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Colonel Luttrell said, ‘Right. Come along. I expect – er – they’ll have taken your things up already – eh, Daisy?’
Mrs Luttrell said tartly, ‘That’s your business, George. I’ve been gardening. I can’t see to everything.’
‘No, no, of course not. I – I’ll see to it, my dear.’
I followed him up the front steps. In the doorway we encountered a grey-haired man, slightly built, who was hurrying out with a pair of field-glasses. He limped, and had a boyish eager face. He said, stammering slightly: ‘There’s a pair of n-nesting blackcaps down by the sycamore.’
As we went into the hall, Luttrell said, ‘That’s Norton. Nice fellow. Crazy about birds.’
In the hall itself, a very big man was standing by the table. He had obviously just finished telephoning. Looking up he said, ‘I’d like to hang, draw and quarter all contractors and builders. Never get anything done right, curse ’em.’
His wrath was so comical and so rueful, that we both laughed. I felt very attracted at once towards the man. He was very good-looking, though a man well over fifty, with a deeply tanned face. He looked as though he had led an out-of-doors life, and he looked, too, the type of man that is becoming more and more rare, an Englishman of the old school, straightforward, fond of out-of-doors life, and the kind of man who can command.
I was hardly surprised when Colonel Luttrell introduced him as Sir William Boyd Carrington. He had been, I knew, Governor of a province in India, where he had been a signal success. He was also renowned as a first-class shot and big game hunter. The sort of man, I reflected sadly, that we no longer seemed to breed in these degenerate days.
‘Aha,’ he said. ‘I’m glad to meet in the flesh that famous personage mon ami Hastings.’ He laughed. ‘The dear old Belgian fellow talks about you a lot, you know. And then, of course, we’ve got your daughter here. She’s a fine girl.’
‘I don’t suppose Judith talks about me much,’ I said, smiling.
‘No, no, far too modern. These girls nowadays always seem embarrassed at having to admit to a father or mother at all.’
‘Parents,’ I said, ‘are practically a disgrace.’
He laughed. ‘Oh, well – I don’t suffer that way. I’ve no children, worse luck. Your Judith is a very good-looking wench, but terribly high-brow. I find it rather alarming.’ He picked up the telephone receiver again. ‘Hope you don’t mind, Luttrell, if I start damning your exchange to hell. I’m not a patient man.’
‘Do ’em good,’ said Luttrell.
He led the way upstairs and I followed him. He took me along the left wing of the house to a door at the end, and I realized that Poirot had chosen for me the room I had occupied before.
There were changes here. As I walked along the corridor some of the doors were open and I saw that the old-fashioned large bedrooms had been partitioned off so as to make several smaller ones.
My own room, which had not been large, was unaltered save for the installation of hot and cold water, and part of it had been partitioned off to make a small bathroom. It was furnished in a cheap modern style which rather disappointed me. I should have preferred a style more nearly approximating to the architecture of the house itself.
My luggage was in my room and the Colonel explained that Poirot’s room was exactly opposite. He was about to take me there when a sharp cry of ‘George’ echoed up from the hall below.
Colonel Luttrell started like a nervous horse. His hand went to his lips.
‘I – I – sure you’re all right? Ring for what you want –’
‘George.’
‘Coming, my dear, coming.’
He hurried off down the corridor. I stood for a moment looking after him. Then, with my heart beating slightly faster, I crossed the corridor and rapped on the door of Poirot’s room.
Chapter 2
Nothing is so sad, in my opinion, as the devastation wrought by age.
My poor friend. I have described him many times. Now to convey to you the difference. Crippled with arthritis, he propelled himself about in a wheeled chair. His once plump frame had fallen in. He was a thin little man now. His face was lined and wrinkled. His moustache and hair, it is true, were still of a jet black colour, but candidly, though I would not for the world have hurt his feelings by saying so to him, this was a mistake. There comes a moment when hair dye is only too painfully obvious. There had been a time when I had been surprised to learn that the blackness of Poirot’s hair came out of a bottle. But now the theatricality was apparent and merely created the impression that he wore a wig and had adorned his upper lip to amuse the children!
Only his eyes were the same as ever, shrewd and twinkling, and now – yes, undoubtedly – softened with emotion.
‘Ah, mon ami Hastings – mon ami Hastings . . .’
I bent my head and, as was his custom, he embraced me warmly.
‘Mon ami Hastings!’
He leaned back, surveying me with his head a little to one side.
‘Yes, just the same – the straight back, the broad shoulders, the grey of the hair – très distingué. You know, my friend, you have worn well. Les femmes, they still take an interest in you? Yes?’
‘Really, Poirot,’ I protested. ‘Must you –’
‘But I assure you, my friend, it is a test – it is the test. When the very young girls come and talk to you kindly, oh so kindly – it is the end! “The poor old man,” they say, “we must be nice to him. It must be so awful to be like that.” But you, Hastings – vous êtes encore jeune. For you there are still possibilities. That is right, twist your moustache, hunch your shoulders – I see it is as I say – you would not look so self-conscious otherwise.’
I burst out laughing. ‘You really are the limit, Poirot. And how are you yourself ?’
‘Me,’ said Poirot with a grimace. ‘I am a wreck. I am a ruin. I cannot walk. I am crippled and twisted. Mercifully I can still feed myself, but otherwise I have to be attended to like a baby. Put to bed, washed and dressed. Enfin, it is not amusing that. Mercifully, though the outside decays, the core is still sound.’
‘Yes, indeed. The best heart in the world.’
‘The heart? Perhaps. I was not referring to the heart. The brain, mon cher, is what I mean by the core. My brain, it still functions magnificently.’
I could at least perceive clearly that no deterioration of the brain in the direction of modesty had taken place.
‘And you like it here?’ I asked.
Poirot shrugged his shoulders. ‘It suffices. It is not, you comprehend, the Ritz. No, indeed. The room I was in when I first came here was both small and inadequately furnished. I moved to this one with no increase of price. Then, the cooking, it is English at its worst. Those Brussels sprouts so enormous, so hard, that the English like so much. The potatoes boiled and either hard or falling to pieces. The vegetables that taste of water, water, and again water. The complete absence of the salt and pepper in any dish –’ he paused expressively.
‘It sounds terrible,’ I said.
‘I do not complain,’ said Poirot, and proceeded to do so. ‘And there is also the modernization, so called. The bathrooms, the taps everywhere and what comes out of them? Lukewarm water, mon ami, at most hours of the day. And the towels, so thin, so meagre!’
‘There is something to be said for the old days,’ I said thoughtfully. I remembered the clouds of steam which had gushed from the hot tap of the one bathroom Styles had originally possessed, one of those bathrooms in which an immense bath with mahogany sides had reposed proudly in the middle of the bathroom floor. Remembered, too, the immense bath towels, and the frequent shining brass cans of boiling hot water that stood in one’s old-fashioned basin.
‘But one must not complain,’ said Poirot again. ‘I am content to suffer – for a good cause.’
A sudden thought struck me.
‘I say, Poirot, you’re not – er – hard up, are you? I know the war hit investments very badly –’
Poirot reassured me quickly.
‘No, no, my friend. I am in most comfortable circumstances. Indeed, I am rich. It is not the economy that brings me here.’
‘Then that’s all right,’ I said. I went on: ‘I think I can understand your feeling. As one gets on, one tends more and more to revert to the old days. One tries to recapture old emotions. I find it painful to be here, in a way, and yet it brings back to me a hundred old thoughts and emotions that I’d quite forgotten I ever felt. I dare say you feel the same.’
‘Not in the least. I do not feel like that at all.’
‘They were good days,’ I said sadly.
‘You may speak for yourself, Hastings. For me, my arrival at Styles St Mary was a sad and painful time. I was a refugee, wounded, exiled from home and country, existing by charity in a foreign land. No, it was not gay. I did not know then that England would come to be my home and that I should find happiness here.’
‘I had forgotten that,’ I admitted.
‘Precisely. You attribute always to others the sentiments that you yourself experience. Hastings was happy – everybody was happy!’
‘No, no,’ I protested, laughing.
‘And in any case it is not true,’ continued Poirot. ‘You look back, you say, the tears rising in your eyes, “Oh, the happy days. Then I was young.” But indeed, my friend, you were not so happy as you think. You had recently been severely wounded, you were fretting at being no longer fit for active service, you had just been depressed beyond words by your sojourn in a dreary convalescent home and, as far as I remember, you proceeded to complicate matters by falling in love with two women at the same time.’
I laughed and flushed.
‘What a memory you have, Poirot.’
‘Ta ta ta – I remember now the melancholy sigh you heaved as you murmured fatuities about two lovely women.’
‘Do you remember what you said? You said, “And neither of them for you! But courage, mon ami. We may hunt together again and then perhaps –”’
I stopped. For Poirot and I had gone hunting again to France and it was there that I had met the one woman . . .
Gently my friend patted my arm.
‘I know, Hastings, I know. The wound is still fresh. But do not dwell on it, do not look back. Instead look forward.’
I made a gesture of disgust.
‘Look forward? What is there to look forward to?’
‘Eh bien, my friend, there is work to be done.’
‘Work? Where?’
‘Here.’
I stared at him.
‘Just now,’ said Poirot, ‘you asked me why I had come here. You may not have observed that I gave you no answer. I will give the answer now. I am here to hunt down a murderer.’
I stared at him with even more astonishment. For a moment I thought he was rambling.
‘You really mean that?’
‘But certainly I mean it. For what other reason did I urge you to join me? My limbs, they are no longer active, but my brain, as I told you, is unimpaired. My rule, remember, has been always the same – sit back and think. That I still can do – in fact it is the only thing possible for me. For the more active side of the campaign I shall have with me my invaluable Hastings.’
‘You really mean it?’ I gasped.
‘Of course I mean it. You and I, Hastings, are going hunting once again.’
It took some minutes to grasp that Poirot was really in earnest.
Fantastic though his statement sounded, I had no reason to doubt his judgement.
With a slight smile he said, ‘At last you are convinced. At first you imagined, did you not, that I had the softening of the brain?’
‘No, no,’ I said hastily. ‘Only this seems such an unlikely place.’
‘Ah, you think so?’
‘Of course I haven’t seen all the people yet –’
‘Whom have you seen?’
‘Just the Luttrells, and a man called Norton, seems an inoffensive chap, and Boyd Carrington – I must say I took the greatest fancy to him.’
Poirot nodded. ‘Well, Hastings, I will tell you this, when you have seen the rest of the household, my statement will seem to you just as improbable as it is now.’
‘Who else is there?’
‘The Franklins – Doctor and Mrs, the hospital nurse who attends to Mrs Franklin, your daughter Judith. Then there is a man called Allerton, something of a lady-killer, and a Miss Cole, a woman in her thirties. They are all, let me tell you, very nice people.’
‘And one of them is a murderer?’
‘And one of them is a murderer.’
‘But why – how – why should you think –?’
I found it hard to frame my questions, they tumbled over each other.
‘Calm yourself, Hastings. Let us begin from the beginning. Reach me, I pray you, that small box from the bureau. Bien. And now the key – so –’
Unlocking the despatch case, he took from it a mass of typescript and newspaper clippings.
‘You can study these at your leisure, Hastings. For the moment I should not bother with the newspaper cuttings. They are merely the press accounts of various tragedies, occasionally inaccurate, sometimes suggestive. To give you an idea of the cases I suggest that you should read through the précis I have made.’
Deeply interested, I started reading.
CASE A. ETHERINGTON
Leonard Etherington. Unpleasant habits – took drugs and also drank. A peculiar and sadistic character. Wife young and attractive. Desperately unhappy with him. Etherington died, apparently of food poisoning. Doctor not satisfied. As a result of autopsy, death discovered to be due to arsenical poisoning. Supply of weed-killer in the house, but ordered a long time previously. Mrs Etherington arrested and charged with murder. She had recently been friends with a man in Civil Service returning to India. No suggestion of actual infidelity, but evidence of deep sympathy between them. Young man had since become engaged to be married to girl he met on voyage out. Some doubt as to whether letter telling Mrs Etherington of this fact was received by her after or before her husband’s death. She herself says before. Evidence against her mainly circumstantial, absence of another likely suspect and accident highly unlikely. Great sympathy felt with her at trial owing to husband’s character and the bad treatment she had received from him. Judge’s summing up was in her favour stressing that verdict must be beyond any reasonable doubt.
Mrs Etherington was acquitted. General opinion, however, was that she was guilty. Her life afterwards very difficult owing to friends, etc., cold shouldering her. She died as a result of taking an overdose of sleeping draught two years after the trial. Verdict of accidental death returned at inquest.
CASE B. MISS SHARPLES
Elderly spinster. An invalid. Difficult, suffering much pain.
