Hercule Poirot 100 Years (1916 - 2016)

by Mark Place

  Poirot rushed out, returning quickly.

  "There is no one there."

  "Isn't there, sir!" said the parlormaid weakly. "Oh, it did give me a start!"

  "But why?"

  She dropped her voice to a whisper. "I thought, I thought it was the master, it looked like 'im."

  I saw Mrs Maltravers give a terrified start, and my mind flew to the old superstition that a suicide cannot rest. She thought of it too, I am sure, for a minute later, she caught Poirot's arm with a scream.

  "Didn't you hear that? Those three taps on the window? That's how he always used to tap when he passed round the house."

  "The ivy," I cried. "It was the ivy against the pane."

  But a sort of terror was gaining on us all. The parlormaid was obviously unstrung, and when the meal was over Mrs Maltravers besought Poirot not to go at once. She was clearly terrified to be left alone. We sat in the little morning room. The wind was getting up, and moaning round the house in an eerie fashion. Twice the door of the room carne unlatched and the door slowly opened, and each time she clung to me with a terrified gasp. "Ah, but this door, it is bewitched!" cried Poirot angrily at last. He got up and shut it once more, then turned the key in the lock. "I shall lock it, so!"

  "Don't do that," she gasped, "if it should come open now"

  And even as she spoke the impossible happened. The locked door slowly swung open. I could not see into the passage from where I sat, but she and Poirot were facing it. She gave one long shriek as she turned to him. "You saw him -there in the passage!" she cried.

  He was staring down at her with a puzzled face, then shook his head. "I saw him -my husband -you must have seen him too?"

  "Madame, I saw nothing. You are not well. Unstrung"

  "I am perfectly well, I, Oh, God!"

  Suddenly, without any warning, the lights quivered and went out. Out of the darkness carne three loud raps. I could hear Mrs Maltravers moaning. And then I saw! The man I had seen on the bed upstairs stood there facing us, gleaming with a faint ghostly light. There was blood on his lips, and he held his right hand out, pointing. Suddenly a brilliant light seemed to proceed from it. It passed over Poirot and me, and fell on Mrs Maltravers. I saw her white terrified face, and something else!

  "My God, Poirot!" I cried. "Look at her hand, her right hand. It's all red!"

  Her own eyes fell on it, and she collapsed in a heap on the floor. "Blood," she cried hysterically. "Yes, it's blood. I killed him. I did it. He was showing me, and then I put my hand on the trigger and pressed. Save me from him, save me! He's come back!"

  Her voice died away in a gurgle.

  "Lights," said Poirot briskly.

  The lights went on as if by magic.

  "That's it," he continued. "You heard, Hastings? And you, Everett? Oh, by the way, this is Mr Everett, rather a fine member of the theatrical profession. I 'phoned to him this afternoon. His make-up is good, isn't it? Quite like the dead man, and with a pocket torch and the necessary phosphorescence he made the proper impression. I shouldn't touch her right hand if I were you, Hastings. Red paint marks so. When the lights went out I clasped her hand, you see. By the way, we mustn't miss our train. Inspector Japp is outside the window. A bad night -but he has been able to while away the time by tapping on the window every now and then."

  "You see," continued Poirot, as we walked briskly through the wind and rain, "there was a little discrepancy. The doctor seemed to think the deceased was a Christian Scientist, and who could have given him that impression but Mrs Maltravers?

  But to us she represented him as being in a grave state of apprehension about his own health. Again, why was she so taken aback by the reappearance of young Black? And lastly, although I know that convention decrees that a woman must make a decent pretence of mourning for her husband, I do not care for such heavily roughed eyelids! You did not observe them, Hastings? No? As I always tell you, you see nothing! Well, there it was. There were the two possibilities. Did Black's story suggest an ingenious method of committing suicide to Mr Maltravers, or did his other listener, the wife, see an equally ingenious method of committing murder? I inclined to the latter view. To shoot himself in the way indicated, he would probably have had to pull the trigger with his toe or at least so I imagine. Now if Maltravers had been found with one boot off, we should almost certainly have heard of it from someone. An odd detail like that would have been remembered. No, as I say, I inclined to the view that it was a case of murder, not suicide, but I realized that I had not a shadow of proof in support of my theory. Hence the elaborate little comedy you saw played tonight."

  "Even now I don't quite see all the details of the crime," I said.

  "Let us start from the beginning. Here is a shrewd and scheming woman who, knowing of her husband's financial débâcle and tired of the elderly mate she has only married for his money, induces him to insure his life for a large sum, and then seeks for the means to accomplish her purpose. An accident gives her that the young soldier's strange story. The next afternoon when monsieur le capitaine, as she thinks, is on the high seas, she and her husband are strolling round the grounds. 'What a curious story that was last night!' she observes. 'Could a man shoot himself in such a way? Do show me if it is possible!'

  The poor fool he shows her. He places the end of the rifle in his mouth. She stoops down, and puts her finger on the trigger, laughing up at him.

  'And now, sir,' she says saucily, 'supposing I pull the trigger?'

  "And then –

  And then, Hastings She pulls it!"

  Hercule Poirot’s

  Christmas

  BY

  AGATHA CHRISTIE

  My dear James

  You have always been one of the most faithful and kindly of my readers, and I was therefore seriously perturbed when I received from you a word of criticism. You complained that my murders were getting too refined—anaemic, in fact. You yearned for a ‘good violent murder with lots of blood’. A murder where there was no doubt about its being murder! So this is your special story—written for you. I hope it may please.

  Your affectionate sister-in-law

  Agatha

  “Yet who would have thought the old man to have had so much blood in him? “

  Macbeth

  Part 1 December 22nd

  Stephen pulled up the collar of his coat as he walked briskly along the platform. Overhead a dim fog clouded the station. Large engines hissed superbly, throwing off clouds of steam into the cold raw air. Everything was dirty and smoke-grimed. Stephen thought with revulsion: ‘what a foul country—what a foul city!’

  His first excited reaction to London, its shops, its restaurants, its well-dressed, attractive women, had faded. He saw it now as a glittering rhinestone set in a dingy setting. Supposing he were back in South Africa now…He felt a quick pang of homesickness. Sunshine, blue skies, gardens of flowers, cool blue flowers, hedges of plumb ago, blue convolvulus clinging to every little shanty. And here, dirt, grime, and endless, incessant crowds, moving, hurrying, jostling, busy ants running industriously about their anthill. For a moment he thought, ‘I wish I hadn’t come…’ Then he remembered his purpose and his lips set back in a grim line. No, by hell, he’d go on with it! He’d planned this for years. He’d always meant to do, what he was going to do. Yes, he’d go on with it!

  That momentary reluctance, that sudden questioning of himself: ‘Why? Is it worth it? Why dwell on the past? Why not wipe out the whole thing?’ all that was only weakness. He was not a boy to be turned this way and that by the whim of the moment. He was a man of forty, assured, purposeful. He would go on with it. He would do what he had come to England to do. He got on the train and passed along the corridor looking for a place. He had waved aside a porter and was carrying his own raw-hide suitcase. He looked into carriage after carriage. The train was full. It was only three days before Christmas. Stephen Farr looked distastefully at the crowded carriages. People! Incessant, innumerable people! And all so, so what was th
e word, so drab looking! So alike, so horribly alike! Those that hadn’t got faces like sheep had faces like rabbits, he thought. Some of them chattered and fussed. Some heavily middle-aged men grunted, more like pigs, those. Even the girls, slender, egg-faced, scarlet-lipped, were of a depressing uniformity.

  He thought with a sudden longing of open veldt, sun-baked and lonely…And then, suddenly, he caught his breath, looking into a carriage. This girl was different. Black hair, rich creamy pallor, eyes with the depth and darkness of night in them. The sad proud eyes of the South…It was all wrong that this girl should be sitting in this train among these dull, drab-looking people, all wrong that she should be going into the dreary midlands of England. She should have been on a balcony, a rose between her lips, a piece of black lace draping her proud head, and there should have been dust and heat and the smell of blood. The smell of the bull-ring, in the air…She should be somewhere splendid, not squeezed into the corner of a third-class carriage. He was an observant man. He did not fail to note the shabbiness of her little black coat and skirt, the cheap quality of her fabric gloves, the flimsy shoes and the defiant note of a flame-red handbag. Nevertheless splendour was the quality he associated with her. She was splendid, fine, exotic…What the hell was she doing in this country of fogs and chills and hurrying industrious ants? He thought, ‘I’ve got to know who she is and what she’s doing here…I’ve got to know…’

  II

  Pilar sat squeezed up against the window and thought how very odd the English smelt…It was what had struck her so far most forcibly about England, the difference of smell. There was no garlic and no dust and very little perfume. In this carriage now there was a smell of cold stuffiness, the sulphur smell of the trains, the smell of soap and another very unpleasant smell, it came, she thought, from the fur collar of the stout woman sitting beside her. Pilar sniffed delicately, imbibing the odour of mothballs reluctantly. It was a funny scent to choose to put on yourself, she thought. A whistle blew, a stentorian voice cried out something and the train jerked slowly out of the station. They had started. She was on her way…Her heart beat a little faster. Would it be all right? Would she be able to accomplish what she had set out to do? Surely, surely she had thought it all out so carefully…She was prepared for every eventuality. Oh, yes, she would succeed she must succeed…The curve of Pilar’s red mouth curved upwards. It was suddenly cruel, that mouth. Cruel and greedy like the mouth of a child or a kitten a mouth that knew only its own desires and that was as yet unaware of pity. She looked round her with the frank curiosity of a child. All these people, seven of them how funny they were, the English! They all seemed so rich, so prosperous, their clothes, their boots, Oh! Undoubtedly England was a very rich country as she had always heard. But they were not at all gay, no, decidedly not gay.

  That was a handsome man standing in the corridor…Pilar thought he was very handsome. She liked his deeply bronzed face and his high-bridged nose and his square shoulders. More quickly than any English girl, Pilar had seen that the man admired her. She had not looked at him once directly, but she knew perfectly how often he had looked at her and exactly how he had looked. She registered the facts without much interest or emotion. She came from a country where men looked at women as a matter of course and did not disguise the fact unduly. She wondered if he was an Englishman and decided that he was not. ‘He is too alive, too real, to be English,’ Pilar decided. ‘And yet he is fair. He may be perhaps Americano.’ He was, she thought, rather like the actors she had seen in Wild West films.

  An attendant pushed his way along the corridor. ‘First lunch, please. First lunch. Take your seats for first lunch.’ The seven occupants of Pilar’s carriage all held tickets for the first lunch. They rose in a body and the carriage was suddenly deserted and peaceful. Pilar quickly pulled up the window which had been let down a couple of inches at the top by a militant-looking, grey-haired lady in the opposite corner. Then she sprawled comfortably back on her seat and peered out of the window at the northern suburbs of London. She did not turn her head at the sound of the door sliding back. It was the man from the corridor, and Pilar knew, of course, that he had entered the carriage on purpose to talk to her. She continued to look pensively out of the window. Stephen Farr said: ‘Would you like the window down at all?’

  Pilar replied demurely: ‘On the contrary. I have just shut it.’

  She spoke English perfectly, but with a slight accent. During the pause that ensued, Stephen thought: ‘A delicious voice. It has the sun in it…It is warm like a summer night…’

  Pilar thought: ‘I like his voice. It is big and strong. He is attractive—yes, he is attractive.’

  Stephen said: ‘The train is very full.’

  ‘Oh, yes indeed. The people go away from London, I suppose, because it is so black there.’

  Pilar had not been brought up to believe that it was a crime to talk to strange men in trains. She could take care of herself as well as any girl, but she had no rigid taboos. If Stephen had been brought up in England he might have felt ill at ease at entering into conversation with a young girl. But Stephen was a friendly soul who found it perfectly natural to talk to anyone if he felt like it. He smiled without any self-consciousness and said: ‘London’s rather a terrible place, isn’t it?’

  ‘Oh, yes. I do not like it at all.’

  ‘No more do I.’

  Pilar said: ‘You are not English, no?’

  ‘I’m British, but I come from South Africa.’

  ‘Oh, I see, that explains it.’

  ‘Have you just come from abroad?’

  Pilar nodded. ‘I come from Spain.’

  Stephen was interested. ‘From Spain, do you? You’re Spanish, then?’

  ‘I am half Spanish. My mother was English. That is why I talk English so well.’

  ‘What about this war business?’ asked Stephen?

  ‘It is very terrible, yes, very sad. There has been damage done, quite a lot, yes.’

  ‘Which side are you on?’

  Pilar’s politics seemed to be rather vague. In the village where she came from, she explained, nobody had paid very much attention to the war. ‘It has not been near us, you understand. The Mayor, he is, of course, an officer of the Government, so he is for the Government, and the priest is for General Franco, but most of the people are busy with the vines and the land, they have not time to go into these questions.’

  ‘So there wasn’t any fighting round you?’

  Pilar said that there had not been. ‘But then I drove in a car,’ she explained, ‘all across the country and there was much destruction. And I saw a bomb drop and it blew up a car—yes, and another destroyed a house. It was very exciting!’ Stephen Farr smiled a faintly twisted smile. ‘So that’s how it seemed to you?’

  ‘It was a nuisance, too,’ explained Pilar. ‘Because I wanted to get on, and the driver of my car, he was killed.’

  Stephen said, watching her: ‘That didn’t upset you?’

  Pilar’s great dark eyes opened very wide.

  ‘Everyone must die! That is so, is it not? If it comes quickly from the sky, bouff, like that, it is as well as any other way. One is alive for a time, yes, and then one is dead. That is what happens in this world.’

  Stephen Farr laughed. ‘I don’t think you are a pacifist.’

  ‘You do not think I am what?’ Pilar seemed puzzled by a word which had not previously entered her vocabulary.

  ‘Do you forgive your enemies, señorita?’

  Pilar shook her head. ‘I have no enemies. But if I had—’

  ‘Well?’

  He was watching her, fascinated anew by the sweet, cruel upward-curving mouth. Pilar said gravely: ‘If I had an enemy—if anyone hated me and I hated them—then I would cut my enemy’s throat like this’ She made a graphic gesture. It was so swift and so crude that Stephen Farr was momentarily taken aback. He said: ‘You are a bloodthirsty young woman!’

  Pilar asked in a matter-of-fact tone: ‘What would you d
o to your enemy?’

  He started, stared at her, then laughed aloud. ‘I wonder’ he said. ‘I wonder!’

  Pilar said disapprovingly: ‘But surely, you know.’

  He checked his laughter, drew in his breath and said in a low voice: ‘Yes. I know…’

  Then with a rapid change of manner, he asked: ‘What made you come to England?’

  Pilar replied with a certain demureness. ‘I am going to stay with my relations with my English relations.’

  ‘I see.’

  He leaned back in his seat, studying her wondering what these English relations of whom she spoke were like wondering what they would make of this Spanish stranger…trying to picture her in the midst of some sober British family at Christmas time.

  Pilar asked: ‘Is it nice, South Africa, yes?’

  He began to talk to her about South Africa. She listened with the pleased attention of a child hearing a story. He enjoyed her naïve but shrewd questions and amused himself by making a kind of exaggerated fairy story of it all. The return of the proper occupants of the carriage put an end to this diversion. He rose, smiled into her eyes, and made his way out again into the corridor. As he stood back for a minute in the doorway, to allow an elderly lady to come in, his eyes fell on the label of Pilar’s obviously foreign straw case. He read the name with interest, Miss Pilar Estravados — then as his eye caught the address it widened to incredulity and some other feeling — Gorston Hall, Longdale, Addlesfield. He half turned, staring at the girl with a new expression, puzzled, resentful, suspicious…

  He went out into the corridor and stood there smoking a cigarette and frowning to himself…

  III

  In the big blue and gold drawing-room at Gorston Hall Alfred Lee and Lydia, his wife, sat discussing their plans for Christmas. Alfred was a squarely built man of middle age with a gentle face and mild brown eyes. His voice when he spoke was quiet and precise with a very clear enunciation. His head was sunk into his shoulders and he gave a curious impression of inertia. Lydia, his wife, was an energetic, lean greyhound of a woman. She was amazingly thin, but all her movements had a swift, startled grace about them. There was no beauty in her careless, haggard face, but it had distinction. Her voice was charming. Alfred said: ‘Father insists! There’s nothing else to it.’