Hercule Poirot and the Greenshore Folly

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Its thin reedy accents were replaced by a magnificent booming contralto which caused Poirot hastily to shift the receiver a couple of inches further from his ear.

‘Mr. Poirot, is that really you?’ demanded Mrs. Oliver.

‘Myself in person, Madame.’

‘This is Mrs. Oliver. I don’t know if you’ll remember me –’

‘But of course I remember you, Madame. Who could forget you?’

‘Well, people do sometimes,’ said Mrs. Oliver. ‘Quite often, in fact. I don’t think that I’ve got a very distinctive personality. Or perhaps it’s because I’m always doing different things to my hair. But all that’s neither here nor there. I hope I’m not interrupting you when you’re frightfully busy?’

‘No, no, you do not derange me in the least.’

‘Good gracious – I’m sure I don’t want to drive you out of your mind. The fact is, I need you.’

‘Need me?’

‘Yes, at once. Can you take an aeroplane?’

‘I do not take aeroplanes. They make me sick.’ ‘They do me, too. Anyway, I don’t suppose it would be any quicker than the train really, because I think the only airport near here is Exeter which is miles away. So come by train. Twelve o’clock from Paddington. You get out at Lapton to Nassecombe. You can do it nicely. You’ve got three quarters of an hour if my watch is right – though it isn’t usually.’

‘But where are you, Madame? What is all this about?’

‘Greenshore House, Lapton. A car or taxi will meet you at the station at Lapton.’

‘But why do you need me? What is all this about?’ Poirot repeated frantically.

‘Telephones are in such awkward places,’ said Mrs. Oliver. ‘This one’s in the hall … People passing through and talking … I can’t really hear. But I’m expecting you. Everybody will be so thrilled. Good bye.’

There was a sharp click as the receiver was replaced. The line hummed gently.

With a baffled air of bewilderment, Poirot put back the receiver and murmured something under his breath. Miss Lemon sat with her pencil poised, incurious. She repeated in muted tones the final phrase of dictation before the interruption.

‘– allow me to assure you, my dear sir, that the hypothesis you have advanced –’

Poirot waved aside the advancement of the hypothesis.

‘That was Mrs. Oliver,’ he said. ‘Ariadne Oliver, the detective novelist. You may have read –’ But he stopped, remembering that Miss Lemon only read improving books and regarded such frivolities as fictional crime with contempt. ‘She wants me to go down to Devonshire today, at once, in –’ he glanced at the clock ‘–thirty-five minutes.’

Miss Lemon raised disapproving eyebrows.

‘That will be running it rather fine,’ she said. ‘For what reason?’

‘You may well ask! She did not tell me.’

‘How very peculiar. Why not?’

‘Because,’ said Hercule Poirot thoughtfully, ‘she was afraid of being overheard. Yes, she made that quite clear.’

‘Well, really,’ said Miss Lemon, bristling in her employer’s defence. ‘The things people expect! Fancy thinking that you’d go rushing off on some wild goose chase like that! An important man like you! I have always noticed that these artists and writers are very unbalanced – no sense of proportion. Shall I telephone through a telegram: Regret unable leave London?’

Her hand went out to the telephone. Poirot’s voice arrested the gesture.

‘Du tout!’ he said. ‘On the contrary. Be so kind as to summon a taxi immediately.’ He raised his voice. ‘Georges! A few necessities of toilet in my small valise. And quickly, very quickly, I have a train to catch.’

CHAPTER TWO (#ulink_25ec3359-b57a-52dd-aca1-bdea850b0190)

THE TRAIN, having done one hundred and eighty-odd miles of its two hundred and twelve miles journey at top speed, puffed gently and apologetically through the last thirty and drew into Lapton station. Only one person alighted, Hercule Poirot. He negotiated with care a yawning gap between the step of the train and the platform and looked round him. At the far end of the train a porter was busy inside a luggage compartment. Poirot picked up his valise and walked back along the platform to the exit. He gave up his ticket and walked out through the booking office.

A large Humber saloon was drawn up outside and a chauffeur in uniform came forward.

‘Mr. Hercule Poirot?’ he inquired respectfully.

He took Poirot’s case from him and opened the door of the car for him. They drove away from the station, over the railway bridge and down a country road which presently disclosed a very beautiful river view.

‘The Dart, sir,’ said the chauffeur.

‘Magnifique!’ said Poirot obligingly.

The road was a long straggling country lane running between green hedges, dipping down and then up. On the upward slope two girls in shorts with bright scarves over their heads and carrying heavy rucksacks on their backs were toiling slowly upwards.

‘There’s a Youth Hostel just above us, sir,’ explained the chauffeur, who had clearly constituted himself Poirot’s guide to Devon … ‘Upper Greenshore, they call it. Come for a couple of nights at a time, they do, and very busy they are there just now. Forty or fifty a night.’

‘Ah, yes,’ said Poirot. He was reflecting, and not for the first time, that seen from the back, shorts were becoming to very few of the female sex. He shut his eyes in pain.

‘They seem heavily laden,’ he murmured.

‘Yes, sir, and it’s a long pull from the station or the bus stop. Best part of two miles. If you don’t object, sir,’ he hesitated, ‘we could give them a lift.’

‘By all means. By all means,’ said Poirot benignantly.

The chauffeur slowed down and came to a purring halt beside the two girls. Two flushed and perspiring faces were raised hopefully. The door was opened and the girls climbed in.

‘It is most kind, please,’ said one of them politely in a foreign accent. ‘It is longer way than I think, yes.’ The other girl who clearly had not much English merely nodded her head several times gratefully and smiled, and murmured ‘Grazie’

Bright dark chestnut fuzzy curls escaped from her head scarf and she had on big earnest looking spectacles.

The English speaking girl continued talking vivaciously. She was in England for a fortnight’s holiday. Her home was Rotterdam. She had already seen Stratford on Avon, Clovelly, Exeter Cathedral, Torquay and, ‘after visiting beauty spot here and historic Dartmouth, I go to Plymouth, discovery of New World from Plymouth Hoe.’

The Italian girl murmered ‘Hoe?’ and shook her head, puzzled.

‘She does not much English speak,’ said the Dutch girl, but I understand she has relative near here married to gentleman who keeps a shop for groceries, so she will spend time with them. My friend I come from Rotterdam with has eat veal and ham pie not good in shop at Exeter and is sick there. It is not always good in hot weather, the veal and ham pie.’

The chauffeur slowed down at a fork in the road. The girls got out, uttered thanks in two languages and the chauffeur with a wave of the hand directed them to the left hand road. He also laid aside for a moment his Olympian aloofness.

‘You want to be careful of Cornish Pasties too,’ he warned them. Put anything in them, they will, holiday time.’

The car drove rapidly down the right hand road into a thick belt of trees.

‘Nice enough young women, some of them, though foreign,’ said the chauffeur. ‘But absolutely shocking the way they trespass. Don’t seem to understand places are private.’

They went on, down a steep hill through woods, then through a gate and along a drive, winding up finally in front of a big white Georgian house looking out over the river.

The chauffeur opened the door of the car as a tall butler appeared on the steps.

‘Mr. Hercule Poirot?’

‘Yes.’

‘Mrs. Oliver is expecting you, sir. You will find her down at the Battery. Allow me to show you the way.’

Poirot was directed to a winding path that led along the wood with glimpses of the river below. The path descended gradually until it came out at last on an open space, round in shape with a low battlemented parapet. On the parapet Mrs. Oliver was sitting.

She rose to meet him and several apples fell from her lap and rolled in all directions. Apples seemed to be an inescapable motif of meeting Mrs. Oliver.

‘I can’t think why I always drop things,’ said Mrs. Oliver somewhat indistinctly, since her mouth was full of apple. ‘How are you, M. Poirot?’

‘Très bien, chère Madame,’ replied Poirot politely. ‘And you?’

Mrs. Oliver was looking somewhat different from when Poirot had last seen her, and the reason lay, as she had already hinted over the telephone, in the fact that she had once more experimented with her coiffure. The last time Poirot had seen her, she had been adopting a windswept effect. Today, her hair, richly blued, was piled upward in a multiplicity of rather artificial little curls in a pseudo Marquise style. The Marquise effect ended at her neck; the rest of her could have been definitely labelled ‘country practical,’ consisting of a violent yolk of egg rough tweed coat and skirt and a rather bilious looking mustard coloured jumper.

‘I knew you’d come,’ said Mrs. Oliver cheerfully.

‘You could not possibly have known,’ said Poirot severely.

‘Oh, yes I did.’

‘I still ask myself why I am here.’

‘Well, I know the answer. Curiosity.’

Poirot looked at her and his eyes twinkled a little.

‘Your famous Woman’s Intuition,’ he said, ‘has perhaps for once not led you too far astray.’

‘Now, don’t laugh at my woman’s intuition. Haven’t I always spotted the murderer right away?’

Poirot was gallantly silent. Otherwise he might have replied, ‘At the fifth attempt, perhaps, and not always then!’

Instead he said, looking round him, ‘It is indeed a beautiful property that you have here.’

‘This? But it doesn’t belong to me, M. Poirot. Did you think it did? Oh, no, it belongs to some people called Stubbs.’

‘Who are they?’

‘Oh, nobody really,’ said Mrs. Oliver vaguely. ‘Just rich. No, I’m down here professionally, doing a job.’

‘Ah, you are getting local colour for one of your chefs-d’oeuvre?’

‘No, no. Just what I said. I’m doing a job. I’ve been engaged to arrange a murder.’