Blackpool (A Jules Poiret Mystery Book 27)

by Frank Howell Evans

  “How so, old boy?” he asked.

  “Well, these are the facts. Last winter my wife and I found ourselves in Istanbul. It was the last day we were there and I asked the hotel manager where I could get a decent meal. He directed me to a little place opposite his establishment. He was quite right, but opposite is a dangerous word when one decent building stands opposite five or six squalid ones. I must have mistaken the door. It opened with difficulty, and then only on darkness, but as I turned back, the door behind me closed and I couldn’t get it to open. There was nothing to do but to walk forward, which I did. I went through passage after passage, in the dark. Then I came to a flight of steps, and then to a blind door, secured by a latch of elaborate ironwork, which I could only see by touch, but which I was able to open at last. A multitude of small lamps on the floor showed merely the feet of some huge statue. It was some sort of an idol.”

  “I say!” said Haven. “What happened then?”

  “I had begun, in the dim light, to guess that it was a place of worship, not without horror, when a more horrible thing happened. A door opened silently in the temple wall behind me and a man came out, with a red face and a big black mustache. He had a carved smile on his face, and ivory teeth.”

  “What did he do?” asked Haven, with bated breath, ignoring Poiret’s annoyed glances.

  “It was not what he did, but what he said,” said his friend. “If you have only seen the feet,” he said, still smiling, “we will be very gentle. You will only be tortured and die.”

  “I say!” said Haven, ignoring Poiret’s deep sigh.

  “He said then, “If you have seen the face, still we will be very moderate with you. You will only be tortured and live.”

  Williams paused for a moment.

  “I say!” said Haven again.

  Poiret threw his hands in the air as if giving up on his impressionable friend.

  “I ran, Mr. Poiret, like the wind. Behind me I heard him say, “May a hair slay you like a sword, and a breath bite you like a snake. May you die many times.”

  “I say! What a harrowing experience, old boy,” said Haven, shaken. “I’m happy you made it through.”

  Williams was silent. Poiret unaffectedly sat down on a bench and looked at the daisies.

  Then their host continued, “Idina, of course, with her jolly common sense, pooh-poohed all my fears. Well, I’ll simply tell you, in the fewest words, the three things that have happened since and you shall judge which of us is right.”

  He lit a cigarette and offered his guests one.

  “The first happened on the boat from Calais to Dover. I woke in the middle of the night, and lay thinking of nothing in particular, when I felt a faint tickling thing, like something trailing across my throat. I shrank back, but the pressure on my throat only increased. I fought with this thing around my neck and Idina remained asleep, no matter how hard I poked her.”

  “I say!” came in Haven.

  “Merci, mon ami, for saying it, because Poiret, he would not have said it,” said his friend, shaking his head.

  “At last I freed myself from my tormentor and it turned out to be my own tie tied in the way of a hangman’s noose and tied to the bed post. The second happened at a hotel in Bournemouth. I woke again in the dark with a sensation that could not be put in colder or more literal words than that I was drowning in air. I couldn’t breathe. I dashed my head against walls until I smashed through a window, and fell rather than jumped into the garden below. Thank God, my wife had already left for breakfast, early that morning. No matter I fear it was my mental state she took seriously, and not my story.”

  “When will it end?” asked Haven rhetorically.

  “The third happened in London, at our warehouse. As it happens our building overlooks the Thames, which almost comes up to our window-sills, save for a flat outer wall. One day, at sunset, as I walked to the window, I felt something pass my head at high speed and lodge itself in the wall behind me. It was an arrow.”

  Poiret looked at his friend, but he was stunned into silence. Poiret threw away his cigarette, and rose with a wistful look. “Do you have the bows and the arrows, Monsieur?” he asked.

  “Plenty of those,” replied Williams. “By all means come into my study.”

  As they entered the house they passed Mrs. Williams, now fully dressed. She handed Poiret his lost glasses. He thanked her and she continued on her way to the kitchen, where they heard her talk to the cook. In Joshua’s study and den of curios Poiret did not seem, like Haven, interested in the weapons hanging on the wall, but in the books lining a part of the wall. So interested was he in reading one particular book that he dropped it, when he heard Williams’s voice next to him say, “Lunch is ready.”

  Poiret laughed mildly, but without offence. “This is,” he said, laying his hand on the big book he had dropped, “a dictionary of the drugs and such things. But it is too large to hold in the hands.” He picked up the large book and put it back in its place among the other ones, and there seemed again the faintest touch of hurry and embarrassment.

  “These weapons,” said the detective, who seemed anxious to change the subject, “they are still in use by you and Madame Williams?”

  “Yes,” answered Williams, “though, we don’t get much time for play with the travelling for the company and all.” He looked up. “The bell is ringing for those who want lunch.”

  Their host led the way to the dining room. The detective looked puzzled. “He can’t have been at the dustbin,” he muttered. “Not in those clothes. Or was he there before?”

  Poiret, touching other people, was as sensitive as a barometer. As the day progressed, however, he seemed to become about as sensitive as a rhinoceros. By no social law, rigid or implied, could he be supposed to linger round the lunch of the hotel supplies merchant and his wife, just before they set off for the railway station, but he lingered, though Haven had nodded to him gently, reminding him that it was the decent thing to do to leave. Poiret, however, stayed and covered his stay with torrents of amusing but quite needless conversation. He was the more puzzling because he did not seem to want any lunch. As one after another of the most exquisitely balanced dishes, accompanied with their appropriate vintages, were laid before the others, he only repeated that it was one of his fast-days, to Haven’s surprise and munched on a piece of bread and drank from a glass of cold water. His talk, however, was exuberant.

  “Madame,” said Poiret, “we know Monsieur Williams, he loves all food, but what is it that you love most of all?”

  Idina turned her pretty head to him and said with a pretty smile, “Scrambled eggs, ever since I was a little girl.”

  “Madame,” said Poiret, springing up and taking her hand in his, “please to allow me to show you my scrambled eggs. They are magnifique!”

  Without waiting for a reply he rushed out of the room and into the kitchen. There he was able to persuade a confused and suspicious cook to let him cook two scrambled eggs. At last she gave in and Poiret, taking an apron from a chair, began his work. Five minutes later, he was able to enter the dining room with a dish of scrambled eggs. He closed the door behind him.

  “Et voila!” he said putting the dish in front of the lady of the house as her husband and his friend looked on amused.

  Poiret took a small fork from the table and wiping it clean with a napkin, handed it to her.

  “Oh, Mr. Poiret,” she said sweetly, “you didn’t have to take all the trouble.”

  “Madame,” said Poiret, “but it is my pleasure to cook the meal, because every meal, it could be the last one.”

  Three smiles disappeared. Poiret’s remained. Soon the other smiles appeared again as the sun before a dark cloud.

  “It’s delicious,” said Mrs. Williams, eating the eggs. “What did you put in it?”

  “Ah, but Madame,” said Poiret, smiling even more broadly, “the magician, he does not tell the ingredients of his illusions. But,” Poiret raised his finger in the air, “for you, Ma
dame, I will demonstrate the trick.”

  He took a few steps back and out of his coat pocket he took a silver cruet. “The salt,” he said. He put it on the table. Idina stopped eating. He took another silver cruet from his pocket. “The pepper,” he continued.

  “That’s my cruet set,” said Williams surprised as he leaned forward a little and clutched the tablecloth. “I thought it had vanished with the burglar.”

  Idina wiped her mouth with a napkin. Then Poiret was silent as every move of his hand introduced another silver cruet to his captive audience. Soon there were a dozen cruets on the table and Idina was as pale as a ghost. She sprang up and ran to the door, but Poiret was quicker. He stood in front of the door.

  “Why are you leaving, Madame?”

  “Let me go,” she cried. “I’m going to be sick.”

  “Why, Madame?”

  “Let me go,” she repeated.

  Williams stood up. As did Haven, frowning, confused.

  “Madame, there are only the spices in the cruets. If you suspect the poison, it is not Poiret, who put it there.”

  She took a few steps back and looked at the little man with open mouth.

  “What is going on?” asked Mr. Williams.

  “Please to ask your wife, Monsieur, she has tried to poison you with the spices in the cruets.”

  It was silent for a moment as husband and wife looked at each other.

  “I don’t believe it,” said Williams.

  “Let me go!” cried his wife as she lunged for the door. Poiret moved to the side. She opened the door and as the three men followed her out of the door, she ran up the stairs and locked herself up in the bathroom, from where they heard her vomit profusely.

  “I wonder what’s the matter with her?” said Williams.

  “Your wife, Monsieur,” said Poiret, gravely, “she thinks Poiret, he put the spices in the cruets in her scrambled eggs. Poiret, he suspected her of trying to murder you, after he found the cruets in the dustbin, but when he saw her reaction, after showing her the innocent cruets, he knows for sure.”

  Williams shook his head.

  “Monsieur, it is not the strange mysterious gang of idolaters, who wish to harm you. It is your wife.”

  Williams shook his head again.

  “The tie around your neck, Monsieur, she was there. The poisonous gas of the fireplace in your hotel room, she was there, Monsieur. The arrow at your warehouse, she was there, Monsieur. She is always there, Monsieur, in the dark and today, Poiret, he tricks her to come out into the sunlight.”

  It was silent for a moment as the three men stood silently at the foot of the stairs and looked up. Williams sighed.

  “It’s not a good thing, you did, today, Poiret,” he said. “It was a bad thing.”

  “Monsieur, Poiret, he has prevented the murder!” said Poiret, raising his eyebrows and voice in anger. “Your wife, she is trying to murder you!”

  “Yes, I know,” said the other man.

  “You know, Monsieur?”

  Williams raised his hands in a desperate manner. “What am I supposed to do?”

  “Go to the police, Monsieur.”

  “I love her.”

  “Even though she wishes you harm?”

  “Even now,” Williams answered.

  Poiret looked at the big red face, thinning hair and protruding belly of their host as he grabbed the handrail and slowly walked up the stairs.

  Haven shook his head. “I don’t understand it,” he said. “Did she want to murder him, because she wished to be free to marry me?”

  Poiret’s mouth opened in astonishment.

  “Non, mon ami, love, it has nothing to do with the wish of Madame Williams to end the life of her husband or his reasons to blame the attempts on his life on the idolaters.”

  They heard Williams knock on the door of the bathroom and calmly ask his wife to open the door. Poiret listened for a moment, then turned around and took his coat, hat and walking stick from the coatrack. That moment they heard Idina open the door of the bathroom and embrace her husband, sobbing loudly. They could hear his reassuring words. Their conversation did not sound angry or even unhappy.

  “Let us go from this house, mon ami,” Poiret said. “The love and the hate, the truth and the lie, it is tainted here. It must not affect the mind of Poiret, for he needs clarity.”

  “Should we really, old boy?” asked Haven looking up the stairs as Poiret opened the door.

  “Not to fear, mon ami, the light of truth has shined its disinfectant ray on the mind of Madame Williams. She has been, how do you say, clipped like the wings of the adventurous bird.”

  Haven nodded, took his coat and hat and stepped through the door, which his friend was holding open for him. Poiret followed his friend into the fresh air of a clear summer’s day in Blackpool.

  The End

  Jules Poiret Mystery Series

  Murder on the Liverpool Express

  The Murder of Lady Malvern

  Look into my Eyes

  Panto

  The Painter’s Easel

  Murder at Land’s End

  The Five Casks