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She shivered slightly.
‘Not by name. He said once that she gave him kippers much too often—and once he said his landlady was upset because she had lost her cat.’
‘Did he ever—you must be honest, please—mention that he knew where she kept her money?’
Some of the colour went out of the girl’s face, but she threw up her chin defiantly.
‘Actually, he did. We were talking about people being distrustful of banks—and he said his old landlady kept her spare money under a floorboard. He said: “I could help myself any day to it when she’s out.” Not quite as a joke, he didn’t joke, more as though he were really worried by her carelessness.’
‘Ah,’ said Poirot. ‘That is good. From my point of view, I mean. When James Bentley thinks of stealing, it presents itself to him as an action that is done behind someone’s back. He might have said, you see, “Some day someone will knock her on the head for it.”’
‘But either way, he wouldn’t be meaning it.’
‘Oh no. But talk, however light, however idle, gives away, inevitably, the sort of person you are. The wise criminal would never open his mouth, but criminals are seldom wise and usually vain and they talk a good deal—and so most criminals are caught.’
Maude Williams said abruptly:
‘But someone must have killed the old woman.’
‘Naturally.’
‘Who did? Do you know? Have you any idea?’
‘Yes,’ said Hercule Poirot mendaciously. ‘I think I have a very good idea. But we are only at the beginning of the road.’
The girl glanced at her watch.
‘I must get back. We’re only supposed to take half an hour. One-horse place, Kilchester—I’ve always had jobs in London before. You’ll let me know if there’s anything I can do—really do, I mean?’
Poirot took out one of his cards. On it he wrote Long Meadows and the telephone number.
‘That is where I am staying.’
His name, he noted with chagrin, made no particular impression on her. The younger generation, he could not but feel, were singularly lacking in knowledge of notable celebrities.
III
Hercule Poirot caught a bus back to Broadhinny feeling slightly more cheerful. At any rate there was one person who shared his belief in James Bentley’s innocence. Bentley was not so friendless as he had made himself out to be.
His mind went back again to Bentley in prison. What a dispiriting interview it had been. There had been no hope aroused, hardly a stirring of interest.
‘Thank you,’ Bentley had said dully, ‘but I don’t suppose there is anything anyone can do.’
No, he was sure he had not got any enemies.
‘When people barely notice you’re alive, you’re not likely to have any enemies.’
‘Your mother? Did she have an enemy?’
‘Certainly not. Everyone liked and respected her.’
There was a faint indignation in his tone.
‘What about your friends?’
And James Bentley had said, or rather muttered, ‘I haven’t any friends…’
But that had not been quite true. For Maude Williams was a friend.
‘What a wonderful dispensation it is of Nature’s,’ thought Hercule Poirot, ‘that every man, however superficially unattractive, should be some woman’s choice.’
For all Miss Williams’s sexy appearance, he had a shrewd suspicion that she was really the maternal type.
She had the qualities that James Bentley lacked, the energy, the drive, the refusal to be beaten, the determination to succeed.
He sighed.
What monstrous lies he had told that day! Never mind—they were necessary.
‘For somewhere,’ said Poirot to himself, indulging in an absolute riot of mixed metaphors, ‘there is in the hay a needle, and among the sleeping dogs there is one on whom I shall put my foot, and by shooting the arrows into the air, one will come down and hit a glass-house!’
Chapter 7 (#u0d668e7a-43ca-4acd-a0f5-133e7851156a)
I
The cottage where Mrs McGinty had lived was only a few steps from the bus stop. Two children were playing on the doorstep. One was eating a rather wormy-looking apple and the other was shouting and beating on the door with a tin tray. They appeared quite happy. Poirot added to the noise by beating hard on the door himself.
A woman looked round the corner of the house. She had on a coloured overall and her hair was untidy.
‘Stop it, Ernie,’ she said.
‘Sha’n’t,’ said Ernie and continued.
Poirot deserted the doorstep and made for the corner of the house.
‘Can’t do anything with children, can you?’ the woman said.
Poirot thought you could, but forbore to say so.
He was beckoned round to the back door.
‘I keep the front bolted up, sir. Come in, won’t you?’
Poirot passed through a very dirty scullery into an almost more dirty kitchen.
‘She wasn’t killed here,’ said the woman. ‘In the parlour.’
Poirot blinked slightly.
‘That’s what you’re down about, isn’t it? You’re the foreign gentleman from up at Summerhayes?’
‘So you know all about me?’ said Poirot. He beamed. ‘Yes, indeed, Mrs—’
‘Kiddle. My husband’s a plasterer. Moved in four months ago, we did. Been living with Bert’s mother before…Some folks said: “You’d never go into a house where there’s been a murder, surely?”—but what I said was, a house is a house, and better than a back sitting-room and sleeping on two chairs. Awful, this ’ousing shortage, isn’t it? And anyway we’ve never been troubled ’ere. Always say they walk if they’ve been murdered, but she doesn’t! Like to see where it happened?’
Feeling like a tourist being taken on a conducted tour, Poirot assented.
Mrs Kiddle led him into a small room over-burdened with a heavy Jacobean suite. Unlike the rest of the house, it showed no signs of ever having been occupied.
‘Down on the floor she was and the back of her head split open. Didn’t half give Mrs Elliot a turn. She’s the one what found her—she and Larkin who comes from the Co-op with the bread. But the money was took from upstairs. Come along up and I’ll show you where.’
Mrs Kiddle led the way up the staircase and into a bedroom which contained a large chest of drawers, a big brass bed, some chairs, and a fine assembly of baby clothes, wet and dry.
‘Right here it was,’ said Mrs Kiddle proudly.
Poirot looked round him. Hard to visualize that this rampant stronghold of haphazard fecundity was once the well-scrubbed domain of an elderly woman who was house-proud. Here Mrs McGinty had lived and slept.
‘I suppose this isn’t her furniture?’
‘Oh no. Her niece over in Cullavon took away all that.’
There was nothing left here of Mrs McGinty. The Kiddles had come and conquered. Life was stronger than death.
From downstairs the loud fierce wail of a baby arose.
‘That’s the baby woken up,’ said Mrs Kiddle unnecessarily.
She plunged down the stairs and Poirot followed her.
There was nothing here for him.
He went next door.
II
‘Yes, sir, it was me found her.’
Mrs Elliot was dramatic. A neat house, this, neat and prim. The only drama in it was Mrs Elliot’s, a tall gaunt dark-haired woman, recounting her one moment of glorious living.
‘Larkin, the baker, he came and knocked at the door. “It’s Mrs McGinty,” he said, “we can’t make her hear. Seems she might have been taken bad.” And indeed I thought she might. She wasn’t a young woman, not by any means. And palpitations she’d had, to my certain knowledge. I thought she might have had a stroke. So I hurried over, seeing as there were only the two men, and naturally they wouldn’t like to go into the bedroom.’
Poirot accepted this piece of propriety with an assenting murmur.
‘Hurried up the stairs, I did. He was on the landing, pale as death he was. Not that I ever thought at the time—well, of course, then I didn’t know what had happened. I knocked on the door loud and there wasn’t any answer, so I turned the handle and I went in. The whole place messed about—and the board in the floor up. “It’s robbery,” I said. “But where’s the poor soul herself?” And then we thought to look in the sitting-room. And there she was…Down on the floor with her poor head stove in. Murder! I saw at once what it was—murder! Couldn’t be anything else! Robbery and murder! Here in Broadhinny. I screamed and I screamed! Quite a job they had with me. Come over all faint, I did. They had to go and get me brandy from the Three Ducks. And even then I was all of a shiver for hours and hours. “Don’t you take on so, mother,” that’s what the sergeant said to me when he came. “Don’t you take on so. You go home and make yourself a nice cup of tea.” And so I did. And when Elliot came home, “Why, whatever’s happened?” he says, staring at me. Still all of a tremble I was. Always was sensitive from a child.’
Poirot dexterously interrupted this thrilling personal narrative.
‘Yes, yes, one can see that. And when was the last time you had seen poor Mrs McGinty?’
‘Must have been the day before, when she’d stepped out into the back garden to pick a bit of mint. I was just feeding the chickens.’
‘Did she say anything to you?’
‘Just good afternoon and were they laying any better.’
‘And that’s the last time you saw her? You didn’t see her on the day she died?’
‘No. I saw Him though.’ Mrs Elliot lowered her voice. ‘About eleven o’clock in the morning. Just walking along the road. Shuffling his feet the way he always did.’
Poirot waited, but it seemed that there was nothing to add.
He asked:
‘Were you surprised when the police arrested him?’
‘Well, I was and I wasn’t. Mind you, I’d always thought he was a bit daft. And no doubt about it, these daft ones do turn nasty, sometimes. My uncle had a feeble-minded boy, and he could go very nasty sometimes—as he grew up, that was. Didn’t know his strength. Yes, that Bentley was daft all right, and I shouldn’t be surprised if they don’t hang him when it comes to it, but sends him to the asylum instead. Why, look at the place he hid the money. No one would hide money in a place like that unless he wanted it to be found. Just silly and simple like, that’s what he was.’
‘Unless he wanted it found,’ murmured Poirot. ‘You did not, by any chance, miss a chopper—or an axe?’
‘No, sir, I did not. The police asked me that. Asked all of us in the cottages here. It’s a mystery still what he killed her with.’
III
Hercule Poirot walked towards the post office.
The murderer had wanted the money found, but he had not wanted the weapon to be found. For the money would point to James Bentley and the weapon would point to—whom?
He shook his head. He had visited the other two cottages. They had been less exuberant than Mrs Kiddle and less dramatic than Mrs Elliot. They had said in effect that Mrs McGinty was a very respectable woman who kept herself to herself, that she had a niece over at Cullavon, that nobody but the said niece ever came to see her, that nobody, so far as they knew, disliked her or bore a grudge against her, that was it true that there was a petition being got up for James Bentley and would they be asked to sign it?
‘I get nowhere—nowhere,’ said Poirot to himself. ‘There is nothing—no little gleam. I can well understand the despair of Superintendent Spence. But it should be different for me. Superintendent Spence, he is a good and painstaking police officer, but me, I am Hercule Poirot. For me, there should be illumination!’
One of his patent leather shoes slopped into a puddle and he winced.
He was the great, the unique Hercule Poirot, but he was also a very old man and his shoes were tight.
He entered the post office.
The right-hand side was given to the business of His Majesty’s mails. The left-hand side displayed a rich assortment of varied merchandise, comprising sweets, groceries, toys, hardware, stationery, birthday cards, knitting wool and children’s underclothes.
Poirot proceeded to a leisurely purchase of stamps.
The woman who bustled forward to attend to him was middle-aged with sharp, bright eyes.
‘Here,’ said Poirot to himself, ‘is undoubtedly the brains of the village of Broadhinny.’
Her name, not inappropriately, was Mrs Sweetiman.
‘And twelve pennies,’ said Mrs Sweetiman, deftly extracting them from a large book. ‘That’s four and tenpence altogether. Will there be anything more, sir?’
