Hallowe'en Party hp-36

by Agatha Christie

  "She was how can I put it? not important. She had rather an ugly voice.

  Shrill. Really, that's about all I remember about her. I'm not particularly fond of children. Mostly they bore me. Joyce bored me.

  When she talked, she talked about herself."

  "She was not interesting?"

  Michael Garfield looked slightly surprised.

  "I shouldn't think so," he said.

  "Does she have to be?"

  "It is my view that people devoid of interest are unlikely to be murdered.

  People are murdered for gain, for fear or for love. One takes one's choice, but one has to have a starting point-" He broke off and glanced at his watch.

  "I must proceed. I have an engagement to fulfill. Once more, my felicitations."

  He went on down, following the path and picking his way carefully. He was glad that for once he was not wearing his tight patent leather shoes.

  Michael Garfield was not the only person he was to meet in the sunk garden that day. As he reached the bottom he noted that three paths led from here in slightly different directions. At the entrance of the middle path, sitting on a fallen trunk of a tree, a child was awaiting him. She made this clear at once.

  "I expect you are Mr. Hercule Poirot, aren't you?" she said.

  Her voice was clear, almost bell-like in tone. She was a fragile creature. Something about her matched the sunk garden.

  A dryad or some elf-like being.

  "That is my name," said Poirot.

  "I came to meet you," said the child. "You are coming to tea with us, aren't you?"

  "With Mrs. Butler and Mrs. Oliver? Yes."

  "That's right. That's Mummy and Aunt Ariadne." She added with a note of censure: "You're rather late."

  "I am sorry. I stopped to speak to someone."

  "Yes, I saw you. You were talking to Michael, weren't you?"

  "You know him?"

  "Of course. We've lived here quite a long time. I know everybody."

  Poirot wondered how old she was. He asked her. She said, "I'm twelve years old. I'm going to boarding-school next year."

  "Will you be sorry or glad?"

  "I don't really know till I get there. I don't think I like this place very much, not as much as I did." She added, "I think you'd better come with me, now, please."

  "But certainly. But certainly. I apologise for being late."

  "Oh, it doesn't really matter."

  "What's your name?"

  "Miranda."

  "I think it suits you," said Poirot.

  "Are you thinking of Shakespeare?"

  "Yes. Do you have it in lessons?"

  "Yes. Miss Ernlyn read us some of it. I asked Mummy to read some more. I liked it. It has a wonderful sound. A brave new world. There isn't anything really like that, is there?"

  "You don't believe in it?"

  "Do you?"

  "There is always a brave new world," said Poirot, "but only, you know, for very special people. The lucky ones. The ones who carry the making of that world within themselves."

  "Oh, I see," said Miranda, with an air of apparently seeing with the utmost ease, though what she saw Poirot rather wondered.

  She turned, started along the path and said, "We go this way. It's not very far. You can go through the hedge of our garden."

  Then she looked back over her shoulder and pointed, saying:

  "In the middle there, that's where the fountain was."

  "A fountain?"

  "Oh, years ago. I suppose it's still there, underneath the shrubs and the azaleas and the other things. It was all broken up, you see.

  People took bits of it away but nobody has put a new one there."

  "It seems a pity."

  "I don't know. I'm not sure. Do you like fountains very much?"

  "Ca depend," said Poirot.

  "I know some French," said Miranda. "That's it depends, isn't it?"

  "You are quite right. You seem very well educated."

  "Everyone says Miss Ernlyn is a very fine teacher. She's our head-mistress. She's awfully strict and a bit stern, but she's terribly interesting sometimes in the things she tells us."

  "Then she is certainly a good teacher," said Hercule Poirot. "You know this place very well you seem to know all the paths. Do you come here often?"

  "Oh yes, it's one of my favourite walks. Nobody knows where I am, you see, when I come here. I sit in trees-on the branches, and watch things. I like that.

  Watching things lhappen."

  "What sort of tthings?"

  "Mostly birds and squirrels. Birds are very quarrelsome, aren't they? Not like in the bit of poetry that says 'birds in their little nests agree". They don't really, do they? And I watch squirrels."

  "And you watch people?"

  "Sometimes. But there aren't many people who come here."

  "Why not, I wonder?"

  "I suppose they are afraid."

  "Why should they be afraid?"

  "Because someone was killed here long ago. Before it wasn't a garden, I mean. It was a quarry once anod then there was a gravel pile or a sand pile and that's where they found her. In that. Do you think the old saying is true-About you're born to be hanged or born to be drowned?"

  "Nobody is born to be hanged nowadays. You do not hang people any longer in this country."

  "But they hang them in some other countries. They hang them in the streets.

  I've read it in the papers."

  "Ah. Do you think that is a good thing or a bad thing?"

  Miranda's response was not strictly in answer to the question, but Poirot felt that it was perhaps meant to be.

  "Joyce was drowned," she said. "Mummy didn't want to tell me, but that was rather silly, I think, don't you? I mean, I'm twelve years old."

  "Was Joyce a friend of yours?"

  "Yes. She was a great friend in a way. She told me very interesting things sometimes.

  All about elephants and rajahs.

  She'd been to India once. I wish I'd been to India. Joyce and I used to tell each other all our secrets. I haven't so much to tell as Mummy. Mummy's been to Greece, you know. That's where she met Aunt Ariadne, but she didn't take me."

  "Who told you about Joyce?"

  "Mrs. Perring. She's our cook. She was talking to Mrs. Minden who comes and cleans. Someone held her head down in a bucket of water."

  "Have you any idea who that someone was?"

  "I shouldn't think so. They didn't seem to know, but then they're both rather stupid really."

  "Do you know, Miranda?"

  "I wasn't there. I had a sore throat and a temperature so Mummy wouldn't take me to the party. But I think I could know.

  Because she was drowned. That's why I asked if you thought people were born to be drowned. We go through the hedge here. Be careful of your clothes."

  Poirot followed her lead. The entrance through the hedge from the Quarry Garden was more suited to the build of his childish guide with her elfin slimness it was practically a highway to her. She was solicitous for Poirot, however, warning him of adjacent thorn bushes and holding back the more prickly components of the hedge. They emerged at a spot in the garden adjacent to a compost heap and turned a corner by a derelict cucumber frame to where two dustbins stood. From there on a small neat garden mostly planted with roses gave easy access to the small bungalow house. Miranda led the way through an open french window, announcing with the modest pride of a collector who has just secured a sample of a rare beetle:

  "I've got him all right."

  "Miranda, you didn't bring him through the hedge, did you? You ought to have gone round by the path at the side gate."

  "This is a better way," said Miranda. "Quicker and shorter."

  "And much more painful, I suspect."

  "I forget," said Mrs. Oliver "I did introduce you, didn't I, to my friend Mrs. Butler?"

  "Of course. In the post office."

  The introduction in question had been a matter of a few moments while there h
ad been a queue in front of the counter.

  Poirot was better able now to study Mrs. Oliver's friend at close quarters. Before it had been a matter of a slim woman in a disguising head-scarf and a mackintosh.

  Judith Butler was a woman of about thirty-five, and whilst her daughter resembled a dryad or a wood-nymph, Judith had more the attributes of a water spirit. She could have been a Rhine maiden. Her long blonde hair hung limply on her shoulders, she was delicately made with a rather long face and faintly hollow cheeks, whilst above them were big sea green eyes fringed with long eyelashes.

  "I'm very glad to thank you properly, Monsieur Poirot," said Mrs. Butler. "It was very good of you to come down here when Ariadne asked you."

  "When my friend, Mrs. Oliver, asks me to do anything I always have to do it," said Poirot.

  "What nonsense," said Mrs. Oliver.

  "She was sure, quite sure, that you would be able to find out all about this beastly thing. Miranda, dear, will you go into the kitchen?

  You'll find the scones on the wire tray above the oven."

  Miranda disappeared. She gave, as she went, a knowledgeable smile directed at her mother that said as plainly as a smile could say,

  "She's getting me out of the way for a short time."

  "I tried not to let her know," said Miranda's mother, "about this this horrible thing that happened. But I suppose that was a forlorn chance from the start."

  "Yes indeed," said Poirot. "There's nothing that goes round any residential centre with the same rapidity as news of a disaster, and particularly an unpleasant disaster. And anyway," he added, "one cannot go long through life without knowing what goes on around one. And children seem particularly apt at that sort of thing."

  "I don't know if it was Burns or Sir Walter Scott who said 'There's a chield among you taking notes'," said Mrs. Oliver, "but he certainly knew what he was talking about."

  "Joyce Reynolds certainly seems to have noticed such a thing as a murder," said Mrs. Butler. "One can hardly believe it."

  "Believe that Joyce noticed it?"

  "I meant believe that if she saw such a thing she never spoke about it earlier.

  That seems very unlike Joyce."

  "The first thing that everybody seems to tell me here," said Poirot, in a mild voice, "is that this girl, Joyce Reynolds, was a liar."

  "I suppose it's possible," said Judith Butler, "that a child might make up a thing and then it might turn out to be true?"

  "That is certainly the focal point from which we start," said Poirot. "Joyce Reynolds was unquestionably murdered."

  "And you have started. Probably you know already all about it," said Mrs. Oliver.

  "Madame, do not ask impossibilities of me. You are always in such a hurry."

  "Why not?" said Mrs. Oliver. "Nobody would ever get anything done nowadays if they weren't in a hurry."

  Miranda returned at this moment with a plateful of scones.

  "Shall I put them down here?" she asked. "I expect you've finished talking by now, haven't you? Or is there anything else you would like me to get from the kitchen?"

  There was a gentle malice in her voice.

  Mrs. Butler lowered the Georgian silver teapot to the fender, switched on an electric kettle which had been turned off just before it came to the boil, duly filled the teapot and served the tea. Miranda handed hot scones and cucumber sandwiches with a serious elegance of manner.

  "Ariadne and I met in Greece," said Judith.

  "I fell into the sea," said Mrs. Oliver, "when we were coming back from one of the islands. It had got rather rough and the sailors always say 'jump' and, of course, they say jump just when the thing's at its furthest point which makes it come right for you, but you don't think that can possibly happen and so you dither and you lose your nerve and you jump when it looks close and, of course, that's the moment when it goes far away." She paused for breath. "Judith helped fish me out and it made a kind of bond between us, didn't it?"

  "Yes, indeed," said Mrs. Butler.

  "Besides, I liked your Christian name," she added. "It seemed very appropriate, somehow."

  "Yes, I suppose it is a Greek name," said Mrs. Oliver. "It's my own, you know. I didn't just make it up for literary purposes. But nothing Ariadne-like has ever happened to me. I've never been deserted on a Greek island by my own true love or anything like that."

  Poirot raised a hand to his moustache in order to hide the slight smile that he could not help coming to his lips as he envisaged Mrs. Oliver in the role of a deserted Greek maiden.

  "We can't all live up to our names," said Mrs. Butler.

  "No, indeed. I can't see you in the role of cutting off your lover's head. That is the way it happened, isn't it, Judith and Holofernes, I mean?"

  "It was her patriotic duty," said Mrs. Butler, "for which, if I remember rightly, she was highly commended and rewarded."

  "I'm not really very well up in Judith and Holofernes. It's the Apochrypha, isn't it? Still, if one comes to think of it, people do give other people their children, I mean some very queer names, don't they? Who was the one who hammered some nails in someone's head? Jael or Sisera. I never remember which is the man or which is the woman there. Jael, I think.

  I don't think I remember any child having been christened Jael."

  "She laid butter before him in a lordly dish," said Miranda unexpectedly, pausing as she was about to remove the tea-tray.

  "Don't look at me," said Judith Butler to her friend, "it wasn't I who introduced Miranda to the Apochrypha. That's her school training,"

  "Rather unusual for schools nowadays, isn't it?" said Mrs. Oliver. "They give them ethical ideas instead, don't they?"

  "Not Miss Ernlyn," said Miranda. "She says that if we go to church nowadays we only get the modern version of the Bible read to us in the lessons and things, and that it has no literary merit whatsoever.

  We should at least know the fine prose and blank verse sometimes of the Authorised Version. I enjoyed the story of Jael and Sisera very much," she added. "It's not a thing," she said meditatively, "that I should ever have thought of doing myself. Hammering nails, I mean into someone's head when they were asleep."

  "I hope not indeed," said her mother.

  "And how would you dispose of your enemies, Miranda?" asked Poirot.

  "I should be very kind," said Miranda in a gently contemplative tone. "It would be more difficult, but I'd rather have it that way because I don't like hurting things. I'd use a sort of drug that gives people euthanasia. They would go to sleep and have beautiful dreams and they just wouldn't wake up." She lifted some tea cups and the bread and butter plate.

  "I'll wash up. Mummy," she said, "if you like to take Monsieur Poirot to look at the garden. There are still some Queen Elizabeth roses at the back of the border."

  She went out of the room carefully carrying the tea-tray.

  "She's an astonishing child, Miranda," said Mrs. Oliver.

  "You have a very beautiful daughter, Madame," said Poirot.

  "Yes, I think she is beautiful now. One doesn't know what they will look like by the time they grow up. They acquire puppy fat and look like well-fattened pigs sometimes. But now-now she is like a wood-nymph."

  "One does not wonder that she is fond of the Quarry Garden which adjoins your house."

  "I wish she wasn't so fond of it sometimes.

  One gets nervous about people wandering about in isolated places, even if they are quite near people or a village.

  One's-oh, one's frightened all the time nowadays. That's why-why you've got to find out why this awful thing happened to Joyce, Monsieur Poirot. Because until we know who that was, we shan't feel safe for a minute about our children, I mean.

  Take Monsieur Poirot out in the garden, will you, Ariadne? I'll join you in a minute or two."

  She took the remaining two cups and a plate and went into the kitchen.

  Poirot and Mrs. Oliver went out through the french window. The small garden was like most autumn gardens. I
t retained a few candles of golden rod and michaelmas daisies in a border, and some Queen Elizabeth roses held their pink statuesque heads up high.

  Mrs. Oliver walked rapidly down to where there was a stone bench, sat down, and motioned Poirot to sit down beside her.

  "You said you thought Miranda was like a wood-nymph," she said. "What do you think of Judith?"

  "I think Judith's name ought to be Undine," said Poirot.

  "A water-spirit, yes. Yes, she does look as though she'd just come out of the Rhine or the sea or a forest pool or something.

  Her hair looks as though it had been dipped in water. Yet there's nothing untidy or scatty about her, is there?"

  "She, too, is a very lovely woman," said Poirot.

  "What do you think about her?"

  "I have not had time to think as yet. I just think that she is beautiful and attractive and that something is giving her very great concern."

  "Well, of course, wouldn't it?"

  "What I would like, Madame, is for you to tell me what you know or think about her."

  "Well, I got to know her very well on the cruise. You know, one does make quite intimate friends. Just one or two people. The rest of them, I mean, they like each other and all that, but you don't really go to any trouble to see them again.

  But one or two you do. Well, Judith was one of the ones I did want to see again."

  "You did not know her before the cruise?"

  "No."

  "But you know something about her?"

  "Well, just ordinary things. She's a widow," said Mrs. Oliver. "Her husband died a good many years ago he was an air pilot. He was killed in a car accident.

  One of those pile-up things, I think it was, coming off the M what-is-it that runs near here on to the ordinary road one evening, or something of that kind. He left her rather badly off, I imagine. She was very broken up about it, I think. She doesn't like talking about him."

  "Is Miranda her only child?"

  "Yes. Judith does some part-time secretarial work in the neighbourhood, but she hasn't got a fixed job."

  "Did she know the people who lived at the Quarry House?"

  "You mean old Colonel and Mrs. Weston?"

  "I mean the former owner, Mrs. Llewellyn-Smythe, wasn't it?"

  "I think so. I think I've heard that name mentioned. But she died two or three years ago, so of course one doesn't hear about her much.