by Mark Place
"A long gaol sentence, perhaps. Merely to be fined, and the fine paid by indulgent relatives, makes little impression."
"One has to remember," said Rowena Drake, "that there are young people at an age when it is vital that they should continue with their studies if they are to have the chance of doing well in life."
"The sacred cow of education," said Hercule Poirot.
"That is a phrase I have heard uttered," he added quickly, "by people - well, should I say - people who ought to know. People who themselves hold academic posts of some seniority."
"They do not perhaps make enough allowances for youth, for a bad bringing up. Broken homes."
"So you think they need something other than gaol sentences?"
"Proper remedial treatment," said Rowena Drake firmly.
"And that will make (another old-fashioned proverb) a silk purse out of a sow's ear? You do not believe in the maxim 'the fate of every man have we bound about his neck'?"
Mrs Drake looked extremely doubtful and slightly displeased.
"An Islamic saying, I believe," said Poirot.
Mrs Drake looked unimpressed.
"I hope," she said, "we do not take our ideas - or perhaps I should say our ideals - from the Middle East."
"One must accept facts," said Poirot, "and a fact that is expressed by modern biologists - Western biologists," he hastened to add, "seems to suggest very strongly that the root of a person's actions lies in his genetic make-up. That a murderer of twenty-four was a murderer in potential at two or three or four years old. Or of course a mathematician or a musical genius."
"We are not discussing murderers," said Mrs Drake. "My husband died as a result of an accident. An accident caused by a careless and badly adjusted personality.
Whoever the boy or young man was, there is always the hope of eventual adjustment to a belief and acceptance that it is a duty to consider others, to feel an abhorrence if you have taken life unawares, simply out of what may be described as criminal carelessness that was not really criminal in intent."
"You are quite sure, therefore, that it was not criminal intent?"
"I should doubt it very much." Mrs Drake looked slightly surprised. "I do not think that the police ever seriously considered that possibility. I certainly did not. It was an accident. A very tragic accident which altered the pattern of many lives, including my own."
"You say we're not discussing murderers," said Poirot. "But in the case of Joyce that is just what we are discussing. There was no accident about that. Deliberate hands pushed that child's head down into water, holding her there till death occurred. Deliberate intent."
"I know. I know. It's terrible. I don't like to think of it, to be reminded of it."
She got up, moving about restlessly. Poirot pushed on relentlessly. "We are still presented with a choice there. We still have to find the motive involved."
"It seems to me that such a crime must have been quite motiveless."
"You mean committed by someone mentally disturbed to the extent of enjoying killing someone? Presumably killing someone young and immature."
"One does hear of such cases. What is the original cause of them is difficult to find out. Even psychiatrists do not agree."
"You refuse to accept a simpler explanation?"
She looked puzzled. "Simpler?"
"Someone not mentally disturbed, not a possible case for psychiatrists to disagree over. Somebody perhaps who just wanted to be safe."
"Safe? Oh, you mean -"
"The girl had boasted that same day, some hours previously, that she had seen someone commit a murder."
"Joyce," said Mrs Drake, with calm certainty, "was really a very silly little girl. Not, I am afraid, always very truthful."
"So everyone has told me," said Hercule Poirot. "I am beginning to believe, you know, that what everybody has told me must be right," he added with a sigh. "It usually is."
He rose to his feet, adopting a different manner.
"I must apologise, Madame. I have talked of painful things to you, things that do not truly concern me here. But it seemed from what Miss Whittaker told me -"
"Why don't you find out more from her?"
"You mean -?"
"She is a teacher. She knows, much better than I can, what potentialities (as you have called them) exist amongst the children she teached." She paused and then said: "Miss Emlyn, too."
"The head-mistress?" Poirot looked surprised.
"Yes. She knows things. I mean, she is a natural psychologist. You said I might have ideas - half-formed ones - as to who killed Joyce. I haven't - but I think Miss Emlyn might."
"This is interesting..."
"I don't mean she has evidence. I mean she just knows. She could tell you - but I don't think she will."
"I begin to see," said Poirot, "that I have still a long way to go. People know things - but they will not tell them to me."
He looked thoughtfully at Rowena Drake.
"Your aunt, Mrs Llewellyn-Smythe, had an au pair girl who looked after her, a foreign girl."
"You seem to have got hold of all the local gossip." Rowena spoke dryly. "Yes, that is so. She left here rather suddenly soon after my aunt's death."
"For good reasons, it would seem."
"I don't know whether it's libel or slander to say so - but there seems no doubt that she forged a codicil to my aunt's Will - or that someone helped her to do so."
"Someone?"
"She was friendly with a young man who worked in a solicitor's office in Medchester. He had been mixed up in a forgery case before. The case never came to court because the girl disappeared. She realised the Will would not be admitted to probate, and that there was going to be a court case. She left the neighbourhood and has never been heard of since."
"She too came, I have heard, from a broken home," said Poirot.
Rowena Drake looked at him sharply but he was smiling amiably. "Thank you for all you have told me, Madame," he said.
When Poirot had left the house, he went for a short walk along a turning off the main road which was labelled "Helpsly Cemetery Road". The cemetery in question did not take him long to reach. It was at most ten minutes' walk. It was obviously a cemetery that had been made in the last ten years, presumably to cope with the rising importance of Woodleigh as a residential entity. The church, a church of reasonable size dating from some two or three centuries back, had had a very small enclosure round it already well filled. So the new cemetery had come into being with a footpath connecting it across two fields. It was, Poirot, thought, a businesslike, modern cemetery with appropriate sentiments on marble or granite slabs; it had urns, chippings, small plantations of bushes or flowers. No interesting old epitaphs or inscriptions. Nothing much for an antiquarian. Cleaned, neat, tidy and with suitable sentiments expressed.
He came to a halt to read a tablet erected on a grave contemporary with several others near it, all dating within two or three years back. It bore a simple inscription, "Sacred to the Memory of Hugo Edmund Drake, beloved husband of Rowena Arabella Drake, who departed this life March the 20th 19--" He giveth his beloved sleep.
It occurred to Poirot, fresh from the impact of the dynamic Rowena Drake, that perhaps sleep might have come in welcome guise to the late Mr Drake. An alabaster urn had been fixed in position there and contained the remains of flowers. An elderly gardener, obviously employed to tend the graves of good citizens departed this life, approached Poirot in the pleasurable hopes of a few minutes' conversation while he laid his hoe and his broom aside. "Stranger in these parts, I think," he said, "aren't you, sir?"
"It is very true," said Poirot. "I am a stranger with you as were my fathers before me."
"Ah, aye. We've got that text somewhere or summat very like it. Over down the other corner, it is." He went on, "He was a nice gentleman, he were, Mr Drake. A cripple, you know. He had that infant paralysis, as they call it, though as often as not it isn't infants as suffer from it. It's grown-ups. Men and women too. My
wife, she had an aunt, who caught it in Spain, she did. Went there with a tour, she did, and bathed somewhere in some river. And they said afterwards as it was the water infection, but I don't think they know much. Doctors don't, if you ask me. Still, it's made a lot of difference nowadays. All this inoculation they give the children, and that. Not nearly as many cases as there were. Yes, he were a nice gentleman and didn't complain, though he took it hard, being a cripple, I mean. He'd been a good sportsman, he had, in his time. Used to bat for us here in the village team. Many a six he's hit to the boundary. Yes, he were a nice gentleman."
"He died of an accident, did he not?"
"That's right. Crossing the road, towards twilight this was. One of these cars come along, a couple of these young thugs in it with beards growing up to their ears. That's what they say. Didn't stop either. Went on. Never looked to see. Abandoned the car somewhere in a car park twenty miles away. Wasn't their own car either. Pinched from a car park somewhere. Ah, it's terrible, a lot of those accidents nowadays. And the police often can't do anything about them. Very devoted to him, his wife was. Took it very hard, she did. She comes here, nearly every week, brings flowers and puts them here. Yes, they were a very devoted couple. If you ask me, she won't stay here much longer."
"Really? But she has a very nice house here."
"Yes, oh yes. And she does a lot in the village, you know. All these things - women's institutes and teas and various societies and all the rest of it. Runs a lot of things, she does. Runs a bit too many for some people. Bossy, you know. Bossy and interfering, some people say. But the vicar relies on her. She starts things. Women's activities and all the rest of it. Gets up tours and outings. Ah yes. Often thought myself, though I wouldn't like to say it to my wife, that all these good works as ladies does, doesn't make you any fonder of the ladies themselves. Always know best, they do. Always telling you what you should do and what you shouldn't do. No freedom. Not much freedom anywhere nowadays."
"Yet you think Mrs Drake may leave here?"
"I shouldn't wonder if she didn't go away and live somewhere abroad. They liked being abroad, used to go there for holidays."
"Why do you think she wants to leave here?"
A sudden rather roguish smile appeared on the old man's face.
"Well, I'd say, you know, that she's done all she can do here. To put it scriptural, she needs another vineyard to work in. She needs more good works. Aren't no more good works to be done round here. She's done all there is, and even more than there need be, so some think. Yes."
"She needs a new field in which to labour?" suggested Poirot.
"You've hit it. Better settle somewhere else where she can put a lot of things right and bully a lot of other people. She's got us where she wants us here and there's not much more for her to do."
"It may be," said Poirot.
"Hasn't even got her husband to look after. She looked after him a good few years. That gave her a kind of object in life, as you might say. What with that and a lot of outside activities, she could be busy all the time. She's the type likes being busy all the time. And she's no children, more's the pity. So it's my view as she'll start all over again somewhere else."
"You may have something there. Where would she go?"
"I couldn't say as to that. One of these Riviery places, maybe - or there's them as goes to Spain or Portugal. Or Greece - I've heard her speak of Greece - Islands. Mrs Butler, she's been to Greece on one of them tours. Hellenic, they call them, which sounds more like fire and brimstone to me." Poirot smiled. "The isles of Greece," he murmured. Then he asked: "Do you like her?"
"Mrs Drake? I wouldn't say I exactly like her. She's a good woman. Does her duty to her neighbour and all that - but she'll always need a power of neighbours to do her duty to - and if you ask me, nobody really likes people who are always doing their duty. Tells me how to prune my roses which I know well enough myself. Always at me to grow some new-fangled kind of vegetable. Cabbage is good enough for me, and I'm sticking to cabbage." Poirot smiled. He said, "I must be on my way. Can you tell me where Nicholas Ransome and Desmond Holland live?"
"Past the church, third house on the left. They board with Mrs Brand, go into Medchester Technical every day to study. They'll be home by now." He gave Poirot an interested glance.
"So that's the way your mind is working, is it? There's some already as thinks the same."
"No, I think nothing as yet. But they were among those present - that is all." As he took leave and walked away, he mused, "Among those present I have come nearly to the end of my list."
Chapter 15
Two pairs of eyes looked at Poirot uneasily. "I don't see what else we can tell you. We've both been interviewed by the police, M. Poirot." Poirot looked from one boy to the other. They would not have described themselves as boys; their manner was carefully adult. So much so that if one shut one's eyes, their conversation could have passed as that of elderly club men - Nicholas was eighteen. Desmond was sixteen.
"To oblige a friend, I make my inquiries of those present on a certain occasion. Not the Hallowe'en party itself - the preparations for that party. You were both active in these."
"Yes, we were."
"So far," Poirot said, "I have interviewed cleaning women, I have had the benefit of police views, of talks to a doctor - the doctor who examined the body first - have talked to a school-teacher who was present, to the headmistress of the school, to distraught relatives, have heard much of the village gossip - By the way, I understand you have a local witch here?" The two young men confronting him both laughed. "You mean Mother Goodbody. Yes, she came to the party and played the part of the witch."
"I have come now," said Poirot, "to the younger generation, to those of acute eyesight and acute hearing and who have up-to-date scientific knowledge and shrewd philosophy. I am eager - very eager - to hear your views on this matter."
Eighteen and sixteen, he thought to himself, looking at the two boys confronting him. Youths to the police, boys to him, adolescents to newspaper reporters. Call them what you will. Products of today. Neither of them, he judged, at all stupid, even if they were not quite of the high mentality that he had just suggested to them by way of a flattering sop to start the conversation. They had been at the party. They had also been there earlier in the day to do helpful offices for Mrs Drake. They had climbed up step-ladders, they had placed yellow pumpkins in strategic positions, they had done a little electrical work on fairy lights, one or other of them had produced some clever effects in a nice batch of phoney photographs of possible husbands as imagined hopefully by teenage girls. They were also, incidentally, of the right age to be in the forefront of suspects in the mind of Inspector Raglan and, it seemed, in the view of an elderly gardener.
The percentage of murders committed by this age group had been increasing in the last few years. Not that Poirot inclined to that particular suspicion himself, but anything was possible. It was even possible that the killing which had occurred two or three years ago might have been committed by a boy, youth, or adolescent of fourteen or twelve years of age. Such cases had occurred in recent newspaper reports.
Keeping all these possibilities in mind he pushed them, as it were, behind a curtain for the moment, and concentrated instead on his own appraisement of these two, their looks, their clothes, their manner, their voices and so on and so forth in the Hercule Poirot manner, masked behind a foreign shield of nattering words and much increased foreign mannerisms, so that they themselves should feel agreeably contemptuous of him, though hiding that under politeness and good manners. For both of them had excellent manners. Nicholas, the eighteen-year-old, was good-looking, wearing side-burns, hair that grew fairly far down his neck, and a rather funereal outfit of black. Not as a mourning for the recent tragedy, but what was obviously his personal taste in modern clothes. The younger one was wearing a rose-coloured velvet coat, mauve trousers and a kind of frilled shirting. They both obviously spent a good deal of money on their clothes which were
certainly not purchased locally and were probably paid for by themselves and not by their parents or guardians. Desmond's hair was ginger coloured and there was a good deal of fluffy profusion about it.
"You were there in the morning or afternoon of the party, I understand, helping with the preparations for it?"
"Early afternoon," corrected Nicholas.
"What sort of preparations were you helping with? I have heard of preparation from several people, but I am not quite clear. They don't all agree."
"A good deal of the lighting, for one thing."
"Getting up on steps for things that had to be put high up."
"I understand there were some very good photographic results too." Desmond immediately dipped into his pocket and took out a folder from which he proudly brought certain cards.
"We faked up these beforehand," he said.
"Husbands for the girls," he explained. "They're all alike, birds are. They all want something up-to-date. Not a bad assortment, are they?"
He handed a few specimens to Poirot who looked with interest at a rather fuzzy reproduction of a ginger-bearded young man and another young man with an aureole of hair, a third one whose hair came to his knees almost, and there were a few assorted whiskers, and other facial adornments.
"Made 'em pretty well all different. It wasn't bad, was it?"
"You had models, I suppose?"
"Oh, they're all ourselves. Just make-up, you know. Nick and I got 'em done. Some Nick took of me and some I took of him. Just varied what you might call the hair motif."
"Very clever," said Poirot.
"We kept 'em a bit out of focus, you know, so that they'd look more like spirit pictures, as you might say."
The other boy said, "Mrs Drake was very pleased with them. She congratulated us. They made her laugh too. It was mostly electrical work we did at the house. You know, fitting up a light or two so that when the girls sat with the mirror one or other of us could take up a position, you'd only to bob up over a screen and the girl would see a face in the mirror with, mind you, the right kind of hair. Beard or whiskers or something or other."
