Hallowe'en Party hp-36

by Agatha Christie

  "And then?" said Poirot.

  "You have presumably heard more or less the developments. From the evidence of handwriting experts, it became clear that the codicil was a complete forgery. It bore only a faint resemblance to Mrs. Llewellyn-Smythe's handwriting, no more than that. Mrs. Smythe had disliked the typewriter and had frequently got Olga to write letters of a personal nature, as far as possible copying her employer's handwriting-sometimes, even, signing the letter with her employer's signature. She had had plenty of practice in doing this. It seems that when Mrs. Llewellyn-Smythe died the girl went one step further and thought that she was proficient enough to make the handwriting acceptable as that of her employer. But that sort of thing won't do with experts. No, indeed it won't."

  "Proceedings were about to be taken to contest the document?"

  "Quite so. There was, of course, the usual legal delay before the proceedings actually came to court. During that period the young lady lost her nerve and well, as you said yourself just now, she-disappeared."

  WHEN Hercule Poirot had taken his leave and departed, Jeremy Fullerton sat before his desk drumming gently with his fingertips. His eyes, however, were far away lost in thought.

  He picked up a document in front of him and dropped his eyes down to it, but without focusing his glance. The discreet buzz of the house telephone caused him to pick up the receiver on his desk.

  "Yes, Miss Miles?"

  "Mr. Holden is here, sir."

  "Yes. Yes, his appointment, I believe, was for nearly three quarters of an hour ago. Did he give any reason for having been so late??

  Yes, yes, I quite see.

  Rather the same excuse he gave last time.

  Will you tell him I've seen another client, and I am now too short of time. Make an appointment with him for next week, will you? We can't have this sort of thing going on."

  "Yes, Mr. Fullerton."

  He replaced the receiver and sat looking thoughtfully down at the document in front of him. He was still not reading it.

  His mind was going over events of the past. Two years close on two years ago and that strange little man this morning with his patent leather shoes and his big moustaches, had brought it back to him, asking all those questions.

  Now he was going over in his own mind a conversation of nearly two years ago.

  He saw again, sitting in the chair opposite him, a girl, a short, stocky figure the olive brown skin, the dark red generous mouth, the heavy cheekbones and the fierceness of the blue eyes that looked into his beneath the heavy, beetling brows. A passionate face, a face full of vitality, a face that had known suffering would probably always know suffering but would never learn to accept suffering. The kind of woman who would fight and protest until the end. Where was she now, he wondered?

  Somehow or other she had managed what had she managed exactly? Who had helped her? Had anyone helped her? Somebody must have done so.

  She was back again, he supposed, in some trouble-stricken spot in Central Europe where she had come from, where she belonged, where she had had to go back to because there was no other course for her to take unless she was content to lose her liberty.

  Jeremy Fullerton was an upholder of the law. He believed in the law, he was contemptuous of many of the magistrates of to-day with their weak sentences, their acceptance of scholastic needs. The students who stole books, the young married women who denuded the supermarkets, the girls who filched money from their employers, the boys who wrecked telephone boxes, none of them in real need, none of them desperate, most of them had known nothing but overindulgence in bringing-up and a fervent belief that anything they could not afford to buy was theirs to take. Yet along with his intrinsic belief in the administration of the law justly, Mr. Fullerton was a man who had compassion. He could be sorry for people. He could be sorry, and was sorry, for Olga Seminoff though he was quite unaffected by the passionate arguments she advanced for herself.

  "I came to you for help. I thought you would help me. You were kind last year.

  You helped me with forms so that I could remain another year in England. So they say to me: 'You need not answer any questions you do not wish to. You can be represented by a lawyer.' So I come to you."

  "The circumstances you have instanced-" and Mr. Fullerton remembered how dryly and coldly he had said that, all the more dryly and coldly because of the pity that lay behind the dryness of the statement "-do not apply. In this case I am not at liberty to act for you legally. I am representing already the Drake family. As you know, I was Mrs. Llewellyn-Smythe's solicitor."

  "But she is dead. She does not want a solicitor when she is dead."

  "She was fond of you," said Mr. Fullerton. "Yes, she was fond of me. That is what I am telling you. That is why she wanted to give me the money."

  "All her money?"

  "Why not? Why not? She did not like her relations."

  "You are wrong. She was very fond of her niece and nephew."

  "Well, then, she may have liked Mr. Drake but she did not like Mrs. Drake. She found her very tiresome. Mrs. Drake interfered. She would not let Mrs. Llewellyn-Smythe do always what she liked. She would not let her eat the food she liked."

  "She is a very conscientious woman, and she tried to get her aunt to obey the doctor's orders as to diet and not too much exercise and many other things."

  "People do not always want to obey a doctor's orders. They do not want to be interfered with by relations. They like living their own lives and doing what they want and having what they want. She had plenty of money. She could have what she wanted! She could have as much as she liked of everything. She was rich rich rich, and she could do what she liked with her money. They have already quite enough money, Mr. and Mrs. Drake.

  They have a fine house and clothes and two cars. They are very well-to-do. Why should they have any more?"

  "They were her only living relations."

  "She wanted me to have the money. She was sorry for me. She knew what I had been through. She knew about my father, arrested by the police and taken away. We never saw him again, my mother and I. And then my mother and how she died.

  All my family died. It is terrible, what I have endured. You do not know what it is like to live in a police state, as I have lived in it.

  No, no. You are on the side of the police. You are not on my side."

  "No," Mr. Fullerton said, "I am not on your side. I am very sorry for what has happened to you, but you've brought this trouble about yourself."

  "That is not true! It is not true that I have done anything I should not do. What have I done? I was kind to her, I was nice to her. I brought her in lots of things that she was not supposed to eat.

  Chocolates and butter. All the time nothing but vegetable fats. She did not like vegetable fats. She wanted butter. She wanted lots of butter."

  "It's not just a question of butter," said Mr. Fullerton.

  "I looked after her, I was nice to her!

  And so she was grateful. And then when she died and I find that in her kindness and her affection she has left a signed paper leaving all her money to me, then those Drakes come along and say I shall not have it.

  They say all sorts of things.

  They say I had a bad influence. And then they say worse things than that. Much worse. They say I wrote the Will myself.

  That is nonsense. She wrote it. She wrote it. And then she sent me out of the room.

  She got the cleaning woman and Jim the gardener. She said they had to sign the paper, not me. Because I was going to get the money. Why should not I have the money? Why should I not have some good luck in my life, some happiness? It seemed so wonderful. All the things I planned to do when I knew about it."

  "I have no doubt, yes, I have no doubt."

  "Why shouldn't I have plans? Why should not I rejoice? I am going to be happy and rich and have all the things I want. What did I do wrong? Nothing. Nothing, I tell you. Nothing"

  "I have tried to explain to you," said Mr. Fullerton.
>
  "That is all lies. You say I tell lies. You say I wrote the paper myself. I did not write it myself. She wrote it. Nobody can say anything different."

  "Certain people say a good many things," said Mr. Fullerton. "Now listen. Stop protesting and listen to me. It is true, is it not, that Mrs. Llewellyn-Smythe in the letters you wrote for her, often asked you to copy her handwriting as nearly as you could? That was because she had an old-fashioned idea that to write typewritten letters to people who are friends or with whom you have a personal acquaintance, is an act of rudeness. That is a survival from Victorian days. Nowadays nobody cares whether they receive handwritten letters or typewritten ones. But to Mrs. Llewellyn-Smythe that was discourtesy. You understand what I am saying?"

  "Yes, I understand. And so she asks me. She says 'Now, Olga' she says. 'These four letters you will answer as I have told you and that you have taken down in shorthand. But you will write them in handwriting and you will make the handwriting as close to mine as possible.' And she told me to practise writing her handwriting, to notice how she made her a's, her b's and her F's and all the different letters. 'So long as it is reasonably like my handwriting,' she said, 'that will do, and then you can sign my name. But I do not want people to think that I am no longer able to write my own letters. Although, as you know, the rheumatism in my wrist is getting worse and I find it more difficult, but I don't want my personal letters typewritten.'"

  "You could have written them in your ordinary handwriting," said Mr. Fullerton, "and put a note at the end saying 'per secretary' or per initials if you liked."

  "She did not want me to do that. She wanted it to be thought that she wrote the letters herself."

  And that, Mr. Fullerton thought, could be true enough. It was very like Louise Llewellyn-Smythe. She was always passionately resentful of the fact that she could no longer do the things she used to do, that she could no longer walk far or go up hills quickly or perform certain actions with her hands, her right hand especially. She wanted to be able to say "I'm perfectly well, perfectly all right, and there's nothing I can't do if I set my mind to it." Yes, what Olga was telling him now was certainly true, and because it was true it was one of the reasons why the codicil appended to the last Will properly drawn out and signed by Louise Llewellyn-Smythe had been accepted at first without suspicion. It was in his own office, Mr. Fullerton reflected, that suspicions had arisen because both he and his younger partner knew Mrs. Llewellyn-Smythe's handwriting very well. It was young Cole who had first said, "You know, I really can't believe that Louise Llewellyn-Smythe wrote that codicil. I know she had arthritis lately but look at these specimens of her own writing that I've brought along from amongst her papers to show you. There's something wrong about that codicil."

  Mr. Fullerton had agreed that there was something wrong about it. He had said they would take expert opinion on this handwriting question.

  The answer had been quite definite. Separate opinions had not varied.

  The handwriting of the codicil was definitely not that of Louise Llewellyn-Smythe. If Olga had been less greedy, Mr. Fullerton thought, if she had, been content to write a codicil beginning as this one had done-"Because of her great care and attention to me and the affection and kindness she has shown me, I leave-" That was how it had begun, that was how it could have begun, and if it had gone on to specify a good round sum of money left to the devoted au pair girl, the relations might have considered it over-done, but they would have accepted it without questioning. But to cut out the relations altogether, the nephew who had been his aunt's residuary legatee in the last four wills she had made during a period of nearly twenty years, to leave everything to the stranger Olga Seminoff-that was not in Louise Llewellyn-Smythe's character.

  In fact, a plea of undue influence could upset such a document anyway.

  No. She had been greedy, this hot, passionate child. Possibly Mrs. Llewellyn-Smythe had told her that some money would be I left her because of her kindness, because of her attention, because of a fondness the old lady was beginning to feel for this girl who fulfilled all her whims, who did whatever she asked her. And that had opened up a vista for Olga. She would have everything.

  The old lady should leave everything to her, and she would have all the money. All the money and the house and the clothes and the jewels.

  Everything. A greedy girl. And now retribution had caught up with her.

  And Mr. Fullerton, against his will, against his legal instincts and against a good deal more, felt sorry for her. Very sorry for her. She had known suffering since she was a child, had known the rig ours of a police state, had lost her parents, lost a brother and sister and known injustice and fear, and it had developed in her a trait that she had no doubt been born with but which she had never been able so far to indulge. It had developed a childish passionate greed.

  "Everyone is against me," said Olga. "Everyone. You are all against me. You are not fair because I am a foreigner, because I do not belong to this country, because I do not know what to say, what to do. What can I do? Why do you not tell me what I can do?"

  "Because I do not really think there is anything much you can do," said Mr. Fullerton. "Your best chance is to make a clean breast of things."

  "If I say what you want me to say, it will be all lies and not true.

  She made that Will. She wrote it down there. She told me to go out of the room while the others signed it."

  "There is evidence against you, you know. There are people who will say that Mrs. Llewellyn-Smythe often did not know what she was signing. She had several documents of different kinds, and she did not always re-read what was put before her."

  "Well, then she did not know what she was saying."

  "My dear child," said Mr. Fullerton, "your best hope is the fact that you are a first offender, that you are a foreigner, that you understand the English language only in a rather rudimentary form. In that case you may get off with a minor sentence or you may, indeed, get put on probation."

  "Oh, words. Nothing but words. I shall be put in prison and never let out again."

  "Now you are talking nonsense," Mr. Fullerton said.

  "It would be better if I ran away, if I ran away and hid myself so that nobody could find me."

  "Once there is a warrant out for your arrest, you would be found."

  "Not if I did it quickly. Not if I went at once. Not if someone helped me. I could get away. Get away from England.

  In a boat or a plane. I could find someone who forges passports or visas, or whatever you have to have. Someone who will do something for me. I have friends. I have people who are fond of me. Somebody could help me to disappear. That is what is needed. I could put on a wig. I could walk about on crutches."

  "Listen," Mr. Fullerton had said, and he had spoken then with authority, "I am sorry for you. I will recommend you to a lawyer who will do his best for you. You can't hope to disappear. You are talking like a child."

  "I have got enough money. I have saved money." And then she had said, "You have tried to be kind. Yes, I believe that. But you will not do anything because it is all the law the law. But someone will help me. Someone will. And I shall get away where nobody will ever find me."

  Nobody, Mr. Fullerton thought, had found her. He wondered, yes; he wondered very much where she was or could be now.

  ADMITTED to Apple Trees, Hercule Poirot was shown into the drawing-room and told that Mrs. Drake would not be long.

  In passing through the hall he heard a hum of female voices from behind what he took to be the dining-room door.

  Poirot crossed to the drawing-room window and surveyed the neat and pleasant garden. Well laid out, kept studiously in control. Rampant autumn michaelmas daisies still survived, tied up severely to sticks; chrysanthemums had not yet relinquished life. There were still a persistent rose or two scorning the approach of winter.

  Poirot could discern no sign as yet of the preliminary activities of a landscape gardener. All was care and convention. He wondere
d if Mrs. Drake had been one too many for Michael Garfield. He had spread his lures in vain. It showed every sign of remaining a splendidly kept suburban garden.

  The door opened.

  "I am sorry to have kept you waiting, Monsieur Poirot," said Mrs. Drake.

  Outside in the hall there was a diminishing hum of voices as various people took their leave and departed.

  "It's our church Christmas fete," explained Mrs. Drake. "A Committee Meeting for arrangements for it and all the rest of it. These things always go on much longer than they ought to, of course. Somebody always objects to something, or has a good idea-the good idea usually being a perfectly impossible one."

  There was a slight acerbity in her tone.

  Poirot could well imagine that Rowena Drake would put things down as quite absurd, firmly and definitely. He could understand well enough from remarks he had heard from Spence's sister, from hints of what other people had said and from various other sources, that Rowena Drake was that dominant type of personality whom everyone expects to run the show, and whom nobody has much affection for while she is doing it. He could imagine, too, that her conscientiousness had not been the kind to be appreciated by an elderly relative who was herself of the same type. Mrs. Llewellyn-Smythe, he gathered, had come here to live so as to be near to her nephew and his wife, and that the wife had readily undertaken the supervision and care of her husband's aunt as far as she could do so without actually living in the house. Mrs. Llewellyn-Smythe had probably acknowledged in her own mind that she owed a great deal to Rowena, and had at the same time resented what she had no doubt thought of as her bossy ways.