Hercule Poirot 100 Years (1916 - 2016)

by Mark Place

  Hercule Poirot said, “You feel strongly.”

  The small woman looked at him with those indomitable grey eyes. She said, “I feel very strongly about the marriage tie. Unless it is respected and upheld, a country degenerates. Mrs Crale was a devoted and faithful wife. Her husband deliberately flouted her and introduced Elsa Greer into her home. As I say, he deserved what he got. He goaded her past endurance and I, for one, do not blame her for what she did.”

  Poirot said slowly, “He acted very badly - that I admit. But he was a great artist, remember.”

  Miss Williams gave a terrific snort.

  “Oh, yes, I know. That’s always the excuse nowadays. An artist! An excuse for every kind of loose living, for drunkenness, for brawling, for infidelity. And what kind of an artist was Mr Crale, when all is said and done? It may be the fashion to admire his pictures for a few years. But they won’t last. Why, he couldn’t even draw! His perspective was terrible! Even his anatomy was quite incorrect. I know something of what I am talking about, M. Poirot. I studied painting for a time, as a girl, in Florence, and to anyone who knows and appreciates the great masters these daubs of Mr Crale’s are really ludicrous. Just splashing a few colours about on the canvas - no construction, no careful drawing. No,” she shook her head, “don’t ask me to admire Mr Crale’s painting.”

  “Two of them are in the Tate Gallery,” Poirot reminded her.

  Miss Williams sniffed. “Possibly. So is one of Mr Epstein’s statues, I believe.”

  Poirot perceived that, according to Miss Williams, the last word had been said. He abandoned the subject of art.

  He said, “You were with Mrs Crale when she found the body?”

  “Yes. She and I went down from the house together after lunch. Angela had left her pullover on the beach after bathing, or else in the boat. She was always very careless about her things. I parted from Mrs Crale at the door of the Battery Garden, but she called me back almost at once. I believe Mr Crale had been dead over an hour. He was sprawled on the bench near his easel.”

  “Was she terribly upset at the discovery?”

  “What exactly do you mean by that, M. Poirot?”

  “I am asking you what your impressions were at the time.”

  “Oh, I see. Yes, she seemed to me quite dazed. She sent me off to telephone for the doctor. After all, we couldn’t be absolutely sure he was dead - it might have been a cataleptic seizure.”

  “Did she suggest such a possibility?”

  “I don’t remember.”

  “And you went and telephoned?”

  Miss Williams’s tone was dry and brusque: “I had gone half up the path when I met Mr Meredith Blake. I entrusted my errand to him and returned to Mrs Crale. I thought, you see, she might have collapsed - and men are no good in a matter of that kind.”

  “And had she collapsed?”

  Miss Williams said dryly, “Mrs Crale was quite in command of herself. She was quite different from Miss Greer, who made a hysterical and very unpleasant scene.”

  “What kind of a scene?”

  “She tried to attack Mrs Crale.”

  “You mean she realized that Mrs Crale was responsible for Mr Crale’s death?”

  Miss Williams considered for a moment or two.

  “No, she could hardly be sure of that. That - er - terrible suspicion had not yet arisen. Miss Greer just screamed out, “It’s all your doing, Caroline. You killed him. It’s all your fault.” She did not actually say, “You’ve poisoned him,” but I think there is no doubt that she thought so.”

  “And Mrs Crale?”

  Miss Williams moved restlessly. “Must we be hypocritical, M. Poirot? I cannot tell you what Mrs Crale really felt or thought at that moment. Whether it was horror at what she had done -”

  “Did it seem like that?”

  “N-no, n-no, I can’t say it did. Stunned, yes - and, I think, frightened. Yes, I am sure, frightened. But that is natural enough.”

  Hercule Poirot said in a dissatisfied tone: “Yes, perhaps that is natural enough. What view did she adopt officially as to her husband’s death?”

  “Suicide. She said, very definitely from the first, that it must be suicide.”

  “Did she say the same when she was talking to you privately, or did she put forward any other theory?”

  “No. She - she - took pains to impress upon me that it must be suicide.”

  Miss Williams sounded embarrassed.

  “And what did you say to that?”

  “Really, M. Poirot, does it matter what I said?”

  “Yes, I think it does.”

  “I don’t see why -”

  But as though his expectant silence hypnotized her, she said reluctantly, “I think I said, ‘Certainly, Mrs Crale. It must have been suicide.’”

  “Did you believe your own words?”

  Miss Williams raised her head. “No, I did not,” she said firmly. “But please understand, M. Poirot, that I was entirely on Mrs Crale’s side, if you like to put it that way. My sympathies were with her, not with the police.”

  “You would have liked to have seen her acquitted?”

  Miss Williams said defiantly, “Yes, I would.”

  “Then you are in sympathy with her daughter’s feelings?”

  “I have every sympathy with Carla.”

  “Would you have any objection to writing out for me a detailed account of the tragedy?”

  “You mean for her to read?”

  “Yes.”

  Miss Williams said slowly, “No, I have no objection. She is quite determined to go into the matter, is she?”

  “Yes. I dare say it would have been preferable if the truth had been kept from her -”

  Miss Williams interrupted him.

  “No. It is always better to face the truth. It is no use evading unhappiness, by tampering with facts. Carla has had a shock, learning the truth - now she wants to know exactly how the tragedy came about. That seems to me the right attitude for a brave young woman to take. Once she knows all about it she will be able to forget it again and go on with the business of living her own life.”

  “Perhaps you are right,” said Poirot.

  “I’m quite sure I’m right.”

  “But, you see, there is more to it than that. She not only wants to know - she wants to prove her mother innocent.”

  Miss Williams said, “Poor child.”

  “That is what you say, is it?”

  Miss Williams said, “I see now why you said that it might be better if she had never known. All the same, I think it is best as it is. To wish to find her mother innocent is a natural hope - and, hard though the actual revelation may be, I think, from what you say of her, that Carla is brave enough to learn the truth and not flinch from it.”

  “You are sure it is the truth?” Poirot asked.

  “I don’t understand you.”

  “You see no loophole for believing that Mrs Crale was innocent?”

  “I don’t think that possibility has ever been seriously considered.”

  “And yet she herself clung to the theory of suicide?”

  Miss Williams said dryly, “The poor woman had to say something.”

  “Do you know that when Mrs Crale was dying she left a letter for her daughter in which she solemnly swears that she is innocent?”

  Miss Williams stared. “That was very wrong of her,” she said sharply. “You think so?”

  “Yes, I do. Oh, I dare say you are a sentimentalist like most men -”

  Poirot interrupted indignantly. “I am not a sentimentalist.”

  “But there is such a thing as false sentiment. Why write that - a lie – at such a solemn moment? To spare your child pain? Yes, many women would do that. But I should not have thought it of Mrs Crale. She was a brave woman and a truthful woman. I should have thought it far more like her to have told her daughter not to judge.”

  Poirot said with slight exasperation, “You will not even consider, then, the possibility that what Caroli
ne Crale wrote was the truth?”

  “Certainly not!”

  Miss Williams looked at Poirot in a very odd way. “It doesn’t matter my saying this now - so long afterward. You see, I happen to know that Caroline Crale was guilty!”

  “What?”

  “It’s true. Whether I did right in withholding what I knew at the time I cannot be sure, but I did withhold it. But you must take it from me, quite definitely, that I know Caroline Crale was guilty…”

  Angela Warren’s flat overlooked Regent’s Park. Here, on this spring day, a soft air wafted in through the open window and one might have had the illusion that one was in the country if it had not been for the steady menacing roar of the traffic passing below. Poirot turned from the window as the door opened and Angela Warren came into the room. It was not the first time he had seen her. He had availed himself of the opportunity to attend a lecture she had given at the Royal Geographical. It had been, he considered, an excellent lecture. Dry, perhaps, from the view of popular appeal. Miss Warren had an excellent delivery; she neither paused nor hesitated for a word. She did not repeat herself. The tones of her voice were clear and not unmelodious. She made no concessions to romantic appeal or love of adventure. There was very little human interest in the lecture. It was an admirable recital of concise facts, adequately illustrated by excellent slides, and with intelligent deductions from the facts recited. Dry, precise, clear, lucid, highly technical. The soul of Hercule Poirot approved. Here, he considered, was an orderly mind.

  Now that he saw her at close quarters he realized that Angela Warren might easily have been a very handsome woman. Her features were regular, though severe. She had finely marked dark brows, clear, intelligent brown eyes, a fine, pale skin. She had very square shoulders and a slightly mannish walk. There was certainly about her no suggestion of the little pig who cried, “Wee-wee.” But on the right cheek, disfiguring and puckering the skin, was that healed scar. The right eye was slightly distorted, the corner pulled downward by it, but no one would have realized that the sight of that eye was destroyed. It seemed to Hercule Poirot almost certain that she had lived with that disability so long that she was now completely unconscious of it. And it occurred to him that of the five people in whom he had become interested as a result of his investigations, those who might have been said to start with the fullest advantages were not those who had actually wrested the most success and happiness from life.

  Elsa, who might have been said to have started with all advantages - youth, beauty, riches - had done worst. She was like a flower overtaken by untimely frost - still in bud but without life. Cecilia Williams, to outward appearances, had no assets of which to boast. Nevertheless, to Poirot’s eye, there was no despondency there and no sense of failure. Miss Williams’s life had been interesting to her – she was still interested in people and events. She had that enormous mental and moral advantage of a strict Victorian upbringing, denied to us in these days - she had done her duty in that station of life to which it had pleased God to call her, and that assurance encased her in an armour impregnable to the slings and darts of envy, discontent, and regret. She had her memories, her small pleasures, made possible by stringent economies, and sufficient health and vigour to enable her still to be interested in life. Now, in Angela Warren - that young creature handicapped by disfigurement and its consequent humiliations - Poirot believed he saw a spirit strengthened by its necessary fight for confidence and assurance. The undisciplined schoolgirl had given place to a vital and forceful woman, a woman of considerable mental power and gifted with abundant energy to accomplish ambitious purposes. She was a woman, Poirot felt sure, both happy and successful. Her life was full and vivid and eminently enjoyable.

  She was not, incidentally, the type of woman that Poirot really liked. Though admiring the clear-cut precision of her mind, she had just a sufficient nuance of the femme formidable about her to alarm him as a mere man. His taste had always been for the flamboyant and extravagant. With Angela Warren it was easy to come to the point of his visit. There was no subterfuge. He merely recounted Carla Lemarchant’s interview with him. Angela Warren’s severe face lighted up appreciatively.

  “Little Carla? She is over here? I would like to see her so much.”

  “You have not kept in touch with her?”

  “Hardly as much as I should have done. I was a schoolgirl at the time she went to Canada, and I realized, of course, that in a year or two she would have forgotten me. Of late years an occasional present at Christmas has been the only link between us. I imagined that she would, by now, be completely immersed in the Canadian atmosphere and that her future would lie over there. Better so, under the circumstances.”

  Poirot said: “One might think so, certainly. A change of name – a change of scene. A new life. But it was not to be so easy as that.” And he then told of Carla’s engagement, the discovery she had made upon coming of age, and her motive in coming to England. Angela Warren listened quietly, her disfigured cheek resting on one hand. She betrayed no emotion during the recital, but as Poirot finished, she said quietly, “Good for Carla.”

  Hercule Poirot was startled. It was the first time that he had met with this reaction. He said, “You approve, Miss Warren?”

  “Certainly. I wish her every success. Anything I can do to help, I will. I feel guilty, you know, that I haven’t attempted anything myself.”

  “Then you think that there is a possibility that she is right in her views?”

  Angela Warren said sharply, “Of course she’s right. Caroline didn’t do it. I’ve always known that.”

  “You surprise me very much indeed, mademoiselle,” Poirot murmured. “Everybody else I have spoken to -”

  She cut in sharply: “You mustn’t go by that. I’ve no doubt that the circumstantial evidence is overwhelming. My own conviction is based on knowledge - knowledge of my sister. I just know quite simply and definitely that Caro couldn’t have killed anyone.”

  “Can you say that with certainty of any human creature?”

  “Probably not in most cases. I agree that the human animal is full of curious surprises. But in Caroline’s case there were special reasons - reasons which I have a better chance of appreciating than anyone else could.”

  She touched her damaged cheek.

  “You see this? You’ve probably heard about it.” Poirot nodded.

  “Caroline did that. That’s why I’m sure - I know - that she did not do murder.”

  “It would not be a convincing argument to most people.”

  “No, it would be the opposite. It was actually used in that way, I believe. As evidence that Caroline had a violent and ungovernable temper! Because she had injured me as a baby, learned men argued that she would be equally capable of poisoning an unfaithful husband.”

  Poirot said, “I, at least, appreciated the difference. A sudden fit of ungovernable rage does not lead you to abstract a poison first and then use it deliberately on the following day.”

  Angela Warren waved an impatient hand.

  “That’s not what I mean at all. I must try and make it plain to you. Supposing that you are a person of normally affectionate and kindly disposition, but that you are also liable to intense jealousy. And supposing that during the years of your life when control is most difficult you do, in a fit of rage, come near to committing what is, in effect, murder. Think of the awful shock, the horror, the remorse that seizes upon you. If you are a sensitive person like Caroline that horror and remorse will never quite leave you. It never left her. I don’t suppose I was consciously aware of it at the time, but looking back I recognize it perfectly. Caro was haunted, continually haunted, by the fact that she had injured me. That knowledge never left her in peace. It coloured all her actions. It explained her attitude to me. Nothing was too good for me. In her eyes, I must always come first. Half the quarrels she had with Amyas were on my account.”

  Miss Warren paused, then went on. “It was very bad for me, of course. I got horribly spoiled.
But that’s neither here nor there. We’re discussing the effect on Caroline. The result of that impulse to violence was a lifelong abhorrence of any further act of the same kind. Caro was watching herself, always in fear that something kind might happen again. And she took her own of guarding against it. One of those ways was a great of language. She felt (and I think, quite truly) that if she were violent enough in speech she would have no temptation to violence in action. She found by experience that the method worked. “That’s why I’ve heard Caro say things like, ‘I’d like to cut so and so in pieces and boil him slowly in oil.’ And she’d say to me, or to Amyas, ‘If you go on annoying me I shall murder you.’ In the same way she quarrelled easily and violently. She recognized, I think, the impulse to violence that there was in her nature, and she deliberately gave it an outlet that way. She and Amyas used to have the most fantastic and lurid quarrels.”

  Hercule Poirot nodded. “Yes, there was evidence of that. They quarrelled like cat and dog, it was said.”

  Angela Warren said: “Exactly. That’s what is so stupid and misleading about evidence. Of course Caro and Amyas quarrelled! Of course they said bitter and outrageous and cruel things to each other! What nobody appreciates is that they enjoyed quarrelling. But they did! Amyas enjoyed it, too. They were that kind of couple. They both of them liked drama and emotional scenes. Most men don’t. They like peace. But Amyas was an artist. He liked shouting and threatening and generally being outrageous. It was like letting off steam to him. He was the kind of man who when he loses his collar stud bellows the house down. It sounds very odd, I know, but living that way with continual rows and makings up was Amyas’s and Caroline’s idea of fun!”

  She made an impatient gesture.

  “If they’d only not hustled me away and let me give evidence, I’d have told them that.” Then she shrugged her shoulders. “But I don’t suppose they would have believed me. And, anyway, then it wouldn’t have been as clear in my mind as it is now. It was the kind of thing I knew but hadn’t thought about and certainly had never dreamed of putting into words.”

  She looked across at Poirot.

  “You do see what I mean?”