Elephants Can Remember

by Agatha Christie

  It was not very far. He saw cars parked against a wall. He saw the outline of a house against the sky. A house that was clearly empty – that needed repainting. A house agent’s board hung there – announcing that ‘this desirable property’ was for sale. On the gate the word Overcliffe had a line drawn over it and the name Down House replaced it. He went to meet two people who were walking towards him. One was Desmond Burton-Cox and the other was Celia Ravenscroft.

  ‘I got an order from the house agent,’ said Desmond, ‘saying we wanted to view it or however they put it. I’ve got the key in case we want to go inside. It’s changed hands twice in the last five years. But there wouldn’t be anything to see there now, would there?’

  ‘I shouldn’t think so,’ said Celia. ‘After all, it’s belonged to lots of people already. Some people called Archer who first bought it, and then somebody called Fallowfield, I think. They said it was too lonely. And now these last people are selling it too. Perhaps they were haunted.’

  ‘Do you really believe in haunted houses?’ said Desmond.

  ‘Well now, of course I don’t think so really,’ said Celia, ‘but this might be, mightn’t it? I mean, the sort of things that happened, the sort of place it is and everything . . .’

  ‘I do not think so,’ said Poirot. ‘There was sorrow here and Death, but there was also Love.’

  A taxi came along the road.

  ‘I expect that’s Mrs Oliver,’ said Celia. ‘She said she’d come by train and take a taxi from the station.’

  Two women got out of the taxi. One was Mrs Oliver and with her was a tall, elegantly dressed woman. Since Poirot knew she was coming he was not taken by surprise. He watched Celia to see if she had any reactions.

  ‘Oh!’ Celia sprang forward.

  She went towards the woman and her face had lit up.

  ‘Zélie!’ she said, ‘it is Zélie? It is really Zélie! Oh, I am so pleased. I didn’t know you were coming.’

  ‘Monsieur Hercule Poirot asked me to come.’

  ‘I see,’ said Celia. ‘Yes, yes, I suppose I see. But I – I didn’t –’ she stopped. She turned her head and looked at the handsome boy standing beside her. ‘Desmond, was it – was it you?’

  ‘Yes. I wrote to Mademoiselle Meauhourat – to Zélie, if I may still call her that.’

  ‘You can always call me that, both of you,’ said Zélie. ‘I was not sure I wanted to come, I did not know if I was wise to come. That I still do not know, but I hope so.’

  ‘I want to know,’ said Celia. ‘We both want to know. Desmond thought you could tell us something.’

  ‘Monsieur Poirot came to see me,’ said Zélie. ‘He persuaded me to come today.’

  Celia linked her arm in Mrs Oliver’s. ‘I wanted you to come too because you put this in hand, didn’t you? You got Monsieur Poirot and you found out some things yourself, didn’t you?’

  ‘People told me things,’ said Mrs Oliver, ‘people whom I thought might remember things. Some of them did remember things. Some of them remembered them right and some of them remembered them wrong. That was confusing. Monsieur Poirot says that that does not really matter.’

  ‘No,’ said Poirot, ‘it is just as important to know what is hearsay and what is certain knowledge. Because from one you can learn facts even if they are not quite the right facts or had not got the explanation that you think they had. With the knowledge that you got from me, madame, from the people whom you designated elephants –’ he smiled a little.

  ‘Elephants?!’ said Mademoiselle Zélie.

  ‘It is what she called them,’ said Poirot.

  ‘Elephants can remember,’ explained Mrs Oliver. ‘That was the idea I started on. And people can remember things that happened a long time ago just like elephants can. Not all people, of course, but they can usually remember something. There were a lot of people who did. I turned a lot of the things I heard over to Monsieur Poirot and he – he has made a sort of – oh, if he was a doctor I should call it a sort of diagnosis, I suppose.’

  ‘I made a list,’ said Poirot. ‘A list of things that seemed to be pointers to the truth of what happened all those years ago. I shall read the various items to you to see perhaps if you who were concerned in all this, feel that they have any significance. You may not see their significance or you may see it plainly.’

  ‘One wants to know,’ said Celia. ‘Was it suicide, or was it murder? Did somebody – some outside person – kill both my father and my mother, shoot them for some reason we don’t know about, some motive? I shall always think there was something of that kind or something else. It’s difficult, but –’

  ‘We will stay here, I think,’ said Poirot. ‘We will not go into the house as yet. Other people have lived in it and it has a different atmosphere. We will perhaps go in if we wish when we have finished our court of enquiry here.’

  ‘It’s a court of enquiry, is it?’ said Desmond.

  ‘Yes. A court of enquiry into what happened.’

  He moved towards some iron seats which stood near the shelter of a large magnolia near the house. Poirot took from the case he carried a sheet of paper with writing on it. He said to Celia:

  ‘To you, it has got to be that way? A definite choice. Suicide or murder.’

  ‘One of them must be true,’ said Celia.

  ‘I shall say to you that both are true, and more than those two. According to my ideas, we have here not only a murder and also a suicide, but we have as well what I shall call an execution, and we have a tragedy also. A tragedy of two people who loved each other and who died for love. A tragedy of love may not always belong to Romeo and Juliet, it is not necessarily only the young who suffer the pains of love and are ready to die for love. No. There is more to it than that.’

  ‘I don’t understand,’ said Celia.

  ‘Not yet.’

  ‘Shall I understand?’ said Celia.

  ‘I think so,’ said Poirot. ‘I will tell you what I think happened and I will tell you how I came to think so. The first thing that struck me was the things that were not explained by the evidence that the police examined. Some things were very commonplace, were not evidence at all, you’d think. Among the possessions of the dead Margaret Ravenscroft, were four wigs.’ He repeated with emphasis. ‘Four wigs.’ He looked at Zélie.

  ‘She did not use a wig all the time,’ said Zélie. ‘Only occasionally. If she travelled or if she’d been out and got very dishevelled and wanted to tidy herself in a hurry, or sometimes she’d use one that was suitable for evening wear.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Poirot, ‘it was quite the fashion at that particular date. People certainly when they travelled abroad usually had a wig or two wigs. But in her possession were four wigs. Four wigs seemed to me rather a lot. I wondered why she needed four. According to the police whom I asked, it was not that she had any tendency to baldness, she had the ordinary hair a woman of her age would have and in good condition. All the same, I wondered about those. One of the wigs had a grey streak in it, I learnt later. It was her hairdresser who told me that. And one of the wigs had little curls. It was the latter wig she was wearing the day she died.’

  ‘Is that significant in any way?’ asked Celia. ‘She might have been wearing any of them.’

  ‘She might. I also learnt the housekeeper told the police that she had been wearing that particular wig almost all the time for the last few weeks before she died. It appeared to be her favourite one.’

  ‘I can’t see –’

  ‘There was also a saying that Superintendent Garroway quoted to me – “Same man, different hat”. It gave me furiously to think.’

  Celia repeated, ‘I don’t see –’

  Poirot said, ‘There was also the evidence of the dog –’

  ‘The dog – what did the dog do?’

  ‘The dog bit her. The dog was said to be devoted to its mistress – but in the last few weeks of her life, the dog turned on her more than once and bit her quite severely.’

  ‘Do y
ou mean it knew she was going to commit suicide?’ Desmond stared.

  ‘No, something much simpler than that –’

  ‘I don’t –’

  Poirot went on – ‘No, it knew what no one else seemed to know. It knew she was not its mistress. She looked like its mistress – the housekeeper who was slightly blind and also deaf saw a woman who wore Molly Ravenscroft’s clothes and the most recognizable of Molly Ravenscroft’s wigs – the one with little curls all over the head. The housekeeper said only that her mistress had been rather different in her manner the last few weeks of her life – “Same man, different hat,” had been Garroway’s phrase. And the thought – the conviction – came to me then. Same wig – different woman. The dog knew – he knew by what his nose told him. A different woman, not the woman he loved – a woman whom he disliked and feared. And I thought, suppose that woman was not Molly Ravenscroft – but who could she be? Could she be Dolly – the twin sister?’

  ‘But that’s impossible,’ said Celia.

  ‘No – it was not impossible. After all, remember, they were twins. I must come now to the things that were brought to my notice by Mrs Oliver. The things people told her or suggested to her. The knowledge that Lady Ravenscroft had suggested to her. The knowledge that Lady Ravenscroft had recently been in hospital or in a nursing home and that she perhaps had known that she suffered from cancer, or thought that she did. Medical evidence was against that, however. She still might have thought she did, but it was not the case. Then I learnt little by little the early history of her and her twin sister, who loved each other very devotedly as twins do, did everything alike, wore clothes alike, the same things seemed to happen to them, they had illnesses at the same time, they married about the same time or not very far removed in time. And eventually, as many twins do, instead of wanting to do everything in the same fashion and the same way, they wanted to do the opposite. To be as unlike each other as they could. And even between them grew a certain amount of dislike. More than that. There was a reason in the past for that. Alistair Ravenscroft as a young man fell in love with Dorothea Preston-Grey, the elder twin of the two. But his affection shifted to the other sister, Margaret, whom he married. There was jealousy then, no doubt, which led to an estrangement between the sisters. Margaret continued to be deeply attached to her twin, but Dorothea no longer was devoted in any way to Margaret. That seemed to me to be the explanation of a great many things. Dorothea was a tragic figure. By no fault of her own but by some accident of genes, of birth, of hereditary characteristics, she was always mentally unstable. At quite an early age she had, for some reason which has never been made clear, a dislike of children. There is every reason to believe that a child came to its death through her action. The evidence was not definite, but it was definite enough for a doctor to advise that she should have mental treatment, and she was for some years treated in a mental home. When reported cured by doctors, she resumed normal life, came often to stay with her sister and went out to Malaya at a time when they were stationed out there, to join them there. And there, again, an accident happened. A child of a neighbour. And again, although perhaps there was no very definite proof, it seems again Dorothea might have been responsible for it. General Ravenscroft took her home to England and she was placed once more in medical care. Once again she appeared to be cured, and after psychiatric care it was again said that she could go once more and resume a normal life. Margaret believed this time that all would be well, and thought that she ought to live with them so that they could watch closely for any signs of any further mental disability. I don’t think that General Ravenscroft approved. I think he had a very strong belief that just as someone can be born deformed, spastic or crippled in some way, she had a deformity of the brain which would recur from time to time and that she would have to be constantly watched and saved from herself in case some other tragedy happened.’

  ‘Are you saying,’ asked Desmond, ‘that it was she who shot both the Ravenscrofts?’

  ‘No,’ said Poirot, ‘that is not my solution. I think what happened was that Dorothea killed her sister, Margaret. They walked together on the cliff one day and Dorothea pushed Margaret over. The dormant obsession of hatred and resentment of the sister who, though so like herself, was sane and healthy, was too much for her. Hate, jealousy, the desire to kill all rose to the surface and dominated her. I think that there was one outsider who knew, who was here at the time that this happened. I think you knew, Mademoiselle Zélie.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Zélie Meauhourat, ‘I knew. I was here at the time. The Ravenscrofts had been worried about her. That is when they saw her attempt to injure their small son, Edward. Edward was sent back to school and I and Celia went to my pensionnat. I came back here – after seeing Celia settled in. Once the house was empty except for myself, General Ravenscroft and Dorothea and Margaret, nobody had any anxiety. And then one day it happened. The two sisters went out together. Dolly returned alone. She seemed in a very queer and nervous state. She came in and sat down at the tea-table. It was then General Ravenscroft noticed that her right hand was covered with blood. He asked her if she had had a fall. She said, “Oh no, it was nothing. Nothing at all. I got scratched by a rose-bush.” But there were no rose-bushes on the downs. It was a purely foolish remark and we were worried. If she had said a gorse bush, we might have accepted the remark. General Ravenscroft went out and I went after him. He kept saying as he walked, “Something has happened to Margaret. I’m sure something has happened to Molly.” We found her on a ledge a little way down the cliff. She had been battered with a rock and stones. She was not dead but she had bled heavily. For a moment we hardly knew what we could do. We dared not move her. We must get a doctor, we felt, at once, but before we could do that she clung to her husband. She said, gasping for breath, “Yes, it was Dolly. She didn’t know what she was doing. She didn’t know, Alistair. You mustn’t let her suffer for it. She’s never known the things she does or why. She can’t help it. She’s never been able to help it. You must promise me, Alistair. I think I’m dying now. No – no, we won’t have time to get a doctor and a doctor couldn’t do anything. I’ve been lying here bleeding to death – and I’m very close to death. I know that, but promise me. Promise me you’ll save her. Promise me you won’t let the police arrest her. Promise me that she’ll not be tried for killing me, not shut up for life as a criminal. Hide me somewhere so that my body won’t be found. Please, please, it’s the last thing I ask you. You whom I love more than anything in the world. If I could live for you I would, but I’m not going to live. I can feel that. I crawled a little way but that was all I could do. Promise me. And you, Zélie, you love me too. I know. You’ve loved me and been good to me and looked after me always. And you loved the children, so you must save Dolly. You must save poor Dolly. Please, please. For all the love we have for each other, Dolly must be saved.”’

  ‘And then,’ said Poirot. ‘What did you do? It seems to me that you must in some way between you –’

  ‘Yes. She died, you know. She died within about ten minutes of those last words, and I helped him. I helped him to hide her body. It was a place a little further along the cliff. We carried her there and there were rocks and boulders and stones, and we covered her body as best we could. There was no path to it really, or no way. You had to scramble. We put her there. All Alistair said again and again was – “I promised her. I must keep my word. I don’t know how to do it, I don’t know howanyone can save her. I don’t know. But –” Well, we did do it. Dolly was in the house. She was frightened, desperate with fright – but at the same time she showed a horrible kind of satisfaction. She said, “I always knew, I’ve known for years that Molly was really evil. She took you away from me, Alistair. You belonged to me – but she took you away from me and made you marry her and I always knew. Now I’m frightened. What’ll they do to me – what’ll they say? I can’t be shut up again. I can’t, I can’t. I shall go mad. You won’t let me be shut up. They’ll take me away and they’ll say I
’m guilty of murder. It wasn’t murder. I just had to do it. Sometimes I do have to do things. I wanted to see the blood, you know. I couldn’t wait to see Molly die, though. I ran away. But I knew she would die. I just hoped you wouldn’t find her. She just fell over the cliff. People would say it was an accident.”’

  ‘It’s a horrible story,’ said Desmond. ‘Yes,’ said Celia, ‘it’s a horrible story, but it’s better to know. It’s better to know, isn’t it? I can’t even feel sorry for her. I mean for my mother. I know she was sweet. I know there was never any trace of evil in her – she was good all through – and I know, I can understand, why my father didn’t want to marry Dolly. He wanted to marry my mother because he loved her and he had found out by then that there was something wrong with Dolly. Something bad and twisted. But how – how did you do it all?’

  ‘We told a good many lies,’ said Zélie. ‘We hoped the body would not be found so that later perhaps it might be removed in the night or something like that to somewhere where it could look as though she’d fallen down into the sea. But then we thought of the sleep-walking story. What we had to do was really quite simple. Alistair said, “It’s frightening, you know. But I promised – I swore to Molly when she was dying. I swore I’d do as she asked – there’s a way, a possible way to save Dolly, if only Dolly can do her part. I don’t know if she’s capable of it.” I said, “Do what?” And Alistair said, “Pretend she’s Molly and that it’s Dorothea who walked in her sleep and fell to her death.”

  ‘We managed it. Took Dolly to an empty cottage we knew of and I stayed with her there for some days. Alistair said Molly had been taken to hospital suffering from shock after the discovery that her sister had fallen over the cliff whilst walking in her sleep at night. Then we brought Dolly back – brought her back as Molly – wearing Molly’s clothes and Molly’s wig. I got extra wigs – the kind with the curls which really did disguise her. The dear old housekeeper, Janet, couldn’t see very well. Dolly and Molly were really very much alike, you know, and their voices were alike. Everyone accepted quite easily that it was Molly, behaving rather peculiarly now and then because of still suffering from shock. It all seemed quite natural. That was the horrible part of it –’