“You know, Bland,” said Merrall, “you’ve got something there. But what’s her motive, if so?”
“No motive for killing the girl,” said Bland; “but I do think, you know, that she might have a motive for killing Lady Stubbs. According to M. Poirot, whom I told you about, she’s head over heels in love with her employer. Supposing she followed Lady Stubbs into the woods and killed her and that Marlene Tucker, bored in the boathouse, came out and happened to see it? Then of course she’d have to kill Marlene too. What would she do next? Put the girl’s body in the boathouse, come back to the house, fetch the tray and go down to the boathouse again. Then she’s covered her own absence from the fête and we’ve got her testimony, our only reliable testimony on the face of it, that Marlene Tucker was alive at a quarter past four.”
“Well,” said Major Merrall, with a sigh, “keep after it, Bland. Keep after it. What do you think she did with Lady Stubbs’ body, if she’s the guilty party?”
“Hid it in the woods, buried it, or threw it into the river.”
“The last would be rather difficult, wouldn’t it?”
“It depends where the murder was committed,” said the inspector. “She’s quite a hefty woman. If it was not far from the boathouse, she could have carried her down there and thrown her off the edge of the quay.”
“With every pleasure steamer on the Helm looking on?”
“It would be just another piece of horseplay. Risky, but possible. But I think it far more likely myself that she hid the body somewhere, and just threw the hat into the Helm. It’s possible, you see, that she, knowing the house and grounds well, might know some place where you could conceal a body. She may have managed to dispose of it in the river later. Who knows? That is, of course, if she did it,” added Inspector Bland as an afterthought. “But, actually, sir, I stick to de Sousa—”
Major Merrall had been noting down points on a pad. He looked up now, clearing his throat.
“It comes to this, then. We can summarize it as follows: we’ve got five or six people who could have killed Marlene Tucker. Some of them are more likely than others, but that’s as far as we can go. In a general way, we know why she was killed. She was killed because she saw something. But until we know exactly what it was she saw—we don’t know who killed her.”
“Put like that, you make it sound a bit difficult, sir.”
“Oh, it is difficult. But we shall get there—in the end.”
“And meantime that chap will have left England—laughing in his sleeve—having got away with two murders.”
“You’re fairly sure about him, aren’t you? I don’t say you’re wrong. All the same….”
The chief constable was silent for a moment or two, then he said, with a shrug of his shoulders:
“Anyway, it’s better than having one of these psychopathic murderers. We’d probably be having a third murder on our hands by now.”
“They do say things go in threes,” said the inspector gloomily.
He repeated that remark the following morning when he heard that old Merdell, returning home from a visit to his favourite pub across the river at Gitcham, must have exceeded his usual potations and had fallen in the river when boarding the quay. His boat was found adrift, and the old man’s body was recovered that evening.
The inquest was short and simple. The night had been dark and overcast, old Merdell had had three pints of beer and, after all, he was ninety-two.
The verdict brought in was Accidental Death.
Sixteen
I
Hercule Poirot sat in a square chair in front of the square fireplace in the square room of his London flat. In front of him were various objects that were not square: that were instead violently and almost impossibly curved. Each of them, studied separately, looked as if it could not have any conceivable function in a sane world. They appeared improbable, irresponsible, and wholly fortuitous. In actual fact, of course, they were nothing of the sort.
Assessed correctly, each had its particular place in a particular universe. Assembled in their proper place in their particular universe, they not only made sense, they made a picture. In other words, Hercule Poirot was doing a jigsaw puzzle.
He looked down at where a rectangle still showed improbably shaped gaps. It was an occupation he found soothing and pleasant. It brought disorder into order. It had, he reflected, a certain resemblance to his own profession. There, too, one was faced with various improbably shaped and unlikely facts which, though seeming to bear no relationship to each other, yet did each have its properly balanced part in assembling the whole. His fingers deftly picked up an improbable piece of dark grey and fitted it into a blue sky. It was, he now perceived, part of an aeroplane.
“Yes,” murmured Poirot to himself, “that is what one must do. The unlikely piece here, the improbable piece there, the oh-so-rational piece that is not what it seems; all of these have their appointed place, and once they are fitted in, eh bien, there is an end of the business! All is clear. All is—as they say nowadays—in the picture.”
He fitted in, in rapid succession, a small piece of a minaret, another piece that looked as though it was part of a striped awning and was actually the backside of a cat, and a missing piece of sunset that had changed with Turneresque suddenness from orange to pink.
If one knew what to look for, it would be so easy, said Hercule Poirot to himself. But one does not know what to look for. And so one looks in the wrong places or for the wrong things. He sighed vexedly. His eyes strayed from the jigsaw puzzle in front of him to the chair on the other side of the fireplace. There, not half an hour ago, Inspector Bland had sat consuming tea and crumpets (square crumpets) and talking sadly. He had had to come to London on police business and that police business having been accomplished, he had come to call upon M. Poirot. He had wondered, he explained, whether M. Poirot had any ideas. He had then proceeded to explain his own ideas. On every point he outlined, Poirot had agreed with him. Inspector Bland, so Poirot thought, had made a very fair and unprejudiced survey of the case.
It was now a month, nearly five weeks, since the occurrences at Nasse House. It had been five weeks of stagnation and of negation. Lady Stubbs’ body had not been recovered. Lady Stubbs, if living, had not been traced. The odds, Inspector Bland pointed out, were strongly against her being alive. Poirot agreed with him.
“Of course,” said Bland, “the body might not have been washed up. There’s no telling with a body once it’s in the water. It may show up yet, though it will be pretty unrecognizable when it does.”
“There is a third possibility,” Poirot pointed out.
Bland nodded.
“Yes,” he said, “I’ve thought of that. I keep thinking of that, in fact. You mean the body’s there—at Nasse, hidden somewhere where we’ve never thought of looking. It could be, you know. It just could be. With an old house, and with grounds like that, there are places you’d never think of—that you’d never know were there.”
He paused a moment, ruminated, and then said:
“There’s a house I was in only the other day. They’d built an air raid shelter, you know, in the war. A flimsy sort of more or less homemade job in the garden, by the wall of the house, and had made a way from it into the house—into the cellar. Well, the war ended, the shelters tumbled down, they heaped it up in irregular mounds and made a kind of rockery of it. Walking through that garden now, you’d never think that the place had once been an air raid shelter and that there was a chamber underneath. Looks as though it was always meant to be a rockery. And all the time, behind a wine bin in the cellar, there’s a passage leading into it. That’s what I mean. That kind of thing. Some sort of way into some kind of place that no outsider would know about. I don’t suppose there’s an actual Priest’s Hole or anything of that kind?”
“Hardly—not at that period.”
“That’s what Mr. Weyman says—he says the house was built about 1790 or thereabouts. No reason for priests to hide themselves b
y that date. All the same, you know, there might be—somewhere, some alteration in the structure—something that one of the family might know about. What do you think, M. Poirot?”
“It is possible, yes,” said Poirot. “Mais oui, decidedly it is an idea. If one accepts the possibility, then the next thing is—who would know about it? Anyone staying in the house might know, I suppose?”
“Yes. Of course it would let out de Sousa.” The inspector looked dissatisfied. De Sousa was still his preferred suspect. “As you say, anyone who lived in the house, such as a servant or one of the family, might know about it. Someone just staying in the house would be less likely. People who only came in from outside, like the Legges, less likely still.”
“The person who would certainly know about such a thing, and who could tell you if you asked her, would be Mrs. Folliat,” said Poirot.
Mrs. Folliat, he thought, knew all there was to know about Nasse House. Mrs. Folliat knew a great deal…Mrs. Folliat had known straight away that Hattie Stubbs was dead. Mrs. Folliat knew, before Marlene and Hattie Stubbs died, that it was a very wicked world and that there were very wicked people in it. Mrs. Folliat, thought Poirot vexedly, was the key to the whole business. But Mrs. Folliat, he reflected, was a key that would not easily turn in the lock.
“I’ve interviewed the lady several times,” said the inspector. “Very nice, very pleasant she’s been about everything, and seems very distressed that she can’t suggest anything helpful.”
Can’t or won’t? thought Poirot. Bland was perhaps thinking the same.
“There’s a type of lady,” he said, “that you can’t force. You can’t frighten them, or persuade them, or diddle them.”
No, Poirot thought, you couldn’t force or persuade or diddle Mrs. Folliat.
The inspector had finished his tea, and sighed and gone, and Poirot had got out his jigsaw puzzle to alleviate his mounting exasperation. For he was exasperated. Both exasperated and humiliated. Mrs. Oliver had summoned him, Hercule Poirot, to elucidate a mystery. She had felt that there was something wrong, and there had been something wrong. And she had looked confidently to Hercule Poirot, first to prevent it—and he had not prevented it—and, secondly, to discover the killer, and he had not discovered the killer. He was in a fog, in the type of fog where there are from time to time baffling gleams of light. Every now and then, or so it seemed to him, he had had one of those glimpses. And each time he had failed to penetrate farther. He had failed to assess the value of what he seemed, for one brief moment, to have seen.
Poirot got up, crossed to the other side of the hearth, rearranged the second square chair so that it was at a definite geometric angle, and sat down in it. He had passed from the jigsaw of painted wood and cardboard to the jigsaw of a murder problem. He took a notebook from his pocket and wrote in small neat characters:
“Etienne de Sousa, Amanda Brewis, Alec Legge, Sally Legge, Michael Weyman.”
It was physically impossible for Sir George or Jim Warburton to have killed Marlene Tucker. Since it was not physically impossible for Mrs. Oliver to have done so, he added her name after a brief space. He also added the name of Mrs. Masterton since he did not remember of his own knowledge having seen Mrs. Masterton constantly on the lawn between four o’clock and quarter to five. He added the name of Henden, the butler; more, perhaps, because a sinister butler had figured in Mrs. Oliver’s Murder Hunt than because he had really any suspicions of the dark-haired artist with the gong stick. He also put down “Boy in turtle shirt” with a query mark after it. Then he smiled, shook his head, took a pin from the lapel of his jacket, shut his eyes and stabbed with it. It was as good a way as any other, he thought.
He was justifiably annoyed when the pin proved to have transfixed the last entry.
“I am an imbecile,” said Hercule Poirot. “What has a boy in a turtle shirt to do with this?”
But he also realized he must have had some reason for including this enigmatic character in his list. He recalled again the day he had sat in the Folly, and the surprise on the boy’s face at seeing him there. Not a very pleasant face, despite the youthful good looks. An arrogant ruthless face. The young man had come there for some purpose. He had come to meet someone, and it followed that that someone was a person whom he could not meet, or did not wish to meet, in the ordinary way. It was a meeting, in fact, to which attention must not be called. A guilty meeting. Something to do with the murder?
Poirot pursued his reflections. A boy who was staying at the Youth Hostel—that is to say, a boy who would be in that neighbourhood for two nights at most. Had he come there casually? One of the many young students visiting Britain? Or had he come there for a special purpose, to meet some special person? There could have been what seemed a casual encounter on the day of the fête—possibly there had been.
I know a good deal, said Hercule Poirot to himself. I have in my hands many, many pieces of this jigsaw. I have an idea of the kind of crime this was—but it must be that I am not looking at it the right way.
He turned a page of his notebook, and wrote:
Did Lady Stubbs ask Miss Brewis to take tea to Marlene? If not, why does Miss Brewis say that she did?
He considered the point. Miss Brewis might quite easily herself have thought of taking cake and a fruit drink to the girl. But if so why did she not simply say so? Why lie about Lady Stubbs having asked her to do so? Could this be because Miss Brewis went to the boathouse and found Marlene dead? Unless Miss Brewis was herself guilty of the murder, that seemed very unlikely. She was not a nervous woman nor an imaginative one. If she had found the girl dead, she would surely at once have given the alarm?
He stared for some time at the two questions he had written. He could not help feeling that somewhere in those words there was some vital pointer to the truth that had escaped him. After four or five minutes of thought he wrote down something more.
Etienne de Sousa declares that he wrote to his cousin three weeks before his arrival at Nasse House. Is that statement true or false?
Poirot felt almost certain that it was false. He recalled the scene at the breakfast table. There seemed no earthly reason why Sir George or Lady Stubbs should pretend to a surprise and, in the latter’s case, a dismay, which they did not feel. He could see no purpose to be accomplished by it. Granting, however, that Etienne de Sousa had lied, why did he lie? To give the impression that his visit had been announced and welcomed? It might be so, but it seemed a very doubtful reason. There was certainly no evidence that such a letter had ever been written or received. Was it an attempt on de Sousa’s part to establish his bona fides—to make his visit appear natural and even expected? Certainly Sir George had received him amicably enough, although he did not know him.
Poirot paused, his thoughts coming to a stop. Sir George did not know de Sousa. His wife, who did know him, had not seen him. Was there perhaps something there? Could it be possible that the Etienne de Sousa who had arrived that day at the fête was not the real Etienne de Sousa? He went over the idea in his mind, but again he could see no point to it. What had de Sousa to gain by coming and representing himself as de Sousa if he was not de Sousa? In any case, de Sousa did not derive any benefit from Hattie’s death. Hattie, as the police had ascertained, had no money of her own except that which was allowed her by her husband.
Poirot tried to remember exactly what she had said to him that morning. “He is a bad man. He does wicked things.” And, according to Bland, she had said to her husband: “He kills people.”
There was something rather significant about that, now that one came to examine all the facts. He kills people.
On the day Etienne de Sousa had come to Nasse House one person certainly had been killed, possibly two people. Mrs. Folliat had said that one should pay no attention to these melodramatic remarks of Hattie’s. She had said so very insistently. Mrs. Folliat….
Hercule Poirot frowned, then brought his hand down with a bang on the arm of his chair.
“Always, al
ways—I return to Mrs. Folliat. She is the key to the whole business. If I knew what she knows…I can no longer sit in an armchair and just think. No, I must take a train and go again to Devon and visit Mrs. Folliat.”
II
Hercule Poirot paused for a moment outside the big wrought iron gates of Nasse House. He looked ahead of him along the curving drive. It was no longer summer. Golden-brown leaves fluttered gently down from the trees. Near at hand the grassy banks were coloured with small mauve cyclamen. Poirot sighed. The beauty of Nasse House appealed to him in spite of himself. He was not a great admirer of nature in the wild, he liked things trim and neat, yet he could not but appreciate the soft wild beauty of massed shrubs and trees.
At his left was the small white porticoed lodge. It was a fine afternoon. Probably Mrs. Folliat would not be at home. She would be out somewhere with her gardening basket or else visiting some friends in the neighbourhood. She had many friends. This was her home, and had been her home for many long years. What was it the old man on the quay had said? “There’ll always be Folliats at Nasse House.”
Poirot rapped gently upon the door of the Lodge. After a few moments’ delay he heard footsteps inside. They sounded to his ear slow and almost hesitant. Then the door was opened and Mrs. Folliat stood framed in the doorway. He was startled to see how old and frail she looked. She stared at him incredulously for a moment or two, then she said:
“M. Poirot? You!”
He thought for a moment that he had seen fear leap into her eyes, but perhaps that was sheer imagination on his part. He said politely:
“May I come in, Madame?”
“But of course.”
She had recovered all her poise now, beckoned him in with a gesture and led the way into her small sittingroom. There were some delicate Chelsea figures on the mantelpiece, a couple of chairs covered in exquisite petit point, and a Derby tea service stood on the small table. Mrs. Folliat said:
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