. ‘But I didn’t weaken in the way that perhaps Chaddy thought I would weaken. Actually I thought of someone younger still than Miss Vansittart—I thought it over and then I said No, she’s too young…Chaddy was with me then, I remember.’

  ‘And she thought,’ said Poirot, ‘that you were referring to Miss Vansittart. That you were saying Miss Vansittart was too young. She thoroughly agreed. She thought that experience and wisdom such as she had got were far more important things. But then, after all, you returned to your original decision. You chose Eleanor Vansittart as the right person and left her in charge of the school that weekend. This is what I think happened. On that Sunday night Miss Chadwick was restless, she got up and she saw the light in the squash court. She went out there exactly as she says she went. There is only one thing different in her story from what she said. It wasn’t a golf club she took with her. She picked up one of the sandbags from the pile in the hall. She went out there all ready to deal with a burglar, with someone who for a second time had broken into the Sports Pavilion. She had the sandbag ready in her hand to defend herself if attacked. And what did she find? She found Eleanor Vansittart kneeling down looking in a locker, and she thought, it may be—(for I am good,’ said Hercule Poirot in a parenthesis, ‘—at putting myself into other people’s minds—) she though tiff I were a marauder, a burglar, I would come up behind her and strike her down. And as the thought came into her mind, only half conscious of what she was doing, she raised the sandbag and struck. And there was Eleanor Vansittart dead, out of her way.

  She was appalled then, I think, at what she had done. It has preyed on her ever since—for she is not a natural killer, Miss Chadwick. She was driven, as some are driven, by jealousy and by obsession. The obsession of love for Meadowbank. Now that Eleanor Vansittart was dead she was quite sure that she would succeed you at Meadowbank. So she didn’t confess. She told her story to the police exactly as it had occurred but for the one vital fact, that it was she who had struck the blow. But when she was asked about the golf club which presumably Miss Vansittart took with her being nervous after all that had occurred, Miss Chadwick said quickly that she had taken it out there. She didn’t want you to think even for a moment that she had handled the sandbag.’

  ‘Why did Ann Shapland also choose a sandbag to kill Mademoiselle Blanche?’ asked Miss Bulstrode.

  ‘For one thing, she could not risk a pistol shot in the school building, and for another she is a very clever young woman. She wanted to tie up this third murder with the second one, for which she had an alibi.’

  ‘I don’t really understand what Eleanor Vansittart was doing herself in the Sports Pavilion,’ said Miss Bulstrode.

  ‘I think one could make a guess. She was probably far more concerned ov
er the disappearance of Shaista than she allowed to appear on the surface. She was as upset as Miss Chadwick was. In a way it was worse for her, because she had been left by you in charge—and the kidnapping had happened whilst she was responsible. Moreover she had pooh-poohed it as long as possible through an unwillingness to face unpleasant facts squarely.’

  ‘So there was weakness behind the façade ,’ mused Miss Bulstrode. ‘I sometimes suspected it.’

  ‘She, too, I think, was unable to sleep. And I think she went out quietly to the Sports Pavilion to make an examination of Shaista’s locker in case there might be some clue there to the girl’s disappearance.’

  ‘You seem to have explanations for everything, Mr Poirot.’

  ‘That’s his speciality,’ said Inspector Kelsey with slight malice.

  ‘And what was the point of getting Eileen Rich to sketch various members of my staff?’

  ‘I wanted to test the child Jennifer’s ability to recognize a face. I soon satisfied myself that Jennifer was so entirely preoccupied by her own affairs, that she gave outsiders at most a cursory glance, taking in only the external details of their appearance. She did not recognize a sketch of Mademoiselle Blanche with a different hairdo. Still less, then, would she have recognized Ann Shapland who, as your secretary, she seldom saw at close quarters.’

  ‘You think that the woman with the racquet was Ann Shapland herself.’

  ‘Yes. It has been a one woman job all through. You remember that day, you rang for her to take a message to Julia but in the end, as the buzzer went unanswered, sent a girl to find Julia. Ann was accustomed to quick disguise. A fair wig, differently pencilled eyebrows, a “fussy” dress and hat. She need only be absent from her typewriter for about twenty minutes. I saw from Miss Rich’s clever sketches how easy it is for a woman to alter her appearance by purely external matters.’