‘We all wanted to help you, M. Poirot, but you tricked us,’ said Annabel Treadway. ‘You led us to believe that you could prove Grandy had been murdered. Now, however, you tell us his death was an accident, exactly as we had always believed.’
‘Mademoiselle, I have been careful at every stage not to say a word that was not true. I told you only that I was certain there was a guilty person, a murderer, to be caught, and that, until that happened, there remained a great danger. I referred, mademoiselle, to the danger to you. Your sister wished to see you hang for the murder of your grandfather. When she admitted this to Mademoiselle Ivy—the conversation overheard by Kingsbury—she had not yet successfully killed anybody. Perhaps would not have continued with her plot to frame you? I do not know. But I do know this: a very short time later, thinking herself to be at risk of discovery and exposure, she left Kingsbury to die. Madame Lavington, I did not lie or even twist the truth when I described you as a murderer. It is a question of character. You became a murderer the moment you set out to arrange your sister’s death.’
Lenore Lavington looked back at Poirot expressionlessly. She said nothing.
‘Why did Lenore want her sister to hang?’ asked John McCrodden.
‘What about the other three letters?’ said Annabel Treadway. ‘Whatever Lenore’s intentions with regard to me, why should she send the same letter to Mr Dockerill, Mrs Rule and Mr McCrodden?’
‘Mademoiselle, monsieur—please. I have not yet finished explaining. Since one cannot finish unless one starts somewhere, please allow me to start with the typewriter. Lenore Lavington used all of her cunning to try to deceive Poirot, but it did not work. Oh, yes, she was very clever. The typewriter I was forbidden to inspect when I first came here … it was the one I was looking for, with the imperfect letter “e”.
‘Between my first visit to Combingham Hall and my second, Lenore Lavington decided it would be wise for her to appear to want to help me in any way she can. I was told, upon arrival, that I could now inspect the typewriter, but that there had been purchased recently a new machine. The old one, said Lenore Lavington, was past its best. In order to appear helpful, Madame Lavington tells me she has kept the old one, since that must be the one I will want to examine. Naturally, the new typewriter, still unsold in the shop when the four letters were typed, cannot be the one I seek. Madame Lavington tells me she has asked Kingsbury to present me with both machines, new and old, so that I may test both. Ah, she was clever—but not clever enough.
‘One of the typewriters looks new. The other looks new apart from a few scratches and cracks—which are easily made. Alors, Poirot, he performs the test, and he notices something most puzzling. The letter “e” is working exactly as it should on both machines, so both can be eliminated from suspicion. But it is not only the “e” that, in each case, is flawless. It is everything. I noticed no difference of quality. Apart from the scratches to one, both might have come brand new from the shop that very morning. I thought to myself: what if Lenore Lavington has lied to me and has, instead of new and old, given me two new machines to inspect? Why would she do that?’
‘She would do it if she didn’t want you to check the real old typewriter,’ said Timothy Lavington. ‘And she didn’t—because it would have incriminated her.’
‘Timmy, don’t,’ said Ivy. ‘You needn’t be the one to say it.’
‘Family loyalty is the last thing in my mind at the moment,’ her brother told her. ‘I’m right, aren’t I, M. Poirot?’
‘Yes, Timothy, you are correct. Your mother was careless. She thought that telling me the old typewriter had not been working properly would be enough. She was not afraid that I would use both machines and notice that both seemed equally new, because of the many scratches she had inflicted upon one machine.
‘I was nearly fooled! I asked myself: “Is it possible that the older machine is simply in excellent condition, and works well on occasions, though not on others?” I was asking myself this question when Annabel Treadway appeared and said to me, “I see you’ve begun your typewriter investigation. Lenore gave me strict orders to leave you alone and let you do your detective work.”
‘Why would Mademoiselle Annabel see two typewriters and two pieces of paper, both with words typed upon them, and conclude that I had only begun my typewriter experiment, rather than completed it? I could think of only one reason: she knew there were in fact three typewriters in the house—the two new ones, and the old machine that Lenore Lavington had hidden away.’
‘Which is why Mrs Lavington told Miss Treadway to leave you alone,’ said Eustace Campbell-Brown. ‘If Miss Treadway knew that two typewriters had recently been purchased, she might have given the game away.’
‘Exactement. And, remember, Lenore Lavington could not ask her sister to lie. If she did, Mademoiselle Annabel would suspect at once who had written and sent the four letters.’
‘And …’ Annabel Treadway began hesitantly ‘… when you asked me to look carefully at the two pieces of paper, and I could see no difference between them …’
‘You were quite correct! I told you, did I not, that I had noticed something significant? It was the absence of difference. Often, the important thing to be noticed is a thing that is not there. I waited until I knew Madame Lavington was downstairs and not in her bedroom, and I searched that room. As I hoped I would, I found the old typewriter. It was in a bag under her bed. A quick test revealed that it was the one with the faulty “e”.’
Timothy was staring furiously at his mother. ‘You were going to kill me before I was even born,’ he said. ‘You were unfaithful to Father. You killed Kingsbury, and you would have allowed Aunt Annabel to hang if M. Poirot here hadn’t stopped you. You’re a monster.’
‘That’s enough!’ John McCrodden told him.
To Poirot, McCrodden said, ‘Whatever you suspect Lenore of having done, you surely cannot think it’s acceptable for a boy to address his mother in such a manner, in front of strangers?’
‘I do not suspect, monsieur. I know. Tell me—for you are not a stranger to Lenore Lavington—what did you do to anger her?’
McCrodden looked surprised. ‘Anger her? How … how did …’
‘How did I know? It is simple,’ said Poirot. He often said this about things that were simple to nobody but him. ‘Lenore Lavington wanted Annabel Treadway to hang—but she needed to conceal her true aim. She did this by sending the same letter of accusation to three other people. You, Monsieur McCrodden, were one of the three. Knowing that it would be a most unpleasant sort of letter to receive, Madame Lavington chose three people who, in her opinion, deserved to suffer a little. Not to hang for murder—that fate, she reserved only for her sister Annabel—but to worry, perhaps, that they might soon be charged with a crime they had not committed. So, I ask again: what did you do to anger Rebecca Grace, whose real name is Lenore Lavington?’
John McCrodden looked at Lenore as he spoke. ‘We met at the seaside resort of Whitby. Rebec—Lenore was holidaying there with her husband. She … I’m afraid there is no nice way to put it. After we met, she abandoned him to spend three days with me. I don’t know what she told him. I can’t remember, all these years later. I seem to recall she made an excuse about having to rush off somewhere. Do you remember what it was, Lenore?’
She gave no answer. For some time, she had expressed no emotion, and done nothing but sit and stare straight ahead.
‘At the end of the three days, I couldn’t bear to let her go,’ John McCrodden went on. ‘I begged her to leave her husband and live with me. She said she couldn’t do that, but that she would come to Whitby and see me whenever she could. She wanted our love affair to continue, but it was a prospect I found intolerable. The idea that she planned to stay with a man she neither loved nor desired … It would have been wrong. And I wasn’t prepared to share her.’
‘Whereas cavorting with a married woman is not wrong,’ muttered Sylvia Rule.
‘Be quiet,’ John McCrodden told he
r. ‘You know nothing of right and wrong, and you care even less.’
‘So you forced upon Madame Lavington the stark choice?’ said Poirot to McCrodden.
‘Yes, I did. Him or me. She chose him, and she blamed me. To her mind, I had ended a love affair that might have continued—that she very much wanted to continue.’
‘And she could not forgive you,’ said Poirot. ‘Just as she could not forgive Sylvia Rule for trying to force her to get rid of the baby she had decided she wanted to keep. Nor could she forgive Hugo for occasionally punishing Timothy for bad behaviour, as he had to every so often. That’s why Monsieur Dockerill was chosen to receive one of the four letters.’
‘How did you know that Lenore and I had had a love affair?’ John McCrodden asked. ‘I never said a word, not to a single soul. Neither did she, I am quite certain. It’s impossible that you could know.’
‘Ah, monsieur, this knowledge was not difficult to acquire. You and Madame Lavington told me yourselves, with a little help from Mademoiselle Ivy.’
‘That cannot be true,’ Ivy said. ‘I myself only found out yesterday afternoon, when Mr McCrodden walked into the house and Mummy saw him again, and then she got so upset that I was able to force her to tell me everything. Before that happened, the name John McCrodden meant nothing to me, and you and I have barely spoken since then, M. Poirot.’
‘C’est vrai. All the same, mademoiselle, you helped me to learn the secret without knowing it yourself. I put together things you had said with things I had heard from both your mother and Monsieur McCrodden, and—’
‘What things?’ John McCrodden asked. ‘I’m still not sure whether to believe a single word that comes out of your mouth, Poirot.’
‘You told me, if you recall, that your father disapproved of your choice of work. You referred to having worked as a miner somewhere in the north of England, on the coast, or near the coast. Your father did not approve this sort of labour, in which you got the dirty hands—but, you said, he also did not approve when you worked at the clean end, making and selling the trinkets. It was a strange expression, this “at the clean end”. I did not know what it meant at the time. It struck me as not especially important, so I did not dwell upon it.
‘I also did not at first realize what you might have meant by the word “trinkets”. I had heard that word used recently—by your father, in fact. He used it to mean the decorations for Christmas, I think. But the word “trinkets” has another meaning too. It can mean jewellery. As for “the clean end”, I decided that you must have been referring to the clean end of mining, for that was the subject we had been discussing. What you were trying to tell me, Monsieur McCrodden, was that you went from working in a mine—the dirty end—to the cleaner work of making jewellery from the substance that, previously, you had mined. That substance was the Whitby jet, was it not?
‘Lenore Lavington told me that she had once owned a mourning bracelet made from jet, one that she later gave to her daughter, Mademoiselle Ivy. She described the bracelet to me as a treasured possession—a gift she herself was given during a seaside holiday with her late husband Cecil. From Ivy Lavington, I learned that the marriage of Cecil and Lenore Lavington was not a happy one—not, at least, on her part. Why, then, I asked myself, would she so treasure a gift bought for her by a husband she had not loved? She would not! The bracelet of Whitby jet had been given to her instead by a man she loved passionately: John McCrodden, the lover she took while on holiday.
‘There was also, I learned, a second gift that Lenore Lavington had given to her daughter: a fan—another item she described as a treasured possession. On the fan was a picture of a dancer with hair the same colour as that of Mademoiselle Ivy—a dancer wearing a red and black dress. Dark hair and a dress of red and black? This sounded very much to me like a Spanish dancer. I have seen such illustrations on ladies’ fans that have been brought back as souvenirs from the continent. I knew, thanks to Rowland McCrodden, that his son John owned a house in Spain—that he loved the country and visited it often. Could John McCrodden have given that fan to Lenore Lavington, I wondered, during the three days they had spent together? I decided it was not merely possible but probable. Why else would an ordinary fan have become a treasured possession? Lenore Lavington had not forgiven John McCrodden, as we know—yet still, she treasured those gifts he had given her. Such is the complicated character of love!’
‘It’s a complicated business,’ agreed Inspector Hubert Thrubwell. ‘Not one of us could deny that, Mr Poirot.’
‘The jet bracelet, the Spanish dancer fan,’ Poirot went on. ‘These things might have been mere coincidences, of course. Neither was proof that John McCrodden and Lenore Lavington knew one another. Then I thought: Lenore Lavington can be linked to Sylvia Rule, via Freddie; to Annabel, her sister; to Hugo Dockerill, housemaster of her son. Why not also to John McCrodden? Instead of being the odd one out, I decided it was likely that it was a case of one whole, undivided slice of cake …’—Poirot pointed dramatically at the plate on the table—‘… and no odd ones out. Lenore Lavington knew them all.’
‘Do you have anything to say about any of this, Mrs Lavington?’ Inspector Thrubwell asked her.
She did not move an inch. Still, she said nothing.
John McCrodden said fiercely, ‘I won’t allow the woman I love to hang for murder, whatever she has done! I don’t care if you’re still angry with me after all these years, Lenore. I love you as much as I did then. Say something, for God’s sake!’
‘Poirot, I’m still not at all clear about the need for four letters,’ said Rowland McCrodden. ‘If Mrs Lavington hoped to see Miss Treadway punished for her grandfather’s murder, why didn’t she send only one letter, to her sister?’
‘Because, my friend, she wished to conceal the fact that she was the accuser—the one with the suspicions! Lenore Lavington could not guarantee that her plan would work and that Mademoiselle Annabel would be sent to the gallows. If the plan did not work, she wanted to be free to try something different, perhaps—another form of revenge. This she would be better placed to do if Mademoiselle Annabel did not know she was an enemy to be feared. If one is feared, then at once precautions are taken. Lenore Lavington did not wish such precautions to be in operation. She wanted her sister unguarded.
‘If she had been the only one accused of murder, Annabel Treadway would have asked herself, “Who might have done such a thing to me, and why?” If, on the other hand, she hears from Hercule Poirot that four people have been accused of the murder of Barnabas Pandy, then it seems to her that the accuser might be some person of whom she has never heard, perhaps. It seems to Mademoiselle Annabel that the accuser would surely not be her sister, who knows she could not have killed their grandfather because the two of them were together in a different room when he died. Eh bien, Lenore Lavington is protected from suspicion of being the one who suspects, the one who accuses; her quarry remains trusting of her and therefore vulnerable, which is how Lenore Lavington wanted her.’
‘Wait a moment,’ said John McCrodden. ‘Lenore and Annabel were in a room together when their grandfather died? Did Lenore tell you that?’ He sounded excited. I could not work out why.
‘Oui, monsieur,’ said Poirot. ‘All three women told me this, and it is true.’
‘Then Lenore provided Annabel with an alibi,’ said McCrodden ‘Why would she do that, if you say she wanted her to hang?’
Poirot looked at Rowland McCrodden. ‘I’m sure you can enlighten your son on this point, mon ami.’
‘The guilty tend to try to look as if they’re not doing the very thing they are doing—the thing they’re guilty of,’ said Rowland McCrodden. ‘If Mrs Lavington hoped to get her sister convicted of murder, what better way to look as if she’s doing the opposite than by vigorously defending Miss Treadway and providing her with an alibi?’
‘Is nobody going to ask the most important question?’ said Jane Dockerill impatiently.
‘I will,’ said Timothy Lavington.
‘Why on earth should Mother wish to revenge herself upon Aunt Annabel, M. Poirot? What harm had Aunt Annabel ever done to Mother?’
CHAPTER 36
The True Culprit
Poirot turned to Annabel Treadway. ‘Mademoiselle,’ he said. ‘You know only too well the answer to your nephew’s question.’
‘I do,’ said Annabel Treadway. ‘It is something I can never forget.’
‘Indeed. It is a secret you have kept for many years, and it has cast a shadow over your whole life, a shadow of terrible guilt and regret.’
‘No. Not regret,’ she said. ‘It was not something I decided to do. It was something that just happened. Oh, I know I was the one who made it happen, but how can I regret it when I can’t remember making the decision?’
‘Then perhaps you feel additional guilt, not knowing whether, if you found yourself in a similar situation today, you would behave differently,’ said Poirot.
‘Can somebody please explain?’ said Jane Dockerill.
‘Yes, do get it over with, M. Poirot,’ said Ivy Lavington. ‘For many of us, this is not a pleasant experience. I accept that it is necessary, but please digress as little as possible.’
‘Very well, mademoiselle. I shall tell everybody the secret that your mother told you yesterday, before Kingsbury came to listen outside the door.
‘Shortly before Barnabas Pandy died, ladies and gentlemen, there was a dinner in this house. At the table were seated Monsieur Pandy, Lenore and Ivy Lavington and Annabel Treadway. Madame Lavington chastised Mademoiselle Ivy for eating too much. During an excursion to the beach several months earlier, she had told her that her legs resembled tree trunks, and this story was told at the dinner table by an angry Ivy Lavington, who had now been twice insulted by her mother. The meal ended in misery: all three ladies left the table in distress, and Barnabas Pandy was also unhappy. The late Kingsbury told me that he came upon Monsieur Pandy sitting alone at the dinner table, crying.
The Mystery of Three Quarters Page 26
