CHAPTER 4

Mrs Oliver put down the glass and wiped her lips.

‘You were right,’ she said. ‘That—that helped. I was getting hysterical.’

‘You have had a great shock, I see now. When did this happen?’

‘Last night. Was it only last night? Yes, yes, of course.’

‘And you came to me.’

It was not a quite a question, but it displayed a desire for more information than Poirot had yet had.

‘You came to me—why?’

‘I thought you could help,’ said Mrs Oliver. ‘You see, it’s—it’s not simple.’

‘It could be and it could not,’ said Poirot. ‘A lot depends. You must tell me more, you know. The police, I presume, are in charge. A doctor was, no doubt, called. What did he say?’

‘There’s to be an inquest,’ said Mrs Oliver.

‘Naturally.’

‘Tomorrow or the next day.’

‘This girl, Joyce, how old was she?’

‘I don’t know exactly. I should think perhaps twelve or thirteen.’

‘Small for her age?’

‘No, no, I should think rather mature, perhaps. Lumpy,’ said Mrs Oliver.

‘Well developed? You mean sexy-looking?’

‘Yes, that is what I mean. But I don’t think that was the kind of crime it was—I mean that would have been more simple, wouldn’t it?’

‘It is the kind of crime,’ said Poirot, ‘of which one reads every day in the paper. A girl who is attacked, a school child who is assaulted—yes, every day. This happened in a private house which makes it different, but perhaps not so different as all that. But all the same, I’m not sure yet that you’ve told me everything.’

‘No, I don’t suppose I have,’ said Mrs Oliver. ‘I haven’t told you the reason, I mean, why I came to you.’

‘You knew this Joyce, you knew her well?’

‘I didn’t know her at all. I’d better explain to you, I think, just how I came to be there.’

‘There is where?’

‘Oh, a place called Woodleigh Common.’

‘Woodleigh Common,’ said Poirot thoughtfully. ‘Now where lately—’ he broke off.

‘It’s not very far from London. About—oh, thirty to forty miles, I think. It’s near Medchester. It’s one of those places where there are a few nice houses, but where a certain amount of new building has been done. Residential. A good school nearby, and people can commute from there to London or into Medchester. It’s quite an ordinary sort of place where people with what you might call everyday reasonable incomes live.’

‘Woodleigh Common,’ said Poirot again, thought fully.

‘I was staying with a friend there. Judith Butler. She’s a widow. I went on a Hellenic cruise this year and Judith was on the cruise and we became friends. She’s got a daughter. A girl called Miranda who is twelve or thirteen. Anyway, she asked me to come and stay and she said friends of hers were giving this party for children, and it was to be a Hallowe’en party. She said perhaps I had some interesting ideas.’

‘Ah,’ said Poirot, ‘she did not suggest this time that you should arrange a murder hunt or anything of that kind?’

‘Good gracious, no,’ said Mrs Oliver. ‘Do you think I should ever consider such a thing again?’

‘I should think it unlikely.’

‘But it happened, that’s what’s so awful,’ said Mrs Oliver. ‘I mean, it couldn’t have happened just because I was there, could it?’

‘I do not think so. At least—Did any of the people at the party know who you were?’

‘Yes,’ said Mrs Oliver. ‘One of the children said something about my writing books and that they liked murders. That’s how it—well—that’s what led to the thing—I mean to the thing that made me come to you.’

‘Which you still haven’t told me.’

‘Well, you see, at first I didn’t think of it. Not straight away. I mean, children do queer things sometimes. I mean there are queer children about, children who—well, once I suppose they would have been in mental homes and things, but they send them home now and tell them to lead ordinary lives or something, and then they go and do something like this.’

‘There were some young adolescents there?’

‘There were two boys, or youths as they always seem to call them in police reports. About sixteen to eighteen.’

‘I suppose one of them might have done it. Is that what the police think?’

‘They don’t say what they think,’ said Mrs Oliver, ‘but they looked as though they might think so.’

‘Was this Joyce an attractive girl?’

‘I don’t think so,’ said Mrs Oliver. ‘You mean attractive to boys, do you?’

‘No,’ said Poirot, ‘I think I meant—well, just the plain simple meaning of the word.’

‘I don’t think she was a very nice girl,’ said Mrs Oliver, ‘not one you’d want to talk to much. She was the sort of girl who shows off and boasts. It’s a rather tiresome age, I think. It sounds unkind what I’m saying, but—’

‘It is not unkind in murder to say what the victim was like,’ said Poirot. ‘It is very, very necessary. The personality of the victim is the cause of many a murder. How many people were there in the house at the time?’

‘You mean for the party and so on? Well, I suppose there were five or six women, some mothers, a school-teacher, a doctor’s wife, or sister, I think, a couple of middle-aged married people, the two boys of sixteen to eighteen, a girl of fifteen, two or three of eleven or twelve—well that sort of thing. About twenty-five or thirty in all, perhaps.’

‘Any strangers?’

‘They all knew each other, I think. Some better than others. I think the girls were mostly in the same school. There were a couple of women who had come in to help with the food and the supper and things like that. when the party ended, most of the mothers went home with their children. I stayed behind with Judith and a couple of others to help Rowena Drake, the woman who gave the party, to clear up a bit, so the cleaning women who came in the morning wouldn’t have so much mess to deal with. You know, there was a lot of flour about, and paper caps out of crackers and different things. So we swept up a bit, and we got to the library last of all. And that’s when—when we found her. And then I remembered what she’d said.’

‘What who had said?’

‘Joyce.’

‘What did she say? We are coming to it now, are we not? We are coming to the reason why you are here?’

‘Yes. I thought it wouldn’t mean anything to—oh, to a doctor or the police or anyone, but I thought it might mean something to you.’

‘Eh bien,’ said Poirot, ‘tell me. Was this something Joyce said at the party?’

‘No—earlier in the day. That afternoon when we were fixing things up. It was after they’d talked about my writing murder stories and Joyce said “I saw a murder once” and her mother or somebody said “Don’t be silly, Joyce, saying things like that” and one of the older girls said “You’re just making it up” and Joyce said “I did. I saw it I tell you. I did. I saw someone do a murder,” but no one believed her. They just laughed and she got very angry.’

‘Did you believe her?’

‘No, of course not.’

‘I see,’ said Poirot, ‘yes, I see.’ He was silent for some moments, tapping a finger on the table. Then he said:

‘I wonder—she gave no details—no names?’

‘No. She went on boasting and shouting a bit and being angry because most of the other girls were laughing at her. The mothers, I think, and the older people, were rather cross with her. But the girls and the younger boys just laughed at her! They said things like “Go on, Joyce, when was this? Why did you never tell us about it?” And Joyce said, “I’d forgotten all about it, it was so long ago”.’

‘Aha! Did she say how long ago?’

‘Years ago,’ she said. ‘You know, in rather a would-be grown-up way.’

‘“Why didn’t you go and tell the police then?” one of the girls said. Ann, I think, or Beatrice. Rather a smug, superior girl.’

‘Aha, and what did she say to that ?’

‘She said: “Because I didn’t know at the time it was a murder”.’

‘A very interesting remark,’ said Poirot, sitting up rather straighter in his chair.

‘She’d got a bit mixed up by then, I think,’ said Mrs Oliver. ‘You know, trying to explain herself and getting angry because they were all teasing her.

‘They kept asking her why she hadn’t gone to the police, and she kept on saying “Because I didn’t know then that it was a murder. It wasn’t until afterwards that it came to me quite suddenly that that was what I had seen”.’

‘But nobody showed any signs of believing her—and you yourself did not believe her—but when you came across her dead you suddenly felt that she might have been speaking the truth?’

‘Yes, just that. I didn’t know what I ought to do, or what I could do. But then, later, I thought of you.’

Poirot bowed his head gravely in acknowledgement. He was silent for a moment or two, then he said:

‘I must pose to you a serious question, and reflect before you answer it. Do you think that this girl had really seen a murder? Or do you think that she merely believed that she had seen a murder?’

‘The first, I think,’ said Mrs Oliver. ‘I didn’t at the time. I just thought that she was vaguely remembering something she had once seen and was working it up to make it sound important and exciting. She became very vehement, saying, “I did see it, I tell you. I did see it happen”.’

‘And so.’

‘And so I’ve come along to you,’ said Mrs Oliver, ‘because the only way her death makes sense is that there really was a murder and that she was a witness to it.’

‘That would involve certain things. It would involve that one of the people who were at the party committed the murder, and that that same person must also have been there earlier that day and have heard what Joyce said.’

‘You don’t think I’m just imagining things, do you?’ said Mrs Oliver. ‘Do you think that it is all just my very far-fetched imagination?’

‘A girl was murdered,’ said Poirot. ‘Murdered by someone who had strength enough to hold her head down in a bucket of water. Аn ugly murder and a murder that was committed with what we might call, no time to lose. Somebody was threatened, and whoever it was struck as soon as it was humanly possible.’

‘Joyce could not have known who it was who did the murder she saw,’ said Mrs Oliver. ‘I mean she wouldn’t have said what she did if there was someone actually in the room who was concerned.’

‘No,’ said Poirot, ‘I think you are right there. She saw a murder, but she did not see the murderer’s face. We have to go beyond that.’

‘I don’t understand exactly what you mean.’

‘It could be that someone who was there earlier in the day and heard Joyce’s accusation knew about the murder, knew who committed the murder, perhaps was closely involved with that person. It may have been that someone thought he was the only person who knew what his wife had done, or his mother or his daughter or his son. Or it might have been a woman who knew what her husband or mother or daughter or son had done. Someone who thought that no one else knew. And then Joyce began talking…’

‘And so—’

‘Joyce had to die?’

‘Yes. What are you going to do?’

‘I have just remembered,’ said Hercule Poirot, ‘why the name of Woodleigh Common was familiar to me.’