Poirot's Early Cases (26 page)

Ellie Henderson was beside him. Her eyes were dark and full of pain. ‘Did you know his heart was weak?’ she asked.

‘I guessed it…Mrs Clapperton talked of her own heart being affected, but she struck me as the type of woman who likes to be thought ill. Then I picked up a torn prescription with a very strong dose of digitalin in it. Digitalin is a heart medicine but it couldn’t be Mrs Clapperton’s because digitalin dilates the pupils of the eyes. I have never noticed such a phenomenon with her—but when I looked at his eyes I saw the signs at once.’

Ellie murmured: ‘So you thought—it might end—this way?’

‘The best way, don’t you think, mademoiselle?’ he said gently.

He saw the tears rise in her eyes. She said: ‘You’ve known. You’ve known all along…That I cared…But he didn’t do it for
me
…It was those girls—youth—it made him feel his slavery. He wanted to be free before it was too late…Yes, I’m sure that’s how it was…When did you guess—that it was he?’

‘His self-control was too perfect,’ said Poirot simply. ‘No matter how galling his wife’s conduct, it never seemed to touch him. That meant either that he was so used to it that it no longer stung him, or else—
eh bien
—I decided on the latter alternative…And I was right…

‘And then there was his insistence on his conjuring ability—the evening before the crime he pretended to give himself away. But a man like Clapperton doesn’t give himself away. There must be a reason. So long as people thought he had been a
conjuror
they weren’t likely to think of his having been a
ventriloquist
.’

‘And the voice we heard—Mrs Clapperton’s voice?’

‘One of the stewardesses had a voice not unlike hers.
I induced her to hide behind the stage and taught her the words to say.’

‘It was a trick—a cruel trick,’ cried out Ellie.

‘I do not approve of murder,’ said Hercule Poirot.

Hercule Poirot arranged his letters in a neat pile in front of him. He picked up the topmost letter, studied the address for a moment, then neatly slit the back of the envelope with a little paper-knife that he kept on the breakfast table for that express purpose and extracted the contents. Inside was yet another envelope, carefully sealed with purple wax and marked ‘Private and Confidential’.

Hercule Poirot’s eyebrows rose a little on his egg-shaped head. He murmured, ‘
Patience! Nous allons arriver!
’ and once more brought the little paper-knife into play. This time the envelope yielded a letter—written in a rather shaky and spiky handwriting. Several words were heavily underlined.

Hercule Poirot unfolded it and read. The letter was headed once again ‘Private and Confidential’. On the right-hand side was the address—Rosebank,
Charman’s Green, Bucks—and the date—March twenty-first.

Poirot read the letter through twice. Again his eyebrows rose slightly. Then he placed it on one side and proceeded to the next envelope in the pile.

At ten o’clock precisely he entered the room where Miss Lemon, his confidential secretary, sat awaiting her instructions for the day. Miss Lemon was forty-eight and of unprepossessing appearance. Her general effect was that of a lot of bones flung together at random. She had a passion for order almost equalling that of Poirot himself; and though capable of thinking, she never thought unless told to do so.

Poirot handed her the morning correspondence. ‘Have the goodness, mademoiselle, to write refusals couched in correct terms to all of these.’

Miss Lemon ran an eye over the various letters, scribbling in turn a hieroglyphic on each of them. These marks were legible to her alone and were in a code of her own: ‘Soft soap’; ‘slap in the face’; ‘purr purr’; ‘curt’; and so on. Having done this, she nodded and looked up for further instructions.

Poirot handed her Amelia Barrowby’s letter. She extracted it from its double envelope, read it through and looked up inquiringly.

‘Yes, M. Poirot?’ Her pencil hovered—ready—over her shorthand pad.

‘What is your opinion of that letter, Miss Lemon?’

With a slight frown Miss Lemon put down the pencil and read through the letter again.

The contents of a letter meant nothing to Miss Lemon except from the point of view of composing an adequate reply. Very occasionally her employer appealed to her human, as opposed to her official, capacities. It slightly annoyed Miss Lemon when he did so—she was very nearly the perfect machine, completely and gloriously uninterested in all human affairs. Her real passion in life was the perfection of a filing system beside which all other filing systems should sink into oblivion. She dreamed of such a system at night. Nevertheless, Miss Lemon was perfectly capable of intelligence on purely human matters, as Hercule Poirot well knew.

‘Well?’ he demanded.

‘Old lady,’ said Miss Lemon. ‘Got the wind up pretty badly.’

‘Ah! The wind rises in her, you think?’

Miss Lemon, who considered that Poirot had been long enough in Great Britain to understand its slang terms, did not reply. She took a brief look at the double envelope.

‘Very hush-hush,’ she said. ‘And tells you nothing at all.’

‘Yes,’ said Hercule Poirot. ‘I observed that.’

Miss Lemon’s hand hung once more hopefully
over the shorthand pad. This time Hercule Poirot responded.

‘Tell her I will do myself the honour to call upon her at any time she suggests, unless she prefers to consult me here. Do not type the letter—write it by hand.’

‘Yes, M. Poirot.’

Poirot produced more correspondence. ‘These are bills.’

Miss Lemon’s efficient hands sorted them quickly. ‘I’ll pay all but these two.’

‘Why those two? There is no error in them.’

‘They are firms you’ve only just begun to deal with. It looks bad to pay too promptly when you’ve just opened an account—looks as though you were working up to get some credit later on.’

‘Ah!’ murmured Poirot. ‘I bow to your superior knowledge of the British tradesman.’

‘There’s nothing much I don’t know about them,’ said Miss Lemon grimly.

The letter to Miss Amelia Barrowby was duly written and sent, but no reply was forthcoming. Perhaps, thought Hercule Poirot, the old lady had unravelled her mystery herself. Yet he felt a shade of surprise that
in that case she should not have written a courteous word to say that his services were no longer required.

It was five days later when Miss Lemon, after receiving her morning’s instructions, said, ‘That Miss Barrowby we wrote to—no wonder there’s been no answer. She’s dead.’

Hercule Poirot said very softly, ‘Ah—dead.’ It sounded not so much like a question as an answer.

Opening her handbag, Miss Lemon produced a newspaper cutting. ‘I saw it in the tube and tore it out.’

Just registering in his mind approval of the fact that, though Miss Lemon used the word ‘tore’, she had neatly cut the entry with scissors, Poirot read the announcement taken from the Births, Deaths and Marriages in the
Morning Post
: ‘On March 26th—suddenly—at Rosebank, Charman’s Green, Amelia Jan Barrowby, in her seventy-third year. No flowers, by request.’

Poirot read it over. He murmured under his breath, ‘Suddenly.’ Then he said briskly, ‘If you will be so obliging as to take a letter, Miss Lemon?’

The pencil hovered. Miss Lemon, her mind dwelling on the intricacies of the filing system, took down in rapid and correct shorthand:

‘Type this letter, please; and if it is posted at once, it should get to Charman’s Green tonight.’

On the following morning a letter in a black-edged envelope arrived by the second post:

Poirot smiled to himself. ‘No longer of importance…Ah—that is what we shall see.
En avant
—to Charman’s Green.’

Rosebank was a house that seemed likely to live up to its name, which is more than can be said for most houses of its class and character.

Hercule Poirot paused as he walked up the path to the front door and looked approvingly at the neatly planned beds on either side of him. Rose trees that promised a good harvest later in the year, and at present
daffodils, early tulips, blue hyacinths—the last bed was partly edged with shells.

Poirot murmured to himself, ‘How does it go, the English rhyme the children sing?

‘Not a row, perhaps,’ he considered, ‘but here is at least one pretty maid to make the little rhyme come right.’

The front door had opened and a neat little maid in cap and apron was looking somewhat dubiously at the spectacle of a heavily moustached foreign gentleman talking aloud to himself in the front garden. She was, as Poirot had noted, a very pretty little maid, with round blue eyes and rosy cheeks.

Poirot raised his hat with courtesy and addressed her: ‘Pardon, but does a Miss Amelia Barrowby live here?’

The little maid gasped and her eyes grew rounder. ‘Oh, sir, didn’t you know? She’s dead. Ever so sudden it was. Tuesday night.’

She hesitated, divided between two strong instincts: the first, distrust of a foreigner; the second, the pleasurable
enjoyment of her class in dwelling on the subject of illness and death.

‘You amaze me,’ said Hercule Poirot, not very truthfully. ‘I had an appointment with the lady for today. However, I can perhaps see the other lady who lives here.’

The little maid seemed slightly doubtful. ‘The mistress? Well, you could see her, perhaps, but I don’t know whether she’ll be seeing anyone or not.’

‘She will see me,’ said Poirot, and handed her a card.

The authority of his tone had its effect. The rosy-cheeked maid fell back and ushered Poirot into a sitting-room on the right of the hall. Then, card in hand, she departed to summon her mistress.

Hercule Poirot looked round him. The room was a perfectly conventional drawing-room—oatmeal-coloured paper with a frieze round the top, indeterminate cretonnes, rose-coloured cushions and curtains, a good many china knick-knacks and ornaments. There was nothing in the room that stood out, that announced a definite personality.

Suddenly Poirot, who was very sensitive, felt eyes watching him. He wheeled round. A girl was standing in the entrance of the french window—a small, sallow girl, with very black hair and suspicious eyes.

She came in, and as Poirot made a little bow she burst out abruptly, ‘Why have you come?’

Poirot did not reply. He merely raised his eyebrows.

‘You are not a lawyer—no?’ Her English was good, but not for a minute would anyone have taken her to be English.

‘Why should I be a lawyer, mademoiselle?’

The girl stared at him sullenly. ‘I thought you might be. I thought you had come perhaps to say that she did not know what she was doing. I have heard of such things—the not due influence; that is what they call it, no? But that is not right. She wanted me to have the money, and I shall have it. If it is needful I shall have a lawyer of my own. The money is mine. She wrote it down so, and so it shall be.’ She looked ugly, her chin thrust out, her eyes gleaming.

The door opened and a tall woman entered and said, ‘Katrina.’

The girl shrank, flushed, muttered something and went out through the window.

Poirot turned to face the newcomer who had so effectually dealt with the situation by uttering a single word. There had been authority in her voice, and contempt and a shade of well-bred irony. He realized at once that this was the owner of the house, Mary Delafontaine.

‘M. Poirot? I wrote to you. You cannot have received my letter.’

‘Alas, I have been away from London.’

‘Oh, I see; that explains it. I must introduce myself. My name is Delafontaine. This is my husband. Miss Barrowby was my aunt.’

Mr Delafontaine had entered so quietly that his arrival had passed unnoticed. He was a tall man with grizzled hair and an indeterminate manner. He had a nervous way of fingering his chin. He looked often towards his wife, and it was plain that he expected her to take the lead in any conversation.

‘I must regret that I intrude in the midst of your bereavement,’ said Hercule Poirot.

‘I quite realize that it is not your fault,’ said Mrs Delafontaine. ‘My aunt died on Tuesday evening. It was quite unexpected.’

‘Most unexpected,’ said Mr Delafontaine. ‘Great blow.’ His eyes watched the window where the foreign girl had disappeared.

‘I apologize,’ said Hercule Poirot. ‘And I withdraw.’ He moved a step towards the door.

‘Half a sec,’ said Mr Delafontaine. ‘You—er—had an appointment with Aunt Amelia, you say?’

‘
Parfaitement
.’

‘Perhaps you will tell us about it,’ said his wife. ‘If there is anything we can do—’

‘It was of a private nature,’ said Poirot. ‘I am a detective,’ he added simply.

Mr Delafontaine knocked over a little china figure he was handling. His wife looked puzzled.

‘A detective? And you had an appointment with Auntie? But how extraordinary!’ She stared at him. ‘Can’t you tell us a little more, M. Poirot? It—it seems quite fantastic.’

Poirot was silent for a moment. He chose his words with care.

‘It is difficult for me, madame, to know what to do.’

‘Look here,’ said Mr Delafontaine. ‘She didn’t mention Russians, did she?’

‘Russians?’

‘Yes, you know—Bolshies, Reds, all that sort of thing.’

‘Don’t be absurd, Henry,’ said his wife.

Mr Delafontaine collapsed. ‘Sorry—sorry—I just wondered.’

Mary Delafontaine looked frankly at Poirot. Her eyes were very blue—the colour of forget-me-nots. ‘If you can tell us anything, M. Poirot, I should be glad if you would do so. I can assure you that I have a—a reason for asking.’

Mr Delafontaine looked alarmed. ‘Be careful, old girl—you know there may be nothing in it.’

Again his wife quelled him with a glance. ‘Well, M. Poirot?’

Slowly, gravely, Hercule Poirot shook his head. He shook it with visible regret, but he shook it. ‘At present, madame,’ he said, ‘I fear I must say nothing.’