LITMIR.BIZ

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door opened and Mrs Oliver emerged on the steps.

      ‘You’re absolutely punctual,’ she said breathlessly. ‘I was watching for you from the window.’

      Poirot turned and closed the gate carefully behind him. Practically on every occasion that he had met Mrs Oliver, whether by appointment or by accident, a motif of apples seemed to be introduced almost immediately. She was either eating an apple or had been eating an apple—witness an apple core nestling on her broad chest—or was carrying a bag of apples. But today there was no apple in evidence at all. Very correct, Poirot thought approvingly. It would have been in very bad taste to be gnawing an apple here, on the scene of what had been not only a crime but a tragedy. For what else can it be but that? thought Poirot. The sudden death of a child of only thirteen years old. He did not like to think of it, and because he did not like to think of it he was all the more decided in his mind that that was exactly what he was going to think of until by some means or other, light should shine out of the darkness and he should see clearly what he had come here to see.

      ‘I can’t think why you wouldn’t come and stay with Judith Butler,’ said Mrs Oliver. ‘Instead of going to a fifth-class guest house.’

      ‘Because it is better that I should survey things with a certain degree of aloofness,’ said Poirot. ‘One must not get involved, you comprehend.’

      ‘I don’t see how you can avoid getting involved,’ said Mrs Oliver. ‘You’ve got to see everyone and talk to them, haven’t you?’

      ‘That most decidedly,’ said Poirot.

      ‘Who have you seen so far?’

      ‘My friend, Superintendent Spence.’

      ‘What’s he like nowadays?’ said Mrs Oliver.

      ‘A good deal older than he was,’ said Poirot. ‘Naturally,’ said Mrs Oliver, ‘what else would you expect? Is he deafer or blinder or fatter or thinner?’

      Poirot considered.

      ‘He has lost a little weight. He wears spectacles for reading the paper. I do not think he is deaf, not to any noticeable extent.’

      ‘And what does he think about it all?’

      ‘You go too quickly,’ said Poirot.

      ‘And what exactly are you and he going to do?’

      ‘I have planned my programme,’ said Poirot. ‘First I have seen and consulted with my old friend. I asked him to get me, perhaps, some information that would not be easy to get otherwise.’

      ‘You mean the police here will be his buddies and he’ll get a lot of inside stuff[61] from them?’

      ‘Well, I should not put it exactly like that, but yes, those are the lines along which I have been thinking.’

      ‘And after that?’

      ‘I come to meet you here, Madame. I have to see just where this thing happened.’

      Mrs Oliver turned her head and looked up at the house.

      ‘It doesn’t look the sort of house there’d be a murder in, does it?’ she said.

      Poirot thought again: What an unerring instinct she has!

      ‘No,’ he said, ‘it does not look at all that sort of a house. After I have seen where, then I go with you to see the mother of the dead child. I hear what she can tell me. This afternoon my friend Spence is making an appointment for me to talk with the local inspector at a suitable hour. I should also like a talk with the doctor here. And possibly the head-mistress at the school. At six o’clock I drink tea and eat sausages with my friend Spence and his sister again in their house and we discuss.’

      ‘What more do you think he’ll be able to tell you?’

      ‘I want to meet his sister. She has lived here longer than he has. He came here to join her when her husband died. She will know, perhaps, the people here fairly well.’

      ‘Do you know what you sound like?’ said Mrs Oliver. ‘A computer. You know. You’re programming yourself. That’s what they call it, isn’t it? I mean you’re feeding all these things into yourself all day and then you’re going to see what comes out.’

      ‘It is certainly an idea you have there,’ said Poirot, with some interest. ‘Yes, yes, I play the part of the computer. One feeds in the information—’

      ‘And supposing you come up with all the wrong answers?’ said Mrs Oliver.

      ‘That would be impossible,’ said Hercule Poirot. ‘Computers do not do that sort of a thing.’

      ‘They’re not supposed to,’ said Mrs Oliver, ‘but you’d be surprised at the things that happen sometimes. My last electric light bill, for instance. I know there’s a proverb which says “To err is human,” but a human error is nothing to what a computer can do if it tries. Come on in and meet Mrs Drake.’

      Mrs Drake was certainly something, Poirot thought. She was a tall, handsome woman of forty-odd[62], her golden hair was lightly tinged with grey, her eyes were brilliantly blue, she oozed competence from the fingertips downwards. Any party she had arranged would have been a successful one. In the drawing-room a tray of morning coffee with two sugared biscuits was awaiting them.

      Apple Trees, he saw, was a most admirably kept house. It was well furnished, it had carpets of excellent quality, everything was scrupulously polished and cleaned, and the fact that it had hardly any outstanding object of interest in it was not readily noticeable. One would not have expected it. The colours of the curtains and the covers were pleasant but conventional. It could have been let furnished at any moment for a high rent to a desirable tenant, without having to put away any treasures or make any alterations to the arrangement of the furniture.

      Mrs Drake greeted Mrs Oliver and Poirot and concealed almost entirely what Poirot could not help suspecting was a feeling of vigorously suppressed annoyance at the position in which she found herself as the hostess at a social occasion at which something as anti-social as murder had occurred. As a prominent member of the community of woodleigh Common, he suspected that she felt an unhappy sense of having herself in some way proved inadequate. What had occurred should not have occurred. To someone else in someone else’s house—yes. But at a party for children, arranged by her, given by her, organized by her, nothing like this ought to have happened. Somehow or other she ought to have seen to it that it did not happen. And Poirot also had a suspicion that she was seeking round irritably in the back of her mind for a reason. Not so much a reason for murder having taken place, but to find out and pin down some inadequacy on the part of someone who had been helping her and who had by some mismanagement or some lack of perception failed to realize that something like this could happen.

      ‘Monsieur Poirot,’ said Mrs Drake, in her fine speaking voice, which Poirot thought would come over excellently in a small lecture room or the village hall.

      ‘I am so pleased you could come down here. Mrs Oliver has been telling me how invaluable your help will be to us in this terrible crisis.’

      ‘Rest assured, Madame, I shall do what I can, but as you no doubt realize from your experience of life, it is going to be a difficult business.’

      ‘Difficult?’ said Mrs Drake. ‘Of course it’s going to be difficult. It seems incredible, absolutely incredible, that such an awful thing should have happened. I suppose,’ she added, ‘the police may know something? Inspector Raglan has a very good reputation locally, I believe. Whether or not they ought to call Scotland Yard[63] in, I don’t know. The idea seems to be that this poor child’s death must have had a local significance. I needn’t tell you, Monsieur Poirot—after all, you read the papers as much as I do—that there have been very many sad fatalities with children all over the countryside. They seem to be getting more and more frequent. Mental instability seems to be on the increase, though I must say that mothers and families generally are not looking after their children properly,

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