by Mark Place
Poirot said: ‘You came for a short visit or a long one?’
Harry said: ‘I came home for good!’
‘Your father was willing?’
‘The old man was delighted.’ He laughed again. The corners of his eyes crinkled engagingly. ‘Pretty boring for the old man living here with Alfred! Alfred’s a dull stick very worthy and all that, but poor company. My father had been a bit of a rip in his time. He was looking forward to my company.’
‘And your brother and his wife were they pleased that you were to live here?’
Poirot asked the question with a slight lifting of his eyebrows.
‘Alfred? Alfred was livid with rage. Don’t know about Lydia. She was probably annoyed on Alfred’s behalf. But I’ve no doubt she’d be quite pleased in the end. I like Lydia. She’s a delightful woman. I should have got on with Lydia. But Alfred was quite another pair of shoes.’ He laughed again. ‘Alfred’s always been as jealous as hell of me. He’s always been the good dutiful stay-at-home stick-in-the-mud son. And what was he going to get for it in the end? …what the good boy of the family always gets a kick in the pants. Take it from me, gentlemen, virtue doesn’t pay.’ He looked from one face to another.
‘Hope you’re not shocked by my frankness. But after all, it’s the truth you’re after. You’ll drag out all the family dirty linen into the light of day in the end. I might as well display mine straight away. I’m not particularly broken-hearted by my father’s death after all, I hadn’t seen the old devil since I was a boy but nevertheless he was my father and he was murdered. I’m all out for revenge on the murderer.’
He stroked his jawbone, watching them. ‘We’re rather hot on revenge in our family. None of the Lees forget easily. I mean to make sure that my father’s murderer is caught and hanged.’
‘I think you can trust us to do our best in that line, Mr Lee,’ said Sugden. ‘If you don’t I shall take the law into my own hands,’ said Harry Lee.
The chief constable said sharply: ‘Have you any ideas on the subject of the murderer’s identity, then, Mr Lee?’
Harry shook his head. ‘No,’ he said slowly. ‘No I haven’t. You know it’s rather a jolt. Because I’ve been thinking about it and I don’t see that it can have been an outside job…’
‘Ah,’ said Sugden, nodding his head.
‘And if so,’ said Harry Lee, ‘then someone here in the house killed him…But who the devil could have done it? Can’t suspect the servants Tressilian has been here since the year one. The half-witted footman? Not on your life. Horbury, now, he’s a cool customer, but Tressilian tells me he was out at the pictures. So what do you come to? Passing over Stephen Farr (and why the devil should Stephen Farr come all the way from South Africa and murder a total stranger?) there’s only the family. And for the life of me I can’t see one of us doing it. Alfred? He adored Father. George? He hasn’t got the guts. David?
David’s always been a moon dreamer. He’d faint if he saw his own finger bleed. The wives? Women don’t go and slit a man’s throat in cold blood. So who did? Blessed if I know, but it’s damned disturbing.’
Colonel Johnson cleared his throat…an official habit of his…and said: ‘When did you last see your father this evening?’
‘After tea. He’d just had a row with Alfred about your humble servant. The old man was no end bucked with himself. He always liked stirring up trouble. In my opinion, that’s why he kept my arrival dark from the others. Wanted to see the fur fly when I blew in unexpectedly! That’s why he talked about altering his will, too.’
Poirot stirred softly. He murmured: ‘So your father mentioned his will?’
‘Yes, in front of the whole lot of us, watching us like a cat to see how we reacted. Just told the lawyer chap to come over and see him about it after Christmas.’
Poirot asked: ‘What changes did he contemplate making?’
Harry Lee grinned: ‘He didn’t tell us that! Trust the old fox! I imagine or shall we say I hoped that the change was to the advantage of your humble servant! I should imagine I’d been cut out of any former wills. Now, I rather fancy, I was to go back. Nasty blow for the others. Pilar, too… he’d taken a fancy to her. She was in for something good, I should imagine. You haven’t seen her yet? My Spanish niece. She’s a beautiful creature, Pilar with the lovely warmth of the South and its cruelty. Wish I wasn’t a mere uncle!’
‘You say your father took to her?’
Harry nodded. ‘She knew how to get round the old man. Sat up there with him a good deal. I bet she knew just what she was after! Well, he’s dead now. No wills can be altered in Pilar’s favour nor mine either, worse luck.’
He frowned, paused a minute, and then went on with a change of tone. ‘But I’m wandering from the point. You wanted to know what was the last time I saw my father? As I’ve told you, it was after tea might have been a little past six. The old man was in good spirits then a bit tired, perhaps. I went away and left him with Horbury. I never saw him again.’
‘Where were you at the time of his death?’
‘In the dining-room with brother Alfred. Not a very harmonious after-dinner session. We were in the middle of a pretty sharp argument when we heard the noise overhead. Sounded as though ten men were wrestling up there. And then poor old Father screamed. It was like killing a pig. The sound of it paralysed Alfred. He just sat there with his jaw dropping. I fairly shook him back to life, and we started off upstairs. The door was locked. Had to break it open. Took some doing, too. How the devil that door came to be locked, I can’t imagine! There was no one in the room but Father, and I’m damned if anyone could have got away through the windows.’
Superintendent Sugden said: ‘The door was locked from the outside.’
‘What?’ Harry stared. ‘But I’ll swear the key was on the inside Poirot murmured: ‘So you noticed that?’
Harry Lee said sharply: ‘I do notice things. It’s a habit of mine.’
He looked sharply from one face to the other.
‘Is there anything more you want to know, gentlemen?’
Johnson shook his head. ‘Thank you, Mr Lee, not for the moment. Perhaps you will ask the next member of the family to come along?’
‘Certainly I will.’
He walked to the door and went out without looking back.
The three men looked at each other.
Colonel Johnson said: ‘What about it, Sugden?’
The superintendent shook his head doubtfully. He said: ‘He’s afraid of something. I wonder why?’
XI
Magdalene Lee paused effectively in the doorway. One long slender hand touched the burnished platinum sheen of her hair. The leaf-green velvet frock she wore clung to the delicate lines of her figure. She looked very young and a little frightened. The three men were arrested for a moment looking at her. Johnson’s eyes showed a sudden surprised admiration. Superintendent Sugden’s showed no animation, merely the impatience of a man anxious to get on with his job. Hercule Poirot’s eyes were deeply appreciative (as she saw) but the appreciation was not for her beauty, but for the effective use she made of it. She did not know that he was thinking to himself: ‘Jolie mannequin, la petite. Mais elle a les yeux durs.’
Colonel Johnson was thinking: ‘Damned good-looking girl. George Lee will have trouble with her if he doesn’t look out. Got an eye for a man all right.’
Superintendent Sugden was thinking: ‘Empty-headed vain piece of goods. Hope we get through with her quickly.’
‘Will you sit down, Mrs Lee? Let me see, you are?’
‘Mrs George Lee.’
She accepted the chair with a warm smile of thanks. ‘After all,’ the glance seemed to say, ‘although you are a man and a policeman, you are not so dreadful after all.’
The tail-end of the smile included Poirot. Foreigners were so susceptible where women were concerned. About Superintendent Sugden she did not bother. She murmured, twisting her hands together in a pretty distress: ‘It’s all so terrible. I feel
so frightened.’
‘Come, come, Mrs Lee,’ said Colonel Johnson kindly but briskly. ‘It’s been a shock, I know, but it’s all over now. We just want an account from you of what happened this evening.’
She cried out: ‘But I don’t know anything about it…I don’t indeed.’
For a moment the chief constable’s eyes narrowed. He said gently: ‘No, of course not.’
‘We only arrived here yesterday. George would make me come here for Christmas! I wish we hadn’t. I’m sure I shall never feel the same again!’
‘Very upsetting yes.’
‘I hardly know George’s family, you see. I’ve only seen Mr Lee once or twice at our wedding and once since. Of course I’ve seen Alfred and Lydia more often, but they’re really all quite strangers to me.’ Again the wide-eyed frightened-child look. Again Hercule Poirot’s eyes were appreciative—and again he thought to himself:
Elle joue très bien la comédie, cette petite…’
‘Yes, yes,’ said Colonel Johnson. ‘Now just tell me about the last time you saw your father-in-law Mr Lee alive.’
‘Oh, that ! That was this afternoon. It was dreadful!’
Johnson said quickly: ‘Dreadful? Why?’
‘They were so angry!’
‘Who was angry?’
‘Oh, all of them…I don’t mean George. His father didn’t say anything to him. But all the others.’
‘What happened exactly?’
‘Well, when we got there he asked for all of us he was speaking into the telephone to his lawyers about his will. And then he told Alfred he was looking very glum. I think that was because of Harry coming home to live. Alfred was very upset about that, I believe. You see, Harry did something quite dreadful. And then he said something about his wife she’s dead long ago but she had the brains of a louse, he said, and David sprang up and looked as though he’d like to murder him Oh!’ She stopped suddenly, her eyes alarmed. ‘I didn’t mean that… I didn’t mean it at all!’
Colonel Johnson said soothingly: ‘Quite quite, figure of speech, that was all.’
‘Hilda, that’s David’s wife, quieted him down and….well, I think that’s all. Mr Lee said he didn’t want to see anyone again that evening. So we all went away.’
‘And that was the last time you saw him?’
‘Yes. Until…until…’
She shivered.
Colonel Johnson said: ‘Yes, quite so. Now, where were you at the time of the crime?’
‘Oh let me see, I think I was in the drawing-room.’
‘Aren’t you sure?’
Magdalene’s eyes flickered a little, the lids drooped over them.
She said:‘Of course! How stupid of me…I’d gone to telephone. One gets so mixed up.’
‘You were telephoning, you say. In this room?’
‘Yes, that’s the only telephone except the one upstairs in my father-in-law’s room.’
Superintendent Sugden said:
‘Was anybody else in the room with you?’
Her eyes widened.
‘Oh, no, I was quite alone.’
‘Had you been here long?’
‘Well a little time. It takes some time to put a call through in the evening.’
‘It was a trunk call, then?’
‘Yes to Westeringham.’
‘I see.’
‘And then?’
‘And then there was that awful scream and everybody running and the door being locked and having to break it down. Oh! It was like a nightmare! I shall always remember it!’
‘No, no,’ Colonel Johnson’s tone was mechanically kind. He went on: ‘Did you know that your father-in-law kept a quantity of valuable diamonds in his safe?’
‘No, did he?’ Her tone was quite frankly thrilled. ‘Real diamonds?’
Hercule Poirot said: ‘Diamonds worth about ten thousand pounds.’
‘Oh!’ It was a soft gasping sound—holding in it the essence of feminine cupidity.
‘Well,’ said Colonel Johnson, ‘I think that’s all for the present. We needn’t bother you any further, Mrs Lee.’
‘Oh, thank you.’
She stood up smiled from Johnson to Poirot the smile of a grateful little girl, then she went out walking with her head held high and her palms a little turned outwards. Colonel Johnson called: ‘Will you ask your brother-in-law, Mr David Lee, to come here?’ Closing the door after her, he came back to the table.
‘Well,’ he said, ‘what do you think? We’re getting at some of it now! You notice one thing: George Lee was telephoning when he heard the scream! His wife was telephoning when she heard it! That doesn’t fit it… doesn’t fit at all.’
He added: ‘What do you think, Sugden?’
The superintendent said slowly: ‘I don’t want to speak offensively of the lady, but I should say that though she’s the kind who would be first class at getting money out a gentleman, I don’t think she’s the kind who’d cut a gentleman’s throat.
That wouldn’t be her line at all.’
‘Ah, but one never knows mon vieux ,’ murmured Poirot.
The chief constable turned round on him.
‘And you, Poirot, what do you think?’
Hercule Poirot leaned forward. He straightened the blotter in front of him and flicked a minute speck of dust from a candlestick. He answered: ‘I would say that the character of the late Mr Simeon Lee begins to emerge for us. It is there, I think, that the whole importance of the case lies…in the character of the dead man.’
Superintendent Sugden turned a puzzled face to him.
‘I don’t quite get you, Mr Poirot,’ he said. ‘What exactly has the character of the deceased got to do with his murder?’
Poirot said dreamily: ‘The character of the victim has always something to do with his or her murder. The frank and unsuspicious mind of Desdemona was the direct cause of her death. A more suspicious woman would have seen Iago’s machinations and circumvented them much earlier. The uncleanness of Marat directly invited his end in a bath. From the temper of Mercutio’s mind came his death at the sword’s point.’
Colonel Johnson pulled his moustache.
‘What exactly are you getting at, Poirot?’
‘I am telling you that because Simeon Lee was a certain kind of man, he set in motion certain forces, which forces in the end brought about his death.’
‘You don’t think the diamonds had anything to do with it, then?’
Poirot smiled at the honest perplexity in Johnson’s face.
‘Mon cher,’ he said. ‘It was because of Simeon Lee’s peculiar character that he kept ten thousand pounds worth of uncut diamonds in his safe! You have not there the action of every man.’
‘That’s very true, Mr Poirot,’ said Superintendent Sugden, nodding his head with the air of a man who at last sees what a fellow-conversationalist is driving at. ‘He was a queer one, Mr Lee was. He kept those stones there so he could take them out and handle them and get the feeling of the past back.
Depend upon it, that’s why he never had them cut.’
Poirot nodded energetically.
‘Precisely, precisely. I see you have great acumen, Superintendent.’
The superintendent looked a little doubtful at the compliment, but Colonel Johnson cut in: ‘There’s something else, Poirot. I don’t know whether it has struck you’
‘Mais oui,’ said Poirot. ‘I know what you mean. Mrs George Lee, she let the cat out of the bag more than she knew! She gave us a pretty impression of that last family meeting. She indicates oh! so naïvely that Alfred was angry with his father and that David looked as “though he could murder him”.
Both those statements I think were true. But from them we can draw our own reconstruction. What did Simeon Lee assemble his family for? Why should they have arrived in time to hear him telephoning to his lawyer? Parbleu, it was no error, that. He wanted them to hear it! The poor old one, he sits in his chair and he has lost the diversions of his younger days. So he inv
ents a new diversion for himself. He amuses himself by playing upon the cupidity and the greed of human nature yes, and on its emotions and its passions, too! But from that arises one further deduction. In his game of rousing the greed and emotion of his children, he would not omit anyone. He must, logically and necessarily, have had his dig at Mr George Lee as well as at the others! His wife is carefully silent about that. At her, too, he may have shot a poisoned arrow or two. We shall find out, I think, from others, what Simeon Lee had to say to George Lee and George Lee’s wife’ He broke off. The door opened and David Lee came in.
XII
David Lee had himself well in hand. His demeanour was calm almost unnaturally so. He came up to them, drew a chair forward and sat down, looking with grave interrogation at Colonel Johnson. The electric light touched the fair peak of hair that grew on his forehead and showed up the sensitive modelling of the cheek bones. He looked absurdly young to be the son of that shrivelled old man who lay dead upstairs. ‘Yes, gentlemen,’ he said, ‘what can I tell you?’
Colonel Johnson said: ‘I understand, Mr Lee, that there was a kind of family meeting held in your father’s room this afternoon?’
‘There was. But it was quite informal. I mean, it was not a family council or anything of that kind.’
‘What took place there?’
David Lee answered calmly: ‘My father was in a difficult mood. He was an old man and an invalid, of course, one had to make allowances for him. He seemed to have assembled us there in order to well vent his spite upon us.’
‘Can you remember what he said?’
David said quietly: ‘It was really all rather foolish. He said we were no use any of us that there wasn’t a single man in the family! He said Pilar (that is my Spanish niece) was worth two of any of us. He said—’ David stopped.
Poirot said: ‘Please, Mr Lee, the exact words, if you can.’
David said reluctantly: ‘He spoke rather coarsely said he hoped that somewhere in the world he had better sons even if they were born the wrong side of the blanket…’
