Taken at the Flood

by Agatha Christie

  “Oh, mon cher. Poirot leaned forward. “On a dim night, with feeble street lights, can one tell youth or age under a mask of makeup?”

  “Look here, Poirot,” said Spence, “what are you getting at?”

  Poirot leaned back and half-closed his eyes.

  “Slacks, a tweed coat, an orange scarf enveloping the head, a great deal of makeup, a dropped lipstick. It is suggestive.”

  “Think you’re the oracle at Delphi,” growled the Superintendent. “Not that I know what the oracle at Delphi was—sort of thing young Graves gives himself airs about knowing—doesn’t help his police work any. Any more cryptic pronnouncements, M. Poirot?”

  “I told you,” said Poirot, “that this case was the wrong shape. As an instance I said to you that the dead man was all wrong. So he was, as Underhay. Underhay was clearly an eccentric, chivalrous individual, old-fashioned and reactionary. The man at the Stag was a blackmailer; he was neither chivalrous, old-fashioned, nor reactionary, nor was he particularly eccentric—therefore he was not Underhay. He could not be Underhay, for people do not change. The interesting thing was that Porter said he was Underhay.”

  “Leading you to Mrs. Jeremy?”

  “The likeness led me to Mrs. Jeremy. A very distinctive cast of countenance, the Trenton profile. To permit myself a little play on words, as Charles Trenton the dead man is the right shape. But there are still questions to which we require answers. Why did David Hunter permit himself to be blackmailed so readily? Is he the kind of man who lets himself be blackmailed? One would say very decidedly, no. So he too acts out of character. Then there is Rosaleen Cloade. Her whole behaviour is incomprehensible—but there is one thing I should like to know very much. Why is she afraid? Why does she think that something will happen to her now that her brother is no longer there to protect her? Someone—or something has given her that fear. And it is not that she fears losing her fortune—no, it is more than that. It is for her life that she is afraid….”

  “Good Lord, M. Poirot, you don’t think—”

  “Let us remember, Spence, that as you said just now, we are back where we started. That is to say, the Cloade family are back where they started. Robert Underhay died in Africa. And Rosaleen Cloade’s life stands between them and the enjoyment of Gordon Cloade’s money—”

  “Do you honestly think that one of them would do that?”

  “I think this. Rosaleen Cloade is twenty-six, and though mentally somewhat unstable, physically she is strong and healthy. She may live to be seventy, she may live longer still. Forty-four years, let us say. Don’t you think, Superintendent, that forty-four years may be too long for someone to contemplate?”

  Twelve

  When Poirot left the police station he was almost at once accosted by Aunt Kathie. She had several shopping bags with her and came up to him with a breathless eagerness of manner.

  “So terrible about poor Major Porter,” she said. “I can’t help feeling that his outlook on life must have been very materialistic. Army life, you know. Very narrowing, and though he had spent a good deal of his life in India, I’m afraid he never took advantage of the spiritual opportunities. It would be all pukka and chota hazri and tiffin and pigsticking—the narrow Army round. To think that he might have sat as a chela at the feet of some guru! Ah, the missed opportunities, M. Poirot, how sad they are!”

  Aunt Kathie shook her head and relaxed her grip on one of the shopping bags. A depressed-looking bit of cod slipped out and slithered into the gutter. Poirot retrieved it and in her agitation Aunt Kathie let a second bag slip, whereupon a tin of golden syrup began a gay career rolling along the High Street.

  “Thank you so much, M. Poirot.” Aunt Kathie grasped the cod. He ran after the golden syrup. “Oh, thank you—so clumsy of me—but really I have been so upset. That unfortunate man—yes, it is sticky, but really I don’t like to use your clean handkerchief. Well, it’s very kind of you—as I was saying, in life we are in death—and in death we are in life—I should never be surprised to see the astral body of any of my dear friends who have passed over. One might, you know, just pass them in the street. Why—only the other night I—”

  “You permit?” Poirot rammed the cod firmly into the depths of the bag. “You were saying—yes?”

  “Astral bodies,” said Aunt Kathie. “I asked, you know, for twopence—because I only had halfpennies. But I thought at the time the face was familiar—only I couldn’t place it. I still can’t—but I think now it must be someone who has Passed Over—perhaps some time ago—so that my remembrance was very uncertain. It is wonderful the way people are sent to one in one’s need—even if it’s only a matter of pennies for telephones. Oh, dear, quite a queue at Peacocks—they must have got either trifle or Swiss roll! I hope I’m not too late!”

  Mrs. Lionel Cloade plunged across the road and joined herself to the tail end of a queue of grim-faced women outside the confectioner’s shop.

  Poirot went on down the High Street. He did not turn in at the Stag. Instead he bent his steps towards the White House.

  He wanted very much to have a talk with Lynn Marchmont, and he suspected that Lynn Marchmont would not be averse to having a talk with him.

  It was a lovely morning—one of those summer mornings in spring that have a freshness denied to a real summer’s day.

  Poirot turned off from the main road. He saw the footpath leading up past Long Willows to the hillside above Furrowbank. Charles Trenton had come that way from the station on the Friday before his death. On his way down the hill, he had met Rosaleen Cloade coming up. He had not recognized her, which was not surprising since he was not Robert Underhay, and she, naturally, had not recognized him for the same reason. But she had sworn when shown the body that she had not even glanced at the face of the man she had passed on the footpath? If so, what had she been thinking about? Had she, by any chance, been thinking of Rowley Cloade?

  Poirot turned along the small side road which led to the White House. The garden of the White House was looking very lovely. It held many flowering shrubs, lilacs and laburnums, and in the centre of the lawn was a big old gnarled apple tree. Under it, stretched out in a deck chair, was Lynn Marchmont.

  She jumped nervously when Poirot, in a formal voice, wished her “Good morning!”

  “You did startle me, M. Poirot. I didn’t hear you coming across the grass. So you are still here—in Warmsley Vale?”

  “I am still here—yes.”

  “Why?”

  Poirot shrugged his shoulders.

  “It is a pleasant out-of-the-world spot where one can relax. I relax.”

  “I’m glad you are here,” said Lynn.

  “You do not say to me like the rest of your family, “When do you go back to London, M. Poirot?” and wait anxiously for the answer.”

  “Do they want you to go back to London?”

  “It would seem so.”

  “I don’t.”

  “No—I realize that. Why, Mademoiselle?”

  “Because it means that you’re not satisfied. Not satisfied, I mean, that David Hunter did it.”

  “And you want him so much—to be innocent?”

  He saw a faint flush creep up under her bronzed skin.

  “Naturally, I don’t want to see a man hanged for what he didn’t do.”

  “Naturally—oh, yes!”

  “And the police are simply prejudiced against him because he’s got their backs up. That’s the worst of David—he likes antagonizing people.”

  “The police are not so prejudiced as you think, Miss Marchmont. The prejudice against him was in the minds of the jury. They refused to follow the coroner’s guidance. They gave a verdict against him and so the police had to arrest him. But I may tell you that they are very far from satisfied with the case against him.”

  She said eagerly:

  “Then they may let him go?”

  Poirot shrugged his shoulders.

  “Who do they think did do it, M. Poirot?”

  Po
irot said slowly: “There was a woman at the Stag that night.”

  Lynn cried:

  “I don’t understand anything. When we thought the man was Robert Underhay it all seemed so simple. Why did Major Porter say it was Underhay if it wasn’t? Why did he shoot himself? We’re back now where we started.”

  “You are the third person to use that phrase!”

  “Am I?” She looked startled. “What are you doing, M. Poirot?”

  “Talking to people. That is what I do. Just talk to people.”

  “But you don’t ask them things about the murder?”

  Poirot shook his head.

  “No, I just—what shall we say—pick up gossip.”

  “Does that help?”

  “Sometimes it does. You would be surprised how much I know of the everyday life of Warmsley Vale in the last few weeks. I know who walked where, and who they met, and sometimes what they said. For instance, I know that the man Arden took the footpath to the village passing by Furrowbank and asking the way of Mr. Rowley Cloade, and that he had a pack on his back and no luggage. I know that Rosaleen Cloade had spent over an hour at the farm with Rowley Cloade and that she had been happy there, unlike her usual self.”

  “Yes,” said Lynn, “Rowley told me that. He said she was like someone having an afternoon out.”

  “Aha, he said that?” Poirot paused and went on, “Yes, I know a lot of the comings and goings. And I have heard a lot about people’s difficulties—yours and your mother’s, for example.”

  “There’s no secret about any of us,” said Lynn. “We’ve all tried to cadge money off Rosaleen. That’s what you mean, isn’t it?”

  “I did not say so.”

  “Well, it’s true! And I suppose you’ve heard things about me and Rowley and David.”

  “But you are going to marry Rowley Cloade?”

  “Am I? I wish I knew…That’s what I was trying to decide that day—when David burst out of the wood. It was like a great question mark in my brain. Shall I? Shall I? Even the train in the valley seemed to be asking the same thing. The smoke made a fine question mark in the sky.”

  Poirot’s face took on a curious expression. Lynn misunderstood it. She cried out:

  “Oh, don’t you see, M. Poirot, it’s all so difficult. It isn’t a question of David at all. It’s me! I’ve changed. I’ve been away for three—four years. Now I’ve come back I’m not the same person who went away. That’s the tragedy everywhere. People coming home changed, having to readjust themselves. You can’t go away and lead a different kind of life and not change!”

  “You are wrong,” said Poirot. “The tragedy of life is that people do not change.”

  She stared at him, shaking her head. He insisted:

  “But yes. It is so. Why did you go away in the first place?”

  “Why? I went into the Wrens. I went on service.”

  “Yes, yes, but why did you join the Wrens in the first place? You were engaged to be married. You were in love with Rowley Cloade. You could have worked, could you not, as a land girl, here in Warmsley Vale?”

  “I could have, I suppose, but I wanted—”

  “You wanted to get away. You wanted to go abroad, to see life. You wanted, perhaps, to get away from Rowley Cloade…And now you are restless, you still want—to get away! Oh, no, Mademoiselle, people do not change!”

  “When I was out East, I longed for home,” Lynn cried defensively.

  “Yes, yes, where you are not, there you will want to be! That will always be so, perhaps, with you. You make a picture to yourself, you see, a picture of Lynn Marchmont coming home…But the picture does not come true, because the Lynn Marchmont whom you imagine is not the real Lynn Marchmont. She is the Lynn Marchmont you would like to be.”

  Lynn asked bitterly:

  “So, according to you, I shall never be satisfied anywhere?”

  “I do not say that. But I do say that, when you went away, you were dissatisfied with your engagement, and that now you have come back, you are still dissatisfied with your engagement.”

  Lynn broke off a leaf and chewed it meditatively.

  “You’re rather a devil at knowing things, aren’t you, M. Poirot?”

  “It is my métier,” said Poirot modestly. “There is a further truth, I think, that you have not yet recognized.”

  Lynn said sharply:

  “You mean David, don’t you? You think I am in love with David?”

  “That is for you to say,” murmured Poirot discreetly.

  “And I—don’t know! There’s something in David that I’m afraid of—but there’s something that draws me, too…” She was silent a moment and then went on: “I was talking yesterday to his Brigadier. He came down here when he heard David was arrested to see what he could do. He’s been telling me about David, how incredibly daring he was. He said David was one of the bravest people he’d ever had under him. And yet, you know, M. Poirot, in spite of all he said and his praise, I had the feeling that he wasn’t sure, not absolutely sure that David hadn’t done this!”

  “And are you not sure, either?”

  Lynn gave a crooked, rather pathetic smile.

  “No—you see, I’ve never trusted David. Can you love someone you don’t trust?”

  “Unfortunately, yes.”

  “I’ve always been unfair to David—because I didn’t trust him. I’ve believed quite a lot of the beastly local gossip—hints that David wasn’t David Hunter at all—but just a boy friend of Rosaleen’s. I was ashamed when I met the Brigadier and he talked to me about having known David as a boy in Ireland.”

  “C’est épatant,” murmured Poirot, “how people can get hold of the wrong end of a stick!”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Just what I say. Tell me, did Mrs. Cloade—the doctor’s wife, I mean—did she ring up on the night of the murder?”

  “Aunt Kathie? Yes, she did.”

  “What about?”

  “Some incredible muddle she had got into over some accounts.”

  “Did she speak from her own house?”

  “Why no, actually her telephone was out of order. She had to go out to a call box.”

  “At ten minutes past ten?”

  “Thereabouts. Our clocks never keep particularly good time.”

  “Thereabouts,” said Poirot thoughtfully. He went on delicately:

  “That was not the only telephone call you had that evening?”

  “No.” Lynn spoke shortly.

  “David Hunter rang you up from London?”

  “Yes.” She flared out suddenly, “I suppose you want to know what he said?”

  “Oh, indeed I should not presume—”

  “You’re welcome to know! He said he was going away—clearing out of my life. He said he was no good to me and that he never would run straight—not even for my sake.”

  “And since that was probably true you did not like it,” said Poirot.

  “I hope he will go away—that is, if he gets acquitted all right…I hope they’ll both go away to America or somewhere. Then, perhaps, we shall be able to stop thinking about them—we’ll learn to stand on our own feet. We’ll stop feeling ill will.”

  “Ill will?”

  “Yes. I felt it first one night at Aunt Kathie’s. She gave a sort of party. Perhaps it was because I was just back from abroad and rather on edge—but I seemed to feel it in the air eddying all round us. Ill will to her—to Rosaleen. Don’t you see, we were wishing her dead—all of us! Wishing her dead…And that’s awful, to wish that someone who’s never done you any harm—may die—”

  “Her death, of course, is the only thing that can do you any practical good.” Poirot spoke in a brisk and practical tone.

  “You mean do us good financially? Her mere being here has done us harm in all the ways that matter! Envying a person, resenting them, cadging off them—it isn’t good for one. Now, there she is, at Furrowbank, all alone. She looks like a ghost—she looks scared to death—she looks—oh! s
he looks as though she’s going off her head. And she won’t let us help! Not one of us. We’ve all tried. Mums asked her to come and stay with us, Aunt Frances asked her there. Even Aunt Kathie went along and offered to be with her at Furrowbank. But she won’t have anything to do with us now and I don’t blame her. She wouldn’t even see Brigadier Conroy. I think she’s ill, ill with worry and fright and misery. And we’re doing nothing about it because she won’t let us.”

  “Have you tried? You, yourself?”

  “Yes,” said Lynn. “I went up there yesterday. I said, was there anything I could do? She looked at me—” Suddenly she broke off and shivered. “I think she hates me. She said, ‘You, least of all.’ David told her, I think, to stop on at Furrowbank, and she always does what David tells her. Rowley took her up eggs and butter from Long Willows. I think he’s the only one of us she likes. She thanked him and said he’d always been kind. Rowley, of course, is kind.”

  “There are people,” said Poirot, “for whom one has great sympathy—great pity, people who have too heavy a burden to bear. For Rosaleen Cloade I have great pity. If I could, I would help her. Even now, if she would listen—”

  With sudden resolution he got to his feet.

  “Come, Mademoiselle,” he said, “let us go up to Furrowbank.”

  “You want me to come with you?”

  “If you are prepared to be generous and understanding—”

  Lynn cried:

  “I am—indeed I am—”

  Thirteen

  It took them only about five minutes to reach Furrowbank. The drive wound up an incline through carefully massed banks of rhododendrons. No trouble or expense had been spared by Gordon Cloade to make Furrowbank a showplace.

  The parlourmaid who answered the front door looked surprised to see them and a little doubtful as to whether they could see Mrs. Cloade. Madam, she said, wasn’t up yet. However, she ushered them into the drawing room and went upstairs with Poirot’s message.

  Poirot looked round him. He was contrasting this room with Frances Cloade’s drawing room—the latter such an intimate room, so characteristic of its mistress. The drawing room at Furrowbank was strictly impersonal—speaking only of wealth tempered by good taste. Gordon Cloade had seen to the latter—everything in the room was of good quality and of artistic merit, but there was no sign of any selectiveness, no clue to the personal tastes of the room’s mistress. Rosaleen, it seemed, had not stamped upon the place any individuality of her own.