Sidney, while Lilian’s attention was focused on Richard, turned back to Verna Laviolette and said quietly something that sounded like, ‘It’s Winnie.’ I might have misheard that part, though I definitely heard what he said next: ‘She has given us no end of trouble and her return is now out of the question. She’s very upset.’ From the movements of his head, I concluded that the second ‘she’ was his wife. Lilian was upset about somebody called Winnie.
In which case, why had Sidney given Richard the signal to distract her so that he could explain this to Verna? Presumably Lilian was aware of her own distress. Why could it not be mentioned openly in front of her? This question had much in common with another one I had asked recently: why must Little Key’s name not be mentioned in front of Sidney and Lilian Devonport when that very name is clearly displayed on a plaque beside their front door?
Verna was evidently thrilled to hear of the problem. Her eyes sparkled as she said, ‘Well, well, so no more Winnie. Whatever will you do without her? How unfortunate!’ she added, in a tone that would better have matched the words ‘How marvellous!’
I wondered if Winnie was perhaps the cook; her absence was evidently linked to dinner being delayed.
Sidney Devonport dismissed Verna’s gloating question with a vague gesture, then loudly announced himself to be ‘more than ready for a snifter’. This, I observed, was his way of indicating to Richard that he could stand down from his distraction duties. Richard immediately seemed to lose all interest in pursuing a conversation with his mother.
It was all most peculiar. The most perplexing thing of all, however—and I had to keep reminding myself of it because there was no external evidence to suggest it—was that a woman named Helen Acton, fiancée of Richard Devonport, was soon to be hanged for the murder of his brother and Sidney and Lilian’s son Frank, and everybody was behaving as if this tragic circumstance did not exist. There was no air of sadness or solemnity in the air, no circumspect, guarded allusions to the Devonport family being in the midst of a terrible ordeal. It was true that Lilian Devonport could not be said to be in the best condition, and she had perhaps been able to walk without assistance before Frank’s death, but otherwise this looked and felt very much like a normal social occasion.
How could Sidney Devonport muster the enthusiasm to welcome two strangers to his home and talk to them at length about a board game when the betrothed of one of his sons was about to swing for the murder of the other?
A discussion started up about where drinks should happen. Richard Devonport and Verna Laviolette favoured the drawing room, but both Godfrey and Sidney insisted that we should congregate in a room they both called ‘Peepers HQ’.
‘Ah, oui,’ said Poirot. ‘The headquarters of the Peepers operation is something that I have yearned to see for many … for the longest time!’ I smiled to myself, suspecting that he had been about to say ‘many years’, then realized that he did not know how long the game had been in existence.
Richard was ordered by his father to show us to our quarters, help us to get settled in and then escort us downstairs again. This he stiffly and dutifully did, while avoiding looking either of us in the eye and speaking only the minimum number of words in a curt, clipped fashion.
Poirot seemed unperturbed by this closed-down manner from the man who had invited us here. He was busy humming a cheery tune to himself and adjusting his lustrous black moustaches, perhaps thinking that there would be plenty of time to question Richard Devonport later. I hoped I was being overly pessimistic in fearing that Devonport might never be willing to answer questions. Had he not already specified that he expected Poirot to solve the mystery of his brother’s murder and save his fiancée from the gallows without saying a word about the subject to anybody? That was strange enough all on its own, and my experience of life had taught me that, wherever strange things are found, you can usually unearth further and even more peculiar ones if you look hard enough.
It struck me as eminently possible that Richard Devonport might want to include himself in the category of people whom Poirot was not permitted to question directly on the matter of Frank’s demise. And how could we get to the bottom of it all if the only avenue open to us was drinking cocktails while discussing a board game?
Having divested ourselves of our effects and splashed some water on our faces, we followed Richard down the stairs. ‘And now to enter the headquarters of the world’s greatest game!’ said Poirot, trotting ahead of me. ‘Ah, this is truly the realization of my heart’s dream!’ I thought he was overdoing his act somewhat, particularly since at that moment there was no one to hear him apart from me and Richard Devonport.
As we reached the bottom of the staircase, the front door started to creak open. Richard stopped. ‘This will be Oliver and Daisy,’ he said without enthusiasm.
A man walked in, bringing a gust of cold air with him, and removed his hat. He was tall, pale as a ghost, with neat, short black hair that had a pronounced shine to it. Though he was smartly and conventionally dressed, there was a roguish aspect about him. He made me think of a highwayman of aristocratic descent. Richard Devonport commenced the introductions: this was Oliver, Oliver Prowd, good friend of the family and engaged to be married to Daisy Devonport, who was …
I did not at that moment take in who Daisy was, though I’m sure Richard told us then that she was his sister. I was prevented from attending to his commentary by the arrival of Daisy herself, who walked into the house a few seconds after Oliver.
I had met her before. Poirot had too. Our mouths gaped open in matching displays of incredulity.
Daisy was The Sculpture: the woman from the coach with the book, the one who had confessed to murder before tricking us and disappearing at Cobham.
How could she be here at Little Key? Yet here she undoubtedly was, La Bête Ingénieuse, staring back at us as if she had walked straight into a trap from which she wished furiously to escape.
CHAPTER 7
Confessions for Dinner
‘What’s the matter, darling?’ Oliver Prowd moved closer to his fiancée and put a protective arm around her. Guarding his treasure, I thought, unable to banish the highwayman association from my mind.
‘Daisy, you look a fright,’ her brother Richard agreed. ‘Has something happened?’ Both men were so aware of the sudden change in her that neither had noticed my shock or Poirot’s.
Daisy opened her mouth, but no words emerged. She stared at Poirot as if waiting for a cue.
He hurried forward, his hand extended. ‘Mademoiselle Daisy!’ he said. ‘It is a great pleasure to make your acquaintance. I am Hercule Poirot—you have perhaps heard of me, eh, and seen my photograph in the newspapers? What an enormous surprise it must be to find me here in your family’s home! May I introduce my friend, Monsieur Edward Catchpool?’
So this was how he was minded to play it. I fell in with his plans, assuming there were sound reasons behind them, and waited to see if Daisy would participate in the charade. She shook my hand without once glancing at me and kept her glare fixed on Poirot.
‘So, you’re Hercule Poirot?’ Oliver Prowd said as he stepped forward to make his greeting. To Daisy, he said, ‘Darling, he is terribly famous.’
‘I know,’ she said in a tone that conveyed disgust. ‘I have heard of his many successes.’
‘Merci bien. It is true, there have been many.’ Poirot gave a little bow.
‘I assume you are not here in your professional capacity,’ said Prowd.
‘Why would he be?’ Richard Devonport cut in quickly.
‘Well, he wouldn’t. That was my point: he must be here for purely recreational purposes.’ The two men exchanged a looked that seemed to me to be loaded with meaning.
Poirot, pretending not to notice, said, ‘You are correct in your assumption, Monsieur Prowd. Poirot, he takes the break from work to come here to this place of great significance.’
‘Significance?’ Daisy Devonport scowled as she spat out the word, while her b
rother and fiancé passed another meaningful look between them.
‘Oui. My friend Catchpool and I, we are the most enthusiastic players of the Peepers game!’
Perhaps Poirot had forgotten by now that I was supposed to be interested only in the game’s commercial prospects. Or was I supposed to be both: a businessman wishing to assess the market potential of Peepers and an ardent fan? It would have been useful to know.
‘It is the most enormous treat for us to be able to meet our favourite game’s two inventors!’ he said. ‘We hope to learn much about what precisely inspired the invention of Peepers in the coming few days.’ He stressed these last three words.
Daisy received his meaning clearly: he would have plenty of time to extract the truth from her about the murder she claimed to have committed. Her lip curled in a snarl.
‘Darling, whatever is the matter?’ her fiancé asked her solicitously.
‘Shut up, Oliver,’ she said flatly. There was plenty of emotion in her—that much was apparent from her face—but clearly none to spare for him.
‘Let us go and find the others,’ said Richard, leading the way. Behind him but ahead of Poirot and me, Oliver Prowd tried to walk close to Daisy. To thwart him, or so it seemed, she slowed down and ended up walking beside me instead.
I could understand her bitterness even if I could not sympathize. Had she known on the motor-coach that Poirot had been on his way to her very own home, she would not have uttered so much as a whisper. Could the murder she told him about be the murder of her brother Frank?
The more I considered it, the more likely it seemed. After all, Richard Devonport believed his fiancée Helen was innocent of that crime, and it struck me as highly improbable that Daisy Devonport should have been intimately involved with two murders. Besides, when I thought back over what Poirot had told me of their conversation on the coach, there seemed to be many clues: Daisy had said that she had loved the man she murdered very much, but that her love for him was quite different from her love for her fiancé. Was not love for a brother very different from romantic love?
It all fitted perfectly. Richard Devonport, in his letter to Poirot, had said that he had once worked for the Treasury, but that recently he had left that employment and taken charge of his father’s financial and business affairs. And Daisy had told Poirot that the thief who stole from Sidney Devonport had been in charge of those very same affairs. Sidney had entrusted his assets first to one son—a son who betrayed his trust and stole from him—and then, after Frank’s death, to his surviving son, Richard.
If my theory was correct, that also meant that Lilian Devonport was dying from a wasting disease. That would explain her visible frailty.
I could hardly believe that we had been so lucky. Thanks to the simple coincidence of us having travelled on the same coach as Daisy Devonport … but of course, we were coming to Kingfisher Hill, at her brother’s request, and she was coming here too because it was where she lived. The only coincidence was that Daisy had happened to be travelling from London today, at the exact moment that we were making the same journey.
Another lucky accident for us, I reflected as we turned a corner into another, wider corridor with mirrors, paintings and tapestries hanging on the walls, was that Daisy’s character was as it was. Most people finding themselves seated beside Hercule Poirot would not take the opportunity to confess to a murder and assume they could get away with it. I decided that Daisy must be an unusually daring and confident young woman. Her present emotional state seemed to confirm my assessment: rage as opposed to abject terror. Her cold, beautiful face was set hard. There was resentment there, but there was also great resolve. I sensed that she was thinking, If this is the situation I find myself in, then so be it. Her anger towards Oliver Prowd also fascinated me. It told me that she did not wish to wallow or be cooed over; she desired, instead, to be left alone so that she could make a strategic plan for her own benefit.
She must have been wondering, as was I, how long Poirot would wait before telling her family all about her confession and Helen Acton’s innocence. He could produce the revelation at any moment—as soon as we reached the room known as ‘Peepers HQ’.
Of course! I recalled that Daisy had nearly referred to its silly nickname in her conversation with Poirot on the coach. Had she not said that her father had summoned her to a room that he ‘infuriatingly’ called … something? And then she had made a quick alteration, to protect herself: that room, in her narrative, became ‘his study’. Of course, if she had uttered the name of Peepers, Poirot might have been able to identify her from that alone.
If I were Daisy Devonport, I thought, I would be angrier with myself than with anyone else. She could so easily have kept her mouth shut. Instead, thanks to her own reckless loquacity, we knew nearly everything. She might not have divulged her motive for murder, and I could not for the life of me imagine why the unfortunate Helen Acton should wish to confess to a crime she had not committed, but the way things were turning out—and also taking into account Poirot’s effervescently high spirits (he was almost bouncing along the corridor ahead of me now, by the side of Oliver Prowd)—I was confident that all of these remaining questions would soon be resolved and we would have the matter of Frank Devonport’s murder nicely wrapped up by the end of the evening.
Goodness me, but we were lucky! If Poirot had not told Daisy the lie that he and I were travelling only as far as Cobham, she would never have uttered so much as a whisper about any murder. Had he told her that we were bound for Kingfisher Hill, she would almost certainly have kept quiet; that would have been too close for safety, even if she had not guessed that his destination was not merely the estate but Little Key specifically.
We arrived finally at Peepers HQ, where we found the others with drinks in hand. They presented an odd little scene. Godfrey and Verna Laviolette were standing with Sidney Devonport near a large window at the farthest end of the room, talking and laughing. Lilian Devonport was seated several feet away from them, facing towards the door. She was slumped in her chair and appeared half asleep. As we walked in she straightened her posture and her eyes cleared. She looked at us—or so I thought at first. Then I realized that it would be more accurate to say that she was looking through us, as if we were transparent. She did not acknowledge our presence with a smile or any words. Nor did she greet her daughter or Oliver Prowd. Her illness was possibly too far advanced for such niceties.
The room we were in was not so much a headquarters for Peepers as a shrine to it. Three different board designs for the game hung on the walls in frames, and an oversized example of a fourth board design lay flat on a table in the centre of the room, surrounded by uneven piles of discs with eyes on them. These had the effect of making one feel rather spied upon. Inside a glass-fronted cabinet, the rules of the game were on display, painted in blue, calligraphy-style, upon a series of stiff boards.
I walked over to the cabinet and tried to concentrate on reading and taking in some of these rules, in case I was later called upon to demonstrate a plausible level of familiarity. Alas, the words danced around my field of vision and I could extract no sense from them. I am sure I was at fault rather than the rule-writers, but I could not persuade my attention to give itself over to Peepers no matter how hard I tried. Instead, I found that my mind kept returning to the puzzle of Joan Blythe, the anguished woman from the coach. I no more believed her story now than I had when I had first heard it, but there was no doubt that Miss Blythe had been afraid of something—perhaps, sincerely, of murder.
Still, the impossibility of the particular story she had chosen to invent still weighed on my mind, as did the fact that the seat she claimed to have been warned against happened to be right next to that of Daisy Devonport, a self-confessed murderer …
I got no further than that before Richard Devonport put a drink into my hand. I thanked him in a tone designed to discourage further conversation. With every passing second I was finding it increasingly unbearable to be in a s
ocial situation when all I wanted was to sit down with a pencil and paper and list all the questions that plagued me.
Richard looked at me searchingly, as if he yearned for something that I could not provide, before moving away. Over by the window, Oliver Prowd and Verna Laviolette were complaining about Alfred Bixby—his vulgar blue and orange coaches; his puffed-up pomposity; his wealth that, they agreed, must have come from a dubious enterprise; his arrogance in naming his firm ‘Kingfisher’ as if the name of the estate, the improper use of which reflected unfavourably upon everyone who lived there, was his to do with as he pleased. There followed a lively discussion of ‘the committee’ and the possibility of compelling Bixby to change the name of his coach company.
Throughout all of this, Lilian Devonport remained in her chair facing away from the rest of us towards the door. She might as well not have been there. Daisy Devonport sat alone in a corner, taking large gulps from the glass she was clutching with both hands. At moments, she looked afraid, then her face would set again in an expression that was as murderous as any I have seen.
Poirot did not approach her. He stood between Godfrey Laviolette and Oliver Prowd and inserted entertaining remarks into the general conversation that made everybody laugh. Verna Laviolette adjusted her position every few seconds as if a photographer had instructed her to try out a variety of different poses for his camera. She looked at me, then over at Daisy, then at Lilian, then fawned over one of Poirot’s witticisms.
I had a strong sense that Verna was not fully part of things in the way that the rest of us were, though what I meant by that was hard to define. Even Lilian and Daisy, at their lonely outposts, seemed more fully immersed in the scene, albeit in an isolated way. There was an authenticity about them both that did not apply to Verna, who seemed constantly alert and in surveillance mode, and also clearly wished to be noticed. She watched meticulously as, one after the other, Oliver Prowd and Richard Devonport approached Daisy and made an effort to find out why she seemed so out of sorts. Daisy waved them both away as if they were irritating flies buzzing around her. Richard seemed upset by this. Oliver did not; he simply shrugged and returned to more amiable company. Doubtless he was accustomed to his fiancée’s variable humours.
The Killings at Kingfisher Hill Page 9
