CHAPTER 14

Admitted to Apple Trees, Hercule Poirot was shown into the drawing-room and told that Mrs Drake would not be long.

In passing through the hall he heard the hum of female voices behind what he took to be the dining-room door.

Poirot crossed to the drawing-room window and surveyed the neat and pleasant garden. Well laid out, kept studiously in control. Rampant autumn michaelmas daisies still survived, tied up severely to sticks; chrysanthemums had not yet relinquished life. There were still a persistent rose or two scorning the approach of winter.

Poirot could discern no sign as yet of the preliminary activities of a landscape gardener. All was care and convention. He wondered if Mrs Drake had been one too many for Michael Garfield. He had spread his lures in vain. It showed every sign of remaining a splendidly kept suburban garden.

The door opened.

‘I am sorry to have kept you waiting, Monsieur Poirot,’ said Mrs Drake.

Outside in the hall there was a diminishing hum of voices as various people took their leave and departed.

‘It’s our church Christmas fete,’ explained Mrs Drake. ‘A Committee Meeting for arrangements for it and all the rest of it. These things always go on much longer than they ought to, of course. Somebody always objects to something, or has a good idea—the good idea usually being a perfectly impossible one.’

There was a slight acerbity in her tone. Poirot could well imagine that Rowena Drake would put things down as quite absurd, firmly and definitely. He could understand well enough from remarks he had heard from Spence’s sister, from hints of what other people had said and from various other sources, that Rowena Drake was that dominant type of personality whom everyone expects to run the show, and whom nobody has much affection for while she is doing it. He could imagine, too, that her conscientiousness had not been the kind to be appreciated by an elderly relative who was herself of the same type. Mrs Llewellyn-Smythe, he gathered, had come here to live so as to be near to her nephew and his wife, and that the wife had readily undertaken the supervision and care of her husband’s aunt as far as she could do so without actually living in the house. Mrs Llewellyn-Smythe had probably acknowledged in her own mind that she owed a great deal to Rowena, and had at the same time resented what she had no doubt thought of as her bossy ways.

‘Well, they’ve all gone now,’ said Rowena Drake, hearing the final shutting of the hall door. ‘Now what can I do for you? Something more about that dreadful party? I wish I’d never had it here. But no other house really seemed suitable.

Is Mrs Oliver still staying with Judith Butler?’

‘Yes. She is, I believe, returning to London in a day or two. You had not met her before?’

‘No. I love her books.’

‘She is, I believe, considered a very good writer,’ said Poirot.

‘Oh well, she is a good writer. No doubt of that. She’s a very amusing person too. Has she any ideas herself—I mean about who might have done this dreadful thing?’

‘I think not. And you, Madame?’

‘I’ve told you already. I’ve no idea whatever.’

‘You would perhaps say so, and yet—you might, might you not, have, perhaps, what amounts to a very good idea, but only an idea. A half-formed idea. A possible idea.’

‘Why should you think that?’

She looked at him curiously.

‘You might have seen something—something quite small and unimportant but which on reflection might seem more significant to you, perhaps, than it had done at first.’

‘You must have something in your mind, Monsieur Poirot, some definite incident.’

‘Well, I admit it. It is because of what someone said to me.’

‘Indeed! And who was that?’

‘A Miss Whittaker. A school-teacher.’

‘Oh yes, of course. Elizabeth Whittaker. She’s the mathematics mistress, isn’t she, at The Elms? She was at the party, I remember. Did she see something?’

‘It was not so much that she saw something as she had the idea that you might have seen something.’

Mrs Drake looked surprised and shook her head.

‘I can’t think of anything I can possibly have seen,’ said Rowena Drake, ‘but one never knows.’

‘It had to do with a vase,’ said Poirot. ‘A vase of flowers.’

‘A vase of flowers?’ Rowena Drake looked puzzled. Then her brow cleared. ‘Oh, of course, I know. Yes, there was a big vase of autumn leaves and chrysanthemums on the table in the angle of the stairs. A very nice glass vase. One of my wedding presents. The leaves seemed to be drooping and so did one or two of the flowers. I remember noticing it as I passed through the hall—it was near the end of the party, I think, by then, but I’m not sure—I wondered why it looked like that, and I went up and dipped my fingers into it and found that some idiot must have forgotten to put any water into it after arranging it. It made me very angry. So I took it into the bathroom and filled it up. But what could I have seen in that bathroom? There was nobody in it. I am quite sure of that. I think one or two of the older girls and boys had done a little harmless, what the Americans call “necking”, there during the course of the party, but there was certainly nobody when I went into it with the vase.’

‘No, no, I do not mean that,’ said Poirot. ‘But I understood that there was an accident. That the vase slipped out of your hand and it fell to the hall below and was shattered to pieces.’

‘Oh yes,’ said Rowena. ‘Broken to smithereens. I was rather upset about it because as I’ve said, it had been one of our wedding presents, and it was really a perfect flower vase, heavy enough to hold big autumn bouquets and things like that. It was very stupid of me. My fingers just slipped. It went out of my hand and crashed on the hall floor below. Elizabeth Whittaker was standing there. She helped me to pick up the pieces and sweep some of the broken glass out of the way in case someone stepped on it. We just swept it into a corner by the Grandfather clock to be cleared up later.’

She looked inquiringly at Poirot.

‘Is that the incident you mean?’ she asked.

‘Yes,’ said Poirot. ‘Miss Whittaker wondered, I think, how you had come to drop the vase. She thought that something perhaps had startled you.’

‘Startled me?’ Rowena Drake looked at him, then frowned as she tried to think again. ‘No, I don’t think I was startled, anyway. It was just one of those ways things do slip out of your hands. Sometimes when you’re washing up. I think, really, it’s a result of being tired. I was pretty tired by that time, what with the preparations for the party and running the party and all the rest of it. It went very well, I must say. I think it was—oh, just one of those clumsy actions that you can’t help when you’re tired.’

‘There was nothing—you are sure—that startled you? Something unexpected that you saw?’

‘Saw? Where? In the hall below? I didn’t see anything in the hall below. It was empty at the moment because everyone was in at the Snapdragon excepting, of course, for Miss Whittaker. And I don’t think I even noticed her until she came forward to help when I ran down.’

‘Did you see someone, perhaps, leaving the library door?’

‘The library door… I see what you mean. Yes, I could have seen that.’ She paused for quite a long time, then she looked at Poirot with a very straight, firm glance. ‘I didn’t see anyone leave the library,’ she said. ‘Nobody at all…’

He wondered. The way in which she said it was what aroused the belief in his mind that she was not speaking the truth, that instead she had seen someone or something, perhaps the door just opening a little, a mere glance perhaps of a figure inside. But she was quite firm in her denial. Why, he wondered, had she been so firm? Because the person she had seen was a person she did not want to believe for one moment had had anything to do with the crime committed on the other side of the door? Someone she cared about, or someone—which seemed more likely, he thought—someone whom she wished to protect. Someone, perhaps, who had not long passed beyond childhood, someone whom she might feel was not truly conscious of the awful thing they had just done.

He thought her a hard creature but a person of integrity. He thought that she was, like many women of the same type, women who were often magistrates, or who ran councils or charities, or interested themselves in what used to be called ‘good works.’ Women who had an inordinate belief in extenuating circumstances, who were ready, strangely enough, to make excuses for the young criminal. An adolescent boy, a mentally retarded girl. Someone perhaps who had already been—what is the phrase—‘in care.’ If that had been the type of person she had seen coming out of the library, then he thought it possible that Rowena Drake’s protective instinct might have come into play. It was not unknown in the present age for children to commit crimes, quite young children. Children of seven, of nine and so on, and it was often difficult to know how to dispose of these natural, it seemed, young criminals who came before the juvenile courts. Excuses had to be brought for them. Broken homes. Negligent and unsuitable parents. But the people who spoke the most vehemently for them, the people who sought to bring forth every excuse for them, were usually the type of Rowena Drake. A stern and censorious woman, except in such cases.

For himself, Poirot did not agree. He was a man who thought first always of justice. He was suspicious, had always been suspicious, of mercy—too much mercy, that is to say. Too much mercy, as he knew from former experience both in Belgium and this country, often resulted in further crimes which were fatal to innocent victims who need not have been victims if justice had been put first and mercy second.

‘I see,’ said Poirot. ‘I see.’

‘You don’t think it’s possible that Miss Whittaker might have seen someone go into the library?’ suggested Mrs Drake.

Poirot was interested.

‘Ah, you think that that might have been so?’

‘It seemed to me merely a possibility. She might have caught sight of someone going in through the library, say, perhaps five minutes or so earlier, and then, when I dropped the vase it might have suggested to her that I could have caught a glimpse of the same person. That I might have seen who it was. Perhaps she doesn’t like to say anything that might suggest, unfairly perhaps, some person whom she had perhaps only half glimpsed—not enough to be sure of. Some back view perhaps of a child, or a young boy.’

‘You think, do you not, Madame, that it was—shall we say, a child—a boy or girl, a mere child, or a young adolescent? You think it was not any definite one of these but, shall we say, you think that that is the most likely type to have committed the crime we are discussing?’

She considered the point thoughtfully, turning it over in her mind.

‘Yes,’ she said at last, ‘I suppose I do. I haven’t thought it out. It seems to me that crimes are so often associated nowadays with the young. People who don’t really know quite what they are doing, who want silly revenges, who have an instinct for destruction. Even the people who wreck telephone boxes, or who slash the tyres of cars, do all sorts of things just to hurt people, just because they hate—not anyone in particular, but the whole world. It’s a sort of symptom of this age. So I suppose when one comes across something like a child drowned at a party for no reason really, one does assume that it’s someone who is not yet fully responsible for their actions. Don’t you agree with me that—that—well, that that is certainly the most likely possibility here?’

‘The police, I think, share your point of view—or did share it.’

‘Well, they should know. We have a very good class of policeman in this district. They’ve done well in several crimes. They are painstaking and they never give up. I think probably they will solve this murder, though I don’t think it will happen very quickly. These things seem to take a long time. A long time of patient gathering of evidence.’

‘The evidence in this case will not be very easy to gather, Madame.’

‘No, I suppose it won’t. When my husband was killed—He was a cripple, you know. He was crossing the road and a car ran over him and knocked him down. They never found the person who was responsible. As you know, my husband—or perhaps you don’t know—my husband was a polio victim. He was partially paralyzed as a result of polio, six years ago. His condition had improved, but he was still crippled, and it would be difficult for him to get out of the way if a car bore down upon him quickly. I almost felt that I had been to blame, though he always insisted on going out without me or without anyone with him, because he would have resented very much being in the care of a nurse, or a wife who took the part of a nurse, and he was always careful before crossing a road. Still, one does blame oneself when accidents happen.’

‘That came on top of the death of your aunt?’

‘No. She died not long afterwards. Everything seems to come at once, doesn’t it?’

‘That is very true,’ said Hercule Poirot. He went on: ‘The police were not able to trace the car that ran down your husband?’

‘It was a Grasshopper Mark 7, I believe. Every third car you notice on the road is a Grasshopper Mark 7—or was then. It’s the most popular car on the market, they tell me. They believe it was pinched from the Market Place in Medchester. A car park there. It belonged to a Mr Waterhouse, an elderly seed merchant in Medchester. Mr Waterhouse was a slow and careful driver. It was certainly not he who caused the accident. It was clearly one of those cases where irresponsible young men help themselves to cars. Such careless, or should I say such callous young men, should be treated, one sometimes feels, more severely than they are now.’

‘A long gaol sentence, perhaps. Merely to be fined, and the fine paid by indulgent relatives, makes little impression.’

‘One has to remember,’ said Rowena Drake, ‘that there are young people at an age when it is vital that they should continue with their studies if they are to have the chance of doing well in life.’

‘The sacred cow of education,’ said Hercule Poirot. ‘That is a phrase I have heard uttered,’ he added quickly, ‘by people—well, should I say people who ought to know. People who themselves hold academic posts of some seniority.’

‘They do not perhaps make enough allowances for youth, for a bad bringing up. Broken homes.’

‘So you think they need something other than gaol sentences?’

‘Proper remedial treatment,’ said Rowena Drake firmly.

‘And that will make—(another old-fashioned proverb)—a silk purse out of a sow’s ear? You do not believe in the maxim “the fate of every man have we bound about his neck”?’

Mrs Drake looked extremely doubtful and slightly displeased.

‘An Islamic saying. I believe,’ said Poirot.

Mrs Drake looked unimpressed.

‘I hope,’ she said, ‘we do not take our ideas—or perhaps I should say our ideals—from the Middle East.’

‘One must accept facts,’ said Poirot, ‘and a fact that is expressed by modern biologists—Western biologists—’ he hastened to add, ‘—seems to suggest very strongly that the root of a person’s actions lies in his genetic make-up. That a murderer of twenty-four was a murderer in potential at two or three or four years old. Or of course a mathematician or a musical genius.’

‘We are not discussing murderers,’ said Mrs Drake. ‘My husband died as a result of an accident. An accident caused by a careless and badly adjusted personality. Whoever the boy or young man was, there is always the hope of eventual adjustment to a belief and acceptance that it is a duty to consider others, to be taught to feel an abhorrence if you have taken life unawares, simply out of what may be described as criminal carelessness that was not really criminal in intent?’

‘You are quite sure, therefore, that it was not criminal in intent?’

‘I should doubt it very much.’ Mrs Drake looked slightly surprised. ‘I do not think that the police ever seriously considered that possibility. I certainly did not. It was an accident. A very tragic accident which altered the pattern of many lives, including my own.’

‘You say we are not discussing murderers,’ said Poirot. ‘But in the case of Joyce that is just what we are discussing. There was no accident about that. Deliberate hands pushed that child’s head down into water, holding her there till death occurred. Deliberate intent.’

‘I know. I know. It’s terrible. I don’t like to think of it, to be reminded of it.’

She got up, moving about restlessly. Poirot pushed on relentlessly.

‘We are still presented with a choice there. We still have to find the motive involved.’

‘It seems to me that such a crime must have been quite motiveless.’

‘You mean committed by someone mentally disturbed to the extent of enjoying killing someone? Presumably killing someone young and immature.’

‘One does hear of such cases. What is the original cause of them is difficult to find out. Even psychiatrists do not agree.’

‘You refuse to accept a simpler explanation?’

She looked puzzled. ‘Simpler?’

‘Someone not mentally disturbed, not a possible case for psychiatrists to disagree over. Somebody perhaps who just wanted to be safe.’

‘Safe? Oh, you mean—’

‘The girl had boasted that same day, some hours previously, that she had seen someone commit a murder.’

‘Joyce,’ said Mrs Drake, with calm certainty, ‘was really a very silly little girl. Not, I am afraid, always very truthful.’

‘So everyone has told me,’ said Hercule Poirot. ‘I am beginning to believe, you know, that what everybody has told me must be right,’ he added with a sigh. ‘It usually is.’

He rose to his feet, adopting a different manner.

‘I must apologize, Madame. I have talked of painful things to you, things that do not truly concern me here. But it seemed from what Miss Whittaker told me—’

‘Why don’t you find out more from her?’

‘You mean—?’

‘She is a teacher. She knows, much better than I can, what potentialities (as you have called them) exist amongst the children she teaches.’

She paused and then said:

‘Miss Emlyn, too.’

‘The head-mistress?’ Poirot looked surprised.

‘Yes. She knows things. I mean, she is a natural psychologist. You said I might have ideas—half-formed ones—as to who killed Joyce. I haven’t—but I think Miss Emlyn might.’

‘This is interesting…’

‘I don’t mean has evidence. I mean she just knows. She could tell you—but I don’t think she will.’

‘I begin to see,’ said Poirot, ‘that I have still a long way to go. People know things—but they will not tell them to me.’ He looked thoughtfully at Rowena Drake.

‘Your aunt, Mrs Llewellyn-Smythe, had an au pair girl who looked after her, a foreign girl.’

‘You seem to have got hold of all the local gossip.’ Rowena spoke dryly. ‘Yes, that is so. She left here rather suddenly soon after my aunt’s death.’

‘For good reasons, it would seem.’

‘I don’t know whether it’s libel or slander to say so—but there seems no doubt that she forged a codicil to my aunt’s Will or that someone helped her to do so.’

‘Someone?’

‘She was friendly with a young man who worked in a solicitor’s office in Medchester. He had been mixed up in a forgery case before. The case never came to court because the girl disappeared. She realized the Will would not be admitted to probate, and that there was going to be a court case. She left the neighbourhood and has never been heard of since.’

‘She too came, I have heard, from a broken home,’ said Poirot.

Rowena Drake looked at him sharply but he was smiling amiably.

‘Thank you for all you have told me, Madame,’ he said.

When Poirot had left the house, he went for a short walk along a turning off the main road which was labelled ‘Helpsly Cemetery Road.’ The cemetery in question did not take him long to reach. It was at most ten minutes’ walk. It was obviously a cemetery that had been made in the last ten years, presumably to cope with the rising importance of woodleigh as a residential entity. The church, a church of reasonable size dating from some two or three centuries back, had had a very small enclosure round it already well filled. So the new cemetery had come into being with a footpath connecting it across two fields. It was, Poirot thought, a business-like, modern cemetery with appropriate sentiments on marble or granite slabs; it had urns, chippings, small plantations of bushes or flowers. No interesting old epitaphs or inscriptions. Nothing much for an antiquarian. Cleaned, neat, tidy and with suitable sentiments expressed.

He came to a halt to read a tablet erected on a grave contemporary with several others near it, all dating within two or three years back. It bore a simple inscription:

Sacred to the Memory of Hugo Edmund Drake, beloved husband of Rowena Arabella Drake, who departed this life March the 20th 19 —

‘He giveth his beloved sleep’

It occurred to Poirot, fresh from the impact of the dynamic Rowena Drake, that perhaps sleep might have come in welcome guise to the late Mr Drake.

An alabaster urn had been fixed in position there and contained the remains of flowers. An elderly gardener, obviously employed to tend the graves of good citizens departed this life, approached Poirot in the pleasurable hopes of a few minutes’ conversation while he laid his hoe and his broom aside.

‘Stranger in these parts, I think,’ he said, ‘aren’t you, sir?’

‘It is very true,’ said Poirot. ‘I am a stranger with you as were my fathers before me.’

‘Ah, aye. We’ve got that text somewhere or summat very like it. Over down the other corner, it is.’ He went on, ‘He was a nice gentleman, he were, Mr Drake. A cripple, you know. He had that infant paralysis, as they call it, though as often as not it isn’t infants as suffer from it. It’s grown-ups. Men and women too. My wife, she had an aunt, who caught it in Spain, she did. Went there with a tour, she did, and bathed somewhere in some river. And they said afterwards as it was the water infection, but I don’t think they know much. Doctors don’t, if you ask me. Still, it’s made a lot of difference nowadays. All this inoculation they give the children, and that. Not nearly as many cases as there were. Yes, he were a nice gentleman and didn’t complain, though he took it hard, being a cripple, I mean. He’d been a good sportsman, he had, in his time. Used to bat for us here in the village team. Many a six he’s hit to the boundary. Yes, he were a nice gentleman.’

‘He died of an accident, did he not?’

‘That’s right. Crossing the road, towards twilight this was. One of these cars come along, a couple of these young thugs in it with beards growing up to their ears. That’s what they say. Didn’t stop either. Went on. Never looked to see. Abandoned the car somewhere in a car park twenty miles away. Wasn’t’t their own car either. Pinched from a car park somewhere. Ah, it’s terrible, a lot of those accidents nowadays. And the police often can’t do anything about them. Very devoted to him, his wife was. Took it very hard, she did. She comes here, nearly every week, brings flowers and puts them here. Yes, they were a very devoted couple. If you ask me, she won’t stay here much longer.’

‘Really? But she has a very nice house here.’

‘Yes, oh yes. And she does a lot in the village, you know. All these things—women’s institutes and teas and various societies and all the rest of it. Runs a lot of things, she does. Runs a bit too many for some people. Bossy, you know. Bossy and interfering, some people say. But the vicar relies on her. She starts things. women’s activities and all the rest of it. Gets up tours and outings. Ah yes. Often thought myself, though I wouldn’t like to say it to my wife, that all these good works as ladies does, doesn’t make you any fonder of the ladies themselves. Always know best, they do. Always telling you what you should do and what you shouldn’t do. No freedom. Not much freedom anywhere nowadays.’

‘Yet you think Mrs Drake may leave here?’

‘I shouldn’t wonder if she didn’t go away and live somewhere abroad. They liked being abroad, used to go there for holidays.’

‘Why do you think she wants to leave here?’

A sudden rather roguish smile appeared on the old man’s face.

‘Well, I’d say, you know, that she’s done all she can do here. To put it scriptural, she needs another vineyard to work in. She needs more good works. Aren’t no more good works to be done round here. She’s done all there is, and even more than there need be, so some think. Yes.’

‘She needs a new field in which to labour?’ suggested Poirot.

‘You’ve hit it. Better settle somewhere else where she can put a lot of things right and bully a lot of other people. She’d got us where she wants us here and there’s not much more for her to do.’

‘It may be,’ said Poirot.

‘Hasn’t even got her husband to look after. She looked after him a good few years. That gave her a kind of object in life, as you might say. What with that and a lot of outside activities, she could be busy all the time. She’s the type likes being busy all the time. And she’s no children, more’s the pity. So it’s my view as she’ll start all over again somewhere else.’

‘You may have something there. Where would she go?’

‘I couldn’t say as to that. One of these Riviery places, maybe—or there’s them as goes to Spain or Portugal. Or Greece—I’ve heard her speak of Greece—Islands. Mrs Butler, she’s been to Greece on one of them tours. Hellenic, they call them, which sounds more like fire and brimstone to me.’

Poirot smiled.

‘The isles of Greece,’ he murmured. Then he asked: ‘Do you like her?’

‘Mrs Drake? I wouldn’t say I exactly like her. She’s a good woman. Does her duty to her neighbour and all that—but she’ll always need a power of neighbours to do her duty to—and if you ask me, nobody really likes people who are always doing their duty. Tells me how to prune my roses which I know well enough myself. Always at me to grow some new-fangled kind of vegetable. Cabbage is good enough for me, and I’m sticking to cabbage.’

Poirot smiled. He said, ‘I must be on my way. Can you tell me where Nicholas Ransom and Desmond Holland live?’

‘Past the church, third house on the left. They board with Mrs Brand, go into Medchester Technical every day to study. They’ll be home by now.’

He gave Poirot an interested glance.

‘So that’s the way your mind is working, is it? There’s some already as thinks the same.’

‘No, I think nothing as yet. But they were among those present—that is all.’

As he took leave and walked away, he mused, ‘Among those present—I have come nearly to the end of my list.’