CHAPTER 18

Poirot sat down, stretched out his legs and said: ‘Ah! that is better.’

‘Take your shoes off,’ said Mrs Oliver, ‘and rest your feet.’

‘No, no, I could not do that.’ Poirot sounded shocked at the possibility.

‘Well, we’re old friends together,’ said Mrs Oliver, ‘and Judith wouldn’t mind if she came out of the house. You know, if you’ll excuse me saying so, you oughtn’t to wear patent leather shoes in the country. Why don’t you get yourself a nice pair of suede shoes? Or the things all the hippy-looking boys wear nowadays? You know, the sort of shoes that slip on, and you never have to clean them—apparently they clean themselves by some extraordinary process or other. One of these labour-saving gimmicks.’

‘I would not care for that at all,’ said Poirot severely. ‘No, indeed!’

‘The trouble with you is,’ said Mrs Oliver, beginning to unwrap a package on the table which she had obviously recently purchased, ‘the trouble with you is that you insist on being smart. You mind more about your clothes and your moustaches and how you look and what you wear than comfort. Now comfort is really the great thing. Once you’ve passed, say, fifty, comfort is the only thing that matters.’

‘Madame, chère Madame, I do not know that I agree with you.’

‘Well, you’d better,’ said Mrs Oliver. ‘If not, you will suffer a great deal, and it will be worse year after year.’

Mrs Oliver fished a gaily covered box from its paper bag. Removing the lid of this, she picked up a small portion of its contents and transferred it to her mouth. She then licked her fingers, wiped them on a handkerchief, and murmured, rather indistinctly:

‘Sticky.’

‘Do you no longer eat apples? I have always seen you with a bag of apples in your hand, or eating them, or on occasions the bag breaks and they tumble out on the road.’

‘I told you,’ said Mrs Oliver, ‘I told you that I never want to see an apple again. No. I hate apples. I suppose I shall get over it some day and eat them again, but—well, I don’t like the associations of apples.’

‘And what is it that you eat now?’ Poirot picked up the gaily coloured lid decorated with a picture of a palm tree. ‘Tunis dates,’ he read. ‘Ah, dates now.’

‘That’s right,’ said Mrs Oliver. ‘Dates.’

She took another date and put it in her mouth, removed a stone which she threw into a bush and continued to munch.

‘Dates,’ said Poirot. ‘It is extraordinary.’

‘What is extraordinary about eating dates? People do.’

‘No, no, I did not mean that. Not eating them. It is extraordinary that you should say to me like that—dates.’’

‘Why?’ asked Mrs Oliver.

‘Because,’ said Poirot, ‘again and again you indicate to me the path, the how do you say, the chemin that I should take or that I should have already taken. You show me the way that I should go. Dates. Till this moment I did not realize how important dates were.’

‘I can’t see that dates have anything to do with what’s happened here. I mean, there’s no real time involved. The whole thing took place what—only five days ago.’

‘The event took place four days ago. Yes, that is very true. But to everything that happens there has to be a past. A past which is by now incorporated in today, but which existed yesterday or last month or last year. The present is nearly always rooted in the past. A year, two years, perhaps even three years ago, a murder was committed. A child saw that murder. Because that child saw that murder on a certain date now long gone by, that child died four days ago. Is not that so?’

‘Yes. That’s so. At least, I suppose it is. It mightn’t have been at all. It might be just some mentally disturbed nut who liked killing people and whose idea of playing with water is to push somebody’s head under it and hold it there. It might have been described as a mental delinquent’s bit of fun at a party.’

‘It was not that belief that brought you to me, Madame.’

‘No,’ said Mrs Oliver, ‘no, it wasn’t. I didn’t like the feel of things. I still don’t like the feel of things.’

‘And I agree with you. I think you are quite right. If one does not like the feel of things, one must learn why. I am trying very hard, though you may not think so, to learn why.’

‘By going around and talking to people, finding out if they are nice or not and then asking them questions?’

‘Exactly.’

‘And what have you learnt?’

‘Facts,’ said Poirot. ‘Facts which will have in due course to be anchored in their place by dates, shall we say.’

‘Is that all? What else have you learnt?’

‘That nobody believes in the veracity of Joyce Reynolds.’

‘When she said she saw someone killed? But I heard her.’

‘Yes, she said it. But nobody believes it is true. The probability is, therefore, that it was not true. That she saw no such thing.’

‘It seems to me,’ said Mrs Oliver, ‘as though your facts were leading you backwards instead of remaining on the spot or going forward.’

‘Things have to be made to accord. Take forgery, for instance. The fact of forgery. Everybody says that a foreign girl, the au pair girl, so endeared herself to an elderly and very rich widow that that rich widow left a Will, or a codicil to a Will, leaving all her money to this girl. Did the girl forge that Will or did somebody else forge it?’

‘Who else could have forged it?’

‘There was another forger in this village. Someone, that is, who had once been accused of forgery but had got off lightly as a first offender and with extenuating circumstances.’

‘Is this a new character? One I know?’

‘No, you do not know him. He is dead.’

‘Oh? When did he die?’

‘About two years ago. The exact date I do not as yet know. But I shall have to know. He is someone who had practised forgery and who lived in this place. Аnd because of a little what you might call girl trouble arousing jealousy and various emotions, he was knifed one night and died. I have the idea, you see, that a lot of separated incidents might tie up more closely than anyone has thought. Not any of them. Probably not all of them, but several of them.’

‘It sounds interesting,’ said Mrs Oliver, ‘but I can’t see—’

‘Nor can I as yet,’ said Poirot. ‘But I think dates might help. Dates of certain happenings, where people were, what happened to them, what they were doing. Everybody thinks that the foreign girl forged the will and probably,’ said Poirot, ‘everybody was right. She was the one to gain by it, was she not? Wait—wait—’

‘Wait for what?’ said Mrs Oliver.

‘An idea that passed through my head,’ said Poirot.

Mrs Oliver sighed and took another date.

‘You return to London, Madame? Or are you making a long stay here?’

‘Day after tomorrow,’ said Mrs Oliver. ‘I can’t stay any longer. I’ve got a good many things cropping up.’

‘Tell me, now—in your flat, your house, I cannot remember which it is now, you have moved so many times lately, there is room there to have guests?’

‘I never admit that there is,’ said Mrs Oliver. ‘If you ever admit that you’ve got a free guest room in London, you’ve asked for it. All your friends, and not only your friends, your acquaintances or indeed your acquaintances’ third cousins sometimes, write you letters and say would you mind just putting them up for a night. Well, I do mind. What with sheets and laundry, pillow cases and wanting early morning tea and very often expecting meals served to them, people come. So I don’t let on that I have got an available spare room. My friends come and stay with me. The people I really want to see, but the others—no, I’m not helpful. I don’t like just being made use of.’

‘Who does?’ said Hercule Poirot. ‘You are very wise.’

‘And anyway, what’s all this about?’

‘You could put up one or two guests, if need arose?’

‘I could,’ said Mrs Oliver. ‘Who do you want me to put up? Not you yourself. You’ve got a splendid flat of your own. Ultra modern, very abstract, all squares and cubes.’

‘It is just that there might be a wise precaution to take.’

‘For whom? Somebody else going to be killed?’

‘I trust and pray not, but it might be within the bounds of possibility.’

‘But who? Who? I can’t understand.’

‘How well do you know your friend?’

‘Know her? Not well. I mean, we liked each other on a cruise and got in the habit of pairing off together. There was something—what shall I say?—exciting about her. Different.’

‘Did you think you might put her in a book some day?’

‘I do hate that phrase being used. People are always saying it to me and it’s not true. Not really. I don’t put people in books. People I meet, people I know.’

‘Is it perhaps not true to say, Madame, that you do put people in books sometimes? People that you meet, but not, I agree, people that you know. There would be no fun in that.’

‘You’re quite right,’ said Mrs Oliver. ‘You’re really rather good at guessing things sometimes. It does happen that way. I mean, you see a fat woman sitting in a bus eating a currant bun and her lips are moving as well as eating, and you can see she’s either saying something to someone or thinking up a telephone call that she’s going to make, or perhaps a letter she’s going to write. And you look at her and you study her shoes and the skirt she’s got on and her hat and guess her age and whether she’s got a wedding ring on and a few other things. And then you get out of the bus. You don’t want ever to see her again, but you’ve got a story in your mind about somebody called Mrs Carnaby who is going home in a bus, having had a very strange interview somewhere where she saw someone in a pastry cook’s and was reminded of someone she’d only met once and who she had heard was dead and apparently isn’t dead. Dear me,’ said Mrs Oliver, pausing for breath. ‘You know, it’s quite true. I did sit across from someone in a bus just before I left London, and here it is all working out beautifully inside my head. I shall have the whole story soon. The whole sequence, what she’s going back to say, whether it’ll run her into danger or somebody else into danger. I think I even know her name. Her name’s Constance. Constance Carnaby. There’s only one thing would ruin it.’

‘And what is that?’

‘Well, I mean, if I met her again in another bus, or spoke to her or she talked to me or I began to know something about her. That would ruin everything, of course.’

‘Yes, yes. The story must be yours, the character is yours. She is your child. You have made her, you begin to understand her, you know how she feels, you know where she lives and you know what she does. But that all started with a real, live human being and if you found out what the real live human being was like—well then, there would be no story, would there?’

‘Right again,’ said Mrs Oliver. ‘As to what you were saying about Judith, I think that is true. I mean, we were together a lot on the cruise, and we went to see the places but I didn’t really get to know her particularly well. She’s a widow, and her husband died and she was left badly off with one child, Miranda, whom you’ve seen. And it’s true that I’ve got rather a funny feeling about them. A feeling as though they mattered, as though they’re mixed up in some interesting drama. I don’t want to know what the drama is. I don’t want them to tell me. I want to think of the sort of drama I would like them to be in.’

‘Yes. Yes, I can see that they are—well, candidates for inclusion for another best seller by Ariadne Oliver.’

‘You really are a beast sometimes,’ said Mrs Oliver. ‘You make it all sound so vulgar.’ She paused thoughtfully. ‘Perhaps it is.’

‘No, no, it is not vulgar. It is just human.’

‘And you want me to invite Judith and Miranda to my flat or house in London?’

‘Not yet,’ said Poirot. ‘Not yet until I am sure that one of my little ideas might be right.’

‘You and your little ideas! Now I’ve got a piece of news for you.’

‘Madame, you delight me.’

‘Don’t be too sure. It will probably upset your ideas. Supposing I tell you that the forgery you have been so busy talking about wasn’t a forgery at all.’

‘What is that you say?’

‘Mrs Ap Jones Smythe, or whatever her name is, did make a codicil to her Will leaving all her money to the au pair girl and two witnesses saw her sign it, and signed it also in the presence of each other. Put that in your moustache and smoke it.’