CHAPTER 15

Two pairs of eyes looked at Poirot uneasily.

‘I don’t see what else we can tell you. We’ve both been interviewed by the police, M. Poirot.’

Poirot looked from one boy to the other. They would not have described themselves as boys; their manner was carefully adult. So much so that if one shut one’s eyes, their conversation could have passed as that of elderly clubmen. Nicholas was eighteen. Desmond was sixteen.

‘To oblige a friend, I make my inquiries of those present on a certain occasion. Not the Hallowe’en party itself—the preparations for that party. You were both active in these.’

‘Yes, we were.’

‘So far,’ Poirot said, ‘I have interviewed cleaning women, I have had the benefit of police views, of talks to a doctor— the doctor who examined the body first—have talked to a school-teacher who was present, to the headmistress of the school, to distraught relatives, have heard much of the village gossip—By the way, I understand you have a local witch here?’

The two young men confronting him both laughed.

‘You mean Mother Goodbody. Yes, she came to the party and played the part of the witch.’

‘I have come now,’ said Poirot, ‘to the younger generation, to those of acute eyesight and acute hearing and who have up-to-date scientific knowledge and shrewd philosophy. I am eager—very eager—to hear your views on this matter.’

Eighteen and sixteen, he thought to himself, looking at the two boys confronting him. Youths to the police, boys to him, adolescents to newspaper reporters. Call them what you will. Products of today. Neither of them, he judged, at all stupid, even if they were not quite of the high mentality that he had just suggested to them by way of a flattering sop to start the conversation . They had been at the party. They had also been there earlier in the day to do helpful offices for Mrs Drake.

They had climbed up step-ladders, they had placed yellow pumpkins in strategic positions, they had done a little electrical work on fairy lights, one or other of them had produced some clever effects in a nice batch of phoney photographs of possible husbands as imagined hopefully by teenage girls. They were also, incidentally, of the right age to be in the forefront of suspects in the mind of Inspector Raglan and, it seemed, in the view of an elderly gardener. The percentage of murders committed by this group had been increasing in the last few years. Not that Poirot inclined to that particular suspicion himself, but anything was possible. It was even possible that the killing which had occurred two or three years ago might have been committed by a boy, youth, or adolescent of fourteen or twelve years of age. Such cases had occurred in recent newspaper reports.

Keeping all these possibilities in mind he pushed them, as it were, behind a curtain for the moment, and concentrated instead on his own appraisement of these two, their looks, their clothes, their manner, their voices and so on and so forth, in the Hercule Poirot manner, masked behind a foreign shield of flattering words and much increased foreign mannerisms, so that they themselves should feel agreeably contemptuous of him, though hiding that under politeness and good manners. For both of them had excellent manners. Nicholas, the eighteen-year-old, was good-looking, wearing sideburns, hair that grew fairly far down his neck, and a rather funereal outfit of black. Not as a mourning for the recent tragedy, but what was obviously his personal taste in modern clothes. The younger one was wearing a rose- coloured velvet coat, mauve trousers and a kind of frilled shirting. They both obviously spent a good deal of money on their clothes which were certainly not purchased locally and were probably paid for by themselves and not by their parents or guardians.

Desmond’s hair was ginger-coloured and there was a good deal of fluffy profusion about it.

‘You were there in the morning or afternoon of the party, I understand, helping with the preparations for it?’

‘Early afternoon,’ corrected Nicholas.

‘What sort of preparations were you helping with? I have heard of preparations from several people, but I am not quite clear. They don’t all agree.’

‘A good deal of the lighting, for one thing.’

‘Getting up on steps for things that had to be put high up.’

‘I understand there were some very good photographic results too.’

Desmond immediately dipped into his pocket and took out a folder from which he proudly brought certain cards.

‘We faked up these beforehand,’ he said. ‘Husbands for the girls,’ he explained. ‘They’re all alike, birds are. They all want something up-to-date. Not a bad assortment, are they?’

He handed a few specimens to Poirot who looked with interest at a rather fuzzy reproduction of a ginger-bearded young man and another young man with an aureole of hair, a third one whose hair came to his knees almost, and there were a few assorted whiskers, and other facial adornments.

‘Made ’em pretty well all different. It wasn’t bad, was it?’

‘You had models, I suppose?’

‘Oh, they’re all ourselves. Just make-up, you know. Nick and I got ’em done. Some Nick took of me and some I took of him. Just varied what you might call the hair motif.’

‘Very clever,’ said Poirot.

‘We kept ’em a bit out of focus, you know, so that they’d look more like spirit pictures, as you might say.’

The other boy said:

‘Mrs Drake was very pleased with them. She congratulated us. They made her laugh too. It was mostly electrical work we did at the house. You know, fitting up a light or two so that when the girls sat with the mirror one or other of us could take up a position, you’d only to bob up over a screen and the girl would see a face in the mirror with, mind you, the right kind of hair. Beard or whiskers or something or other.’

‘Did they know it was you and your friend?’

‘Oh, I don’t think so for a moment. Not at the party, they didn’t. They knew we had been helping at the house with some things, but I don’t think they recognized us in the mirrors. Weren’t smart enough, I should say. Besides, we’d got sort of an instant make-up to change the image. First me, then Nicholas. The girls squeaked and shrieked. Damned funny.’

‘And the people who were there in the afternoon? I do not ask you to remember who was at the party.’

‘At the party, there must have been about thirty, I suppose, knocking about. In the afternoon there was Mrs Drake, of course, and Mrs Butler. One of the schoolteachers, Whittaker I think her name is. Mrs Flatterbut or some name like that. She’s the organist’s sister or wife. Dr Ferguson’s dispenser, Miss Lee; it’s her afternoon off and she came along and helped too and some of the kids came to make themselves useful if they could. Not that I think they were very useful. The girls just hung about and giggled.’

‘Ah yes. Do you remember what girls there were there?’

‘Well, the Reynolds were there. Poor old Joyce, of course. The one who got done in and her elder sister Ann. Frightful girl. Puts no end of side on. Thinks she’s terribly clever. Quite sure she’s going to pass all her “A” levels. And the small kid, Leopold, he’s awful,’ said Desmond. ‘He’s a sneak. He eavesdrops. Tells tales. Real nasty bit of goods. And there was Beatrice Ardley and Cathie Grant, who is dim as they make and a couple of useful women, of course. Cleaning women, I mean. And the authoress woman—the one who brought you down here.’

‘Any men?’

‘Oh, the vicar looked in if you count him. Nice old boy, rather dim. And the new curate. He stammers when he’s nervous. Hasn’t been here long. That’s all I can think of now.’

‘And then I understand you heard this girl—Joyce Reynolds —saying something about having seen a murder committed.’

‘I never heard that,’ said Desmond. ‘Did she?’

‘Oh, they’re saying so,’ said Nicholas. ‘I didn’t hear her, I suppose I wasn’t in the room when she said it. Where was she—when she said that, I mean?’

‘In the drawing-room.’

‘Yes, well, most of the people were in there unless they were doing something special. Of course Nick and I,’ said Desmond, ‘were mostly in the room where the girls were going to look for their true loves in mirrors. Fixing up wires and various things like that. Or else we were out on the stairs fixing fairy lights. We were in the drawing-room once or twice putting the pumpkins up and hanging up one or two that had been hollowed out to hold lights in them. But I didn’t hear anything of that kind when we were there. What about you, Nick?’

‘I didn’t,’ said Nick. He added with some interest, ‘Did Joyce really say that she’d seen a murder committed? Jolly interesting, you know, if she did, isn’t it?’

‘Why is it so interesting?’ asked Desmond.

‘Well, it’s E.S.P., isn’t it? I mean there you are. She saw a murder committed and within an hour or two she herself was murdered. I suppose she had a sort of vision of it. Makes you think a bit. You know these last experiments they’ve been having seems as though there is something you can do to help it by getting an electrode, or something of that kind, fixed up to your jugular vein. I’ve read about it somewhere.’

‘They’ve never got very far with this E.S.P. stuff,’ said Nicholas, scornfully. ‘People sit in different rooms looking at cards in a pack or words with squares and geometrical figures on them. But they never see the right things, or hardly ever.’

‘Well, you’ve got to be pretty young to do it. Adolescents are much better than older people.’

Hercule Poirot, who had no wish to listen to this high- level scientific discussion, broke in.

‘As far as you can remember, nothing occurred during your presence in the house which seemed to you sinister or significant in any way. Something which probably nobody else would have noticed, but which might have come to your attention.’

Nicholas and Desmond frowned hard, obviously racking their brains to produce some incident of importance.

‘No, it was just a lot of clacking and arranging and doing things.’

‘Have you any theories yourself?’

Poirot addressed himself to Nicholas.

‘What, theories as to who did Joyce in?’

‘Yes. I mean something that you might have noticed that could lead you to a suspicion on perhaps purely psychological grounds.’

‘Yes, I can see what you mean. There might be something in that.’

‘Whittaker for my money,’ said Desmond, breaking into Nicholas’s absorption in thought.

‘The school-mistress?’ asked Poirot.

‘Yes. Real old spinster, you know. Sex starved. And all that teaching, bottled up among a lot of women. You remember, one of the teachers got strangled a year or two ago. She was a bit queer, they say.’

‘Lesbian?’ asked Nicholas, in a man of the world voice.

‘I shouldn’t wonder. D’you remember Nora Ambrose, the girl she lived with? She wasn’t a bad looker. She had a boy friend or two, so they said, and the girl she lived with got mad with her about it. Someone said she was an unmarried mother. She was away for two terms with some illness and then came back. They’d say anything in this nest of gossip.’

‘Well, anyway, Whittaker was in the drawing-room most of the morning. She probably heard what Joyce said. Might have put it into her head, mightn’t it?

‘Look here,’ said Nicholas, ‘supposing Whittaker—what age is she, do you think? Forty odd? Getting on for fifty— Women do go a bit queer at that age.’

They both looked at Poirot with the air of contented dogs who have retrieved something useful which master has asked for.

‘I bet Miss Emlyn knows if it is so. There’s not much she doesn’t know, about what goes on in her school.’

‘Wouldn’t she say?’

‘Perhaps she feels she has to be loyal and shield her.’

‘Oh, I don’t think she’d do that. If she thought Elizabeth Whittaker was going off her head, well then, I mean, a lot of the pupils at the school might get done in.’

‘What about the curate?’ said Desmond hopefully. ‘He might be a bit off his nut. You know, original sin perhaps, and all that, and the water and the apples and the things and then—look here, I’ve got a good idea now. Suppose he is a bit barmy. Not been here very long. Nobody knows much about him. Supposing it’s the Snapdragon put it into his head. Hell fire! All those flames going up! Then, you see, he took hold of Joyce and he said “come along with me and I’ll show you something,” and he took her to the apple room and he said “kneel down.” He said “This is baptism,” and pushed her head in. See? It would all fit. Adam and Eve and the apple and hell fire and the Snapdragon and being baptised again to cure you of sin.’

‘Perhaps he exposed himself to her first,’ said Nicholas hopefully. ‘I mean, there’s always got to be a sex background to all these things.’

They both looked with satisfied faces to Poirot.

‘Well,’ said Poirot, ‘you’ve certainly given me something to think about.’