I must have looked as surprised as I felt. Jane Dockerill, when she had brought the dress to Whitehaven Mansions, had said something about Mrs Rule earning money in a manner that was both illegal and immoral. Poirot, Rowland McCrodden and I had all assumed she was referring to a different sort of unlawful immorality.
‘It’s perfectly true, you know,’ said Timothy.
‘When you say that Sylvia Rule kills babies …?’
‘Women go to her when they’re expecting babies they don’t want. Only the ones who can afford to pay through the nose, of course. Mrs Rule doesn’t care about them—or the babies, obviously. Only about getting richer. That’s why I think she might have killed Grandy. Don’t you think murder could become a habit? I mean, once a person has taken one life, why not carry on? Grandy would have been an ideal victim. The very old, like the very young, can’t fight back.’
Timothy’s theory struck me as fanciful. What motive might Sylvia Rule have had for murdering Barnabas Pandy?
‘Could Mrs Rule have stuck the dress to the bottom of your bed?’ I asked.
‘Easily. Though I don’t know how she’d have got hold of it. It belongs to my Aunt Annabel.’
I was about to ask Timothy if he knew the whereabouts of his housemaster’s typewriter when he said, ‘I want to show you something. It concerns my father. You must promise to tell nobody, if I tell you. Especially not Mother. She doesn’t deserve to know. She was always so cold to Father—never showed any affection towards him that I ever saw.
‘I’m not sure I can promise to keep secrets, Timothy. If, for instance, there were to be anything criminal about—’
‘Oh, it’s nothing like that. It’s the opposite, actually.’ He opened his satchel, pulled out an envelope and passed it to me. It was addressed to him—not at Combingham Hall, but here, at Turville. ‘Open it,’ he said.
I pulled out the letter, unfolded it and began to read:
Dear Timmy,
I am sorry to have taken so long to write and inform you that, contrary to what you have been told, I am not dead. I am alive and well, and engaged in important work on behalf of His Majesty’s Government. Our country is under threat, and must be protected. It has fallen to me to be one of its protectors. My work has placed me and others in a certain amount of danger, and so it was decided that I had to disappear. I am afraid that I cannot tell you any more than I have without endangering you too, which is the very last thing I would ever wish to do. I should not be writing to you at all, and you must promise never to tell anyone that I have. This is very important, Timmy. I do not know if I shall ever be able to return to my old life, but I will certainly write to you whenever I can. This must be our little secret. As soon as I can, I will send an address at which you can write to me. Then we can have a proper correspondence. I am immensely proud of you, Timmy, and think of you every single day.
Your loving father,
Cecil Lavington
The letter was dated 21 June 1929: nearly eight months ago.
‘Goodness me,’ I said, suddenly aware of my heart pounding in my chest.
‘I don’t think Father would mind my showing you the letter,’ said Timothy. ‘It’s Mother and Ivy and Aunt Annabel who can’t be allowed to know. He surely couldn’t object to my telling a policeman. And I’ve been bursting to tell somebody. It was so infuriating to have to sit quietly while Mrs Dockerill explained to you that I must be so sad about my dead father. She has no idea he’s as alive as you and I. They must have buried an empty coffin. Ha! Your face is a picture. I knew the letter would shock you.’
‘Indeed it has,’ I said quietly, staring at the words ‘Coode House, Turville College’ typed on the envelope. Five letter ‘e’s; five tiny pieces of proof. And many more in the letter itself.
The horizontal bar of each ‘e’ had a tiny hole in it where the white paper showed through. Many months before our Hercule Poirot impersonator had decided to accuse four people of murdering Barnabas Pandy, he or she had sent this letter to Timothy Lavington.
The question, as ever, was: why? And how did all the pieces fit together?
CHAPTER 24
Ancient Enmities
In the heart of Wales, Hercule Poirot sat at a heavily scarred kitchen table opposite Deborah Dakin, a stout woman with iron-grey hair, who had talked a lot in the short time Poirot had known her about the need to put her feet up and the impossibility of ever doing so. She had delayed the start of their conversation for nearly twenty minutes while she bustled around her kitchen, assembling a plate of cakes that a detective of Poirot’s eminence might deem worthy of his gastronomic attention. Finally, she had sat down and was now rubbing her ankles, grimacing and murmuring to herself about her feet as Poirot read the letter she had placed on the table, alongside the cakes.
Finding Mrs Dakin had been no easy task. Her little cottage had turned out to be not in the town of Llanidloes, as the address had led Poirot to believe, but in a sort of forest nearby, two miles up a steep, narrow track and many miles from what could reasonably be termed ‘civilization’. No other houses were visible from any of the cottage’s windows, only dense trees. If he had not had the reassurance that a driver was waiting for him as close to the house as it was possible for a motorcar to park, and in a reliable vehicle that would soon take him back to a railway station, Poirot would have been feeling decidedly anxious.
He read the letter a second time. It had been sent by Barnabas Pandy to Vincent Lobb at an address in Dollgellau in Wales, late the previous year. The date on it was 5 December, just two days before Pandy had died.
Pandy had written:
Dear Vincent,
You will be surprised to receive this letter from me, I am sure. For my part, I am surprised to be writing it. I have no way of knowing if, after all these years, you will be as glad to receive it as you would once have been, or if you long ago resolved to cast me from your mind and never think of me again. I asked myself if I might do more harm than good by sending a communication of this sort after so many years, when we are both old men with not much time left to us. In the end, I felt compelled to make an attempt to repair the damage that was done so many years ago.
I wish you to know that I forgive you. I understand the choice you made, and that you would have chosen differently had you not believed yourself to be in mortal danger. I should not have blamed you so unremittingly for your weakness, particularly when you endeavoured to atone for your error by telling me the truth in due course, which is something you need not have done. It was brave of you to do it.
I wish now that I had made a greater effort to see the matter from your perspective. I wish I had, much sooner than now, admitted to myself that, in your position, I too might have been afraid and thought only of saving my own life and the lives of my family, and not about justice and the morality of the situation—and so I write to beg you to be more forgiving towards me than I have been towards you. I am sorry, Vincent, truly. I regret my unyielding condemnation of you. My lack of compassion towards you was a worse sin, I now realize, than anything that you did.
Please forgive me,
Barnabas
Poirot looked up from the letter. ‘You received this only three weeks ago?’ he asked Deborah Dakin.
She nodded. ‘With Vincent being dead, it lay around unopened for a while, until someone decided to enquire as to whether he had family anywhere—and, before you ask me, I don’t know who that someone was. All I know is, one day I came home and found it sitting on my doormat. It might easily have been lost for ever and read by no one. It’s lucky it got here, if it’s important—and I’ll admit, Mr Prarrow, that that’s the only lucky side to it. Otherwise, if it hadn’t turned out to be important, and helpful to you … well, I’d prefer not to have read it.’
‘What do you mean, madame?’
‘Only that I nearly wept tears of joy when you told me who you were, and asked if I knew anything about a letter Mr Pandy had sent to Vincent. “The Lord truly does work in myste
rious ways,” I thought to myself. There was I wishing I’d never clapped eyes on the wretched thing—wishing Mr Pandy had never bothered to write it—when a famous detective tells me it might help with an important investigation! I don’t mind the upset it’s caused me if it helps you, Mr Prarrow. I can’t pretend I’ll be sorry if it turns out someone has murdered Mr Pandy—because I won’t. Not at all. Not for his sake. All the same, murder’s wrong and I’ll willingly do my duty if there’s a murderer to be caught.’
‘It sounds, madame, as if I ought to ask you where you were on the day Monsieur Pandy died. You speak as if you might have hated him enough to kill him.’
‘Enough?’ Deborah Dakin looked puzzled. ‘Oh, I hated him enough all right, Mr Prarrow. But it’s not a question of “enough” or “not enough”. I’d never allow myself to kill a person. It’s against the law, and so I wouldn’t do it. That’s what the law’s for, isn’t it? To tell us what we can and can’t do? But please don’t think I didn’t kill Mr Pandy on account of not hating him enough.’
‘Why did you hate him?’
‘Because of what he did to Vincent. I dare say you’ll have heard that story already, from Mr Pandy’s side.’
Poirot told her he had not.
‘Oh.’ She looked surprised. ‘Well, it goes back to the mine. Slate mine, it was, near Llanberis. Mr Pandy had a few of them—it’s how he made his money. This was … oh, it must have been fifty years ago. I wasn’t even born.’
She was younger than fifty, then. Poirot had thought she was older.
‘Mr Pandy was the owner of the mine, and Vincent worked for him as a supervisor. The two of them became good friends—the best of friends. What you’d call lifelong friends, except it didn’t last, and that was Mr Pandy’s doing.’
‘He did something to destroy the friendship?’ said Poirot.
‘Some slate was stolen, and a young man named William Evans was blamed for it. He also worked in the mine, and Mr Pandy thought he was a good lad, by all accounts. Well, Mr Evans got sent to prison, where he took his own life—and he didn’t waste any time about it either. He left behind a note saying he wouldn’t allow anyone to punish him for a crime he hadn’t committed. Well, that made no sense, did it? When he put that rope around his neck, he punished himself worse than the prison was punishing him. And that wasn’t yet the worst of it: his grief-stricken wife followed his example and did away with herself and their young child.’
‘Bouleversant,’ murmured Poirot, shaking his head.
‘It was a terrible tragedy: three lives lost, and all for nothing. It turned out, you see, that he was right. About being innocent. William Evans wasn’t the guilty one. But I’m getting ahead of myself. I’ll admit, Mr Prarrow, I’ve had no practice at talking to famous detectives in my own kitchen.’
‘Please, tell me the story however you wish, madame.’
‘You’re very kind, Mr Prarrow. Well … Mr Pandy was upset by the deaths of the Evanses. Very upset indeed. He wasn’t one to count his profits and not care about his workers, I’ll say that for him. Fair’s fair, much as I hate the man. Hated, I suppose I ought to say, since he’s dead.’
‘Hatred can survive long after the one who inspired it is gone,’ said Poirot.
‘You don’t have to tell me that, Mr Prarrow! I’m the expert!’
‘Was the true culprit ever identified—the one who stole the slate?’
‘Oh, yes. With the Evanses dead, Vincent wasn’t himself at all, and Mr Pandy noticed some strange behaviour. He wanted to know why Vincent should be so wretched about it when he and William Evans had not been particular friends. Fearing Mr Pandy had guessed the truth, Vincent told him that he’d known all along that William Evans hadn’t been the one to steal the slate. The guilty party was a horrible dirty beast of a man—Vincent never told us his name. Didn’t want to put it in our heads, he said. Vincent told Mr Pandy that lots of the mine men had known. It wasn’t only him. They all kept quiet, though, after the thief threatened to cut their throats and their wives’ and children’s throats if they spoke up about what they knew.’
‘An evil man,’ said Poirot quietly.
‘Oh, without a doubt, Mr Prarrow. Without a doubt. But that didn’t make Vincent evil for not saying anything, did it? He was frightened—frightened that he and his wife and their son, my late husband, would be murdered in their beds if he told Mr Pandy what he knew. Do you see? Could you or I or any of us say we wouldn’t be too afraid to speak up? And besides, Vincent did speak up eventually. Thanks to him, that beast got what he deserved in the end.’
‘But Monsieur Pandy could not forgive him? He blamed him for the death of the Evans family?’
‘That he did, Mr Prarrow. And Vincent blamed himself. And I don’t deny it made sense for Mr Pandy to be angry with him at first. Anyone would have been, and there was the shock of it as much as anything else. Oh, Vincent understood the way Mr Pandy felt, all right. He never could forgive himself, and neither did Mr Pandy. He treated Vincent as if he’d murdered William Evans and his family with his own bare hands. Even after twenty, thirty years, when Vincent tried again and again to say how deeply he regretted it … Even then Mr Pandy wouldn’t see him or read his letters. Sent them all back unopened, he did. In the end, Vincent stopped trying.’
‘I am sorry, madame.’
‘You should be,’ Deborah Dakin said. ‘Well, not you, Mr Prarrow, I don’t mean you … but Mr Pandy should have been sorry—very sorry—for the way he treated poor Vincent. It destroyed him. As he grew older and life got harder, and no kind word arrived from Mr Pandy, Vincent came to see his old and once so dear friend’s judgement upon him as … well, as a kind of doom.’
‘Tragedy upon tragedy,’ said Poirot.
‘That makes it sound as if it’s no one’s fault, when it was,’ said Deborah Dakin. ‘It was Mr Pandy’s fault. Vincent died believing himself to be damned. In the last years of his life, he barely spoke a word.’
‘Then … pardon me, madame, but why do you describe this letter as “wretched”? Were you not pleased to read it? To know that, after so many years, Monsieur Pandy relented and forgave your father-in-law?
‘No, I’m not! This letter makes the whole thing so much worse—surely you can see that? Either Vincent committed an unforgivable sin or else he didn’t. We always thought that, to Mr Pandy, that’s what it was: unforgivable. Then, suddenly, after fifty years, he decides it’s no such thing? He made Vincent suffer all that time, only to decide when it was too late, and when it suited him, that he got it wrong?’
Poirot said, ‘An interesting opinion, madame—though perhaps not entirely rational.’
Deborah Dakin looked affronted. ‘What do you mean it’s not rational? Of course it is! Doing the right thing much too late is worse than never doing it at all.’
The same logic could be applied to Vincent Lobb’s actions, thought Poirot. Evidently this had not occurred to his daughter-in-law, and Poirot decided not to extend his visit any longer than necessary by pointing it out to her.
CHAPTER 25
Poirot Returns to Combingham Hall
Poirot had been expecting a driver to collect him from the railway station. He was surprised to alight from his train and find Lenore Lavington standing on the platform under a navy blue umbrella. She offered no conventional greetings or pleasantries, and instead said, ‘I hope I won’t regret allowing you to visit us again, M. Poirot.’
‘I hope so too, madame.’
They walked to her motorcar in silence, followed by the porter who carried Poirot’s cases.
As she started up the engine a few minutes later, Lenore Lavington said, ‘Your telegram need not have been as cryptic as it was. Am I to understand that you have found evidence that Grandfather was murdered, and that you plan to expose a murderer during your stay with us? Do you already know …?’ She left the question unfinished.
‘I will admit, madame, that the picture is not yet complete. In three days’ time, however, I hope to b
e able to tell you and others the whole story.’
Three days. The words loomed large in Poirot’s mind. 24 February had seemed a safe distance away when he had sent his letters of invitation. Since then, several interesting new pieces of information had come his way. Any one of them might prove to be the key that unlocked the mystery, but when, he wondered, would the unlocking happen? For the sake of Poirot’s peace of mind, he hoped it would be soon.
‘At our gathering, you will learn the truth about your grandfather’s death,’ he said, fervently hoping he would not be proved wrong. ‘One of the assembled company will know the truth already, of course.’
‘Do you mean Grandfather’s murderer?’ asked Lenore. ‘But that person won’t be among the assembled company, as you put it. The only people at the Hall will be you, me, Annabel, Ivy and Kingsbury. None of us murdered Grandfather.’
‘You are wrong, I am afraid, madame. Many more people are to join us. They will arrive tomorrow. Inspector Edward Catchpool of Scotland Yard, Hugo and Jane Dockerill, Freddie Rule and his mother Sylvia. Also, there will be Freddie’s sister Mildred, and her fiancé Eustace Campbell-Brown, and John McCrodden and his father Rowland McCrodden. And—please be careful!’
The motorcar swerved violently, narrowly missing another vehicle travelling in the opposite direction, then stopped by the side of the road. Lenore Lavington switched off the engine.
‘And also your son Timothy,’ Poirot said in a faltering voice, producing a handkerchief from his pocket to wipe his brow.
‘Do you mean to tell me you have invited an assort-ment of complete strangers to my home, without my permission?’
‘It is irregular, I know. In my defence, I will say only that it is necessary—unless you wish a murderer to escape justice.’
‘Of course I don’t, but … that does not mean that you can fill my house with strangers and people I dislike without consulting me.’
‘Whom do you dislike? Freddie Rule?’
The Mystery of Three Quarters Page 18
