| |||||
|
Eighteen
Hercule Poirot looked out of his window and saw Henrietta Savernake walking up the path to the
front door. She was wearing the same green tweeds that she had worn on the day of the tragedy.
There was a spaniel with her.
He hastened to the front door and opened it. She stood smiling at him.
“Can I come in and see your house? I like looking at people’s houses. I’m just taking the dog
for a walk.”
“But most certainly. How English it is to take the dog for a walk!”
“I know,” said Henrietta. “I thought of that. Do you know that nice poem: ‘The days passed
slowly one by one. I fed the ducks, reproved my wife, played Handel’s Largo on the fife and took
the dog a run.’”
Again she smiled, a brilliant, insubstantial smile.
Poirot ushered her into his sitting room. She looked round its neat and prim arrangement and
nodded her head.
“Nice,” she said, “two of everything. How you would hate my studio.”
“Why should I hate it?”
“Oh, a lot of clay sticking to things—and here and there just one thing that I happen to like and
which would be ruined if there were two of them.”
“But I can understand that, Mademoiselle. You are an artist.”
“Aren’t you an artist, too, M. Poirot?”
Poirot put his head on one side.
“It is a question, that. But on the whole I would say, no. I have known crimes that were artistic
—they were, you understand, supreme exercises of imagination. But the solving of them—no, it is
not the creative power that is needed. What is required is a passion for the truth.”
“A passion for the truth,” said Henrietta meditatively. “Yes, I can see how dangerous that might
make you. Would the truth satisfy you?”
He looked at her curiously.
“What do you mean, Miss Savernake?”
“I can understand that you would want to know. But would knowledge be enough? Would you
have to go a step further and translate knowledge into action?”
He was interested in her approach.
“You are suggesting that if I knew the truth about Dr. Christow’s death—I might be satisfied to
keep that knowledge to myself. Do you know the truth about his death?”
Henrietta shrugged her shoulders.
“The obvious answer seems to be Gerda. How cynical it is that a wife or a husband is always
the first suspect.”
“But you do not agree?”
“I always like to keep an open mind.”
Poirot said quietly:
“Why did you come here, Miss Savernake?”
“I must admit that I haven’t your passion for truth, M. Poirot. Taking the dog for a walk was
such a nice English countryside excuse. But of course the Angkatells haven’t got a dog—as you
may have noticed the other day.”
“The fact had not escaped me.”
“So I borrowed the gardener’s spaniel. I am not, you must understand, M. Poirot, very truthful.”
Again that brilliant brittle smile flashed out. He wondered why he should suddenly find it
unendurably moving. He said quietly:
“No, but you have integrity.”
“Why on earth do you say that?”
She was startled—almost, he thought, dismayed.
“Because I believe it to be true.”
“Integrity,” Henrietta repeated thoughtfully. “I wonder what that word really means.”
She sat very still, staring down at the carpet, then she raised her head and looked at him
steadily.
“Don’t you want to know why I did come?”
“You find a difficulty, perhaps, in putting it into words.”
“Yes, I think I do. The inquest, M. Poirot, is tomorrow. One has to make up one’s mind just
how much—”
She broke off. Getting up, she wandered across to the mantelpiece, displaced one or two of the
ornaments and moved a vase of Michaelmas daisies from its position in the middle of a table to the
extreme corner of the mantelpiece. She stepped back, eyeing the arrangement with her head on
one side.
“How do you like that, M. Poirot?”
“Not at all, Mademoiselle.”
“I thought you wouldn’t.” She laughed, moved everything quickly and deftly back to its original
position. “Well, if one wants to say a thing one has to say it! You are, somehow, the sort of person
one can talk to. Here goes. Is it necessary, do you think, that the police should know that I was
John Christow’s mistress?”
Her voice was quite dry and unemotional. She was looking, not at him, but at the wall over his
head. With one forefinger she was following the curve of the jar that held the purple flowers. He
had an idea that in the touch of that finger was her emotional outlet.
Hercule Poirot said precisely and also without emotion:
“I see. You were lovers?”
“If you prefer to put it like that.”
He looked at her curiously.
“It was not how you put it, Mademoiselle.”
“No.”
“Why not?”
Henrietta shrugged her shoulders. She came and sat down by him on the sofa. She said slowly:
“One likes to describe things as—as accurately as possible.”
His interest in Henrietta Savernake grew stronger. He said:
“You had been Dr. Christow’s mistress—for how long?”
“About six months.”
“The police will have, I gather, no difficulty in discovering the fact?”
Henrietta considered.
“I imagine not. That is, if they are looking for something of that kind.”
“Oh, they will be looking, I can assure you of that.”
“Yes, I rather thought they would.” She paused, stretched out her fingers on her knee and
looked at them, then gave him a swift, friendly glance. “Well, M. Poirot, what does one do? Go to
Inspector Grange and say—what does one say to a moustache like that? It’s such a domestic,
family moustache.”
Poirot’s hand crawled upwards to his own proudly borne adornment.
“Whereas mine, Mademoiselle?”
“Your moustache, M. Poirot, is an artistic triumph. It has no associations with anything but
itself. It is, I am sure, unique.”
“Absolutely.”
“And it is probably the reason why I am talking to you as I am. Granted that the police have to
know the truth about John and myself, will it necessarily have to be made public?”
“That depends,” said Poirot. “If the police think it had no bearing on the case, they will be quite
discreet. You—are very anxious on this point?”
Henrietta nodded. She stared down at her fingers for a moment or two, then suddenly lifted her
head and spoke. Her voice was no longer dry and light.
“Why should things be made worse than they are for poor Gerda? She adored John and he’s
dead. She’s lost him. Why should she have to bear an added burden?”
“It is for her that you mind?”
“Do you think that is hypocritical? I suppose you’re thinking that if I cared at all about Gerda’s
peace of mind, I would never have become John’s mistress. But you don’t understand—it was not
like that. I did not break up his married life. I was only one—of a procession.”
“Ah, it was like that?”
She turned on him sharply.
“No, no, no! Not what you are thinking. That’s what I mind most of all! The false idea that
everybody will have of what John was like. That’s why I’m here talking to you—because I’ve got
a vague, foggy hope that I can make you understand. Understand, I mean, the sort of person John
was. I can see so well what will happen—the headlines in the papers—A Doctor’s Love Life—
Gerda, myself, Veronica Cray. John wasn’t like that—he wasn’t, actually, a man who thought
much about women. It wasn’t women who mattered to him most, it was his work. It was in his
work that his interest and excitement—yes, and his sense of adventure—really lay. If John had
been taken unawares at any moment and asked to name the woman who was most in his mind, do
you know who he would have said?—Mrs. Crabtree.”
“Mrs. Crabtree?” Poirot was surprised. “Who, then, is this Mrs. Crabtree?”
There was something between tears and laughter in Henrietta’s voice as she went on:
“She’s an old woman—ugly, dirty, wrinkled, quite indomitable. John thought the world of her.
She’s a patient in St. Christopher’s Hospital. She’s got Ridgeway’s Disease. That’s a disease that’s
very rare, but if you get it you’re bound to die—there just isn’t any cure. But John was finding a
cure—I can’t explain technically—it was all very complicated—some question of hormone
secretions. He’d been making experiments and Mrs. Crabtree was his prize patient—you see, she’s
got guts, she wants to live—and she was fond of John. She and he were fighting on the same side.
Ridgeway’s Disease and Mrs. Crabtree is what has been uppermost in John’s mind for months—
night and day—nothing else really counted. That’s what being the kind of doctor John was really
means—not all the Harley Street stuff and the rich, fat women, that’s only a sideline. It’s the
intense scientific curiosity and the achievement. I—oh, I wish I could make you understand.”
Her hands flew out in a curiously despairing gesture, and Hercule Poirot thought how very
lovely and sensitive those hands were.
He said:
“You seem to understand very well.”
“Oh, yes, I understood. John used to come and talk, do you see? Not quite to me—partly, I
think, to himself. He got things clear that way. Sometimes he was almost despairing—he couldn’t
see how to overcome the heightened toxicity—and then he’d get an idea for varying the treatment.
I can’t explain to you what it was like—it was like, yes, a battle. You can’t imagine the—the fury
of it and the concentration—and yes, sometimes the agony. And sometimes the sheer tiredness….”
She was silent for a minute or two, her eyes dark with remembrance.
Poirot said curiously:
“You must have a certain technical knowledge yourself?”
She shook her head.
“Not really. Only enough to understand what John was talking about. I got books and read
about it.”
She was silent again, her face softened, her lips half-parted. She was, he thought, remembering.
With a sigh, her mind came back to the present. She looked at him wistfully.
“If I could only make you see—”
“But you have, Mademoiselle.”
“Really?”
“Yes. One recognizes authenticity when one hears it.”
“Thank you. But it won’t be so easy to explain to Inspector Grange.”
“Probably not. He will concentrate on the personal angle.”
Henrietta said vehemently:
“And that was so unimportant—so completely unimportant.”
Poirot’s eyebrows rose slowly. She answered his unspoken protest.
“But it was! You see—after a while—I got between John and what he was thinking of. I
affected him, as a woman. He couldn’t concentrate as he wanted to concentrate—because of me.
He began to be afraid that he was beginning to love me—he didn’t want to love anyone. He—he
made love to me because he didn’t want to think about me too much. He wanted it to be light,
easy, just an affair like other affairs that he had had.”
“And you—” Poirot was watching her closely. “You were content to have it—like that.”
Henrietta got up. She said, and once more it was her dry voice:
“No, I wasn’t—content. After all, one is human….”
Poirot waited a minute then he said:
“Then why, Mademoiselle—”
“Why?” She whirled round on him. “I wanted John to be satisfied, I wanted John to have what
he wanted. I wanted him to be able to go on with the thing he cared about—his work. If he didn’t
want to be hurt—to be vulnerable again—why—why, that was all right by me.”
Poirot rubbed his nose.
“Just now, Miss Savernake, you mentioned Veronica Cray. Was she also a friend of John
Christow’s?”
“Until last Saturday night, he hadn’t seen her for fifteen years.”
“He knew her fifteen years ago?”
“They were engaged to be married.” Henrietta came back and sat down. “I see I’ve got to make
it all clearer. John loved Veronica desperately. Veronica was, and is, a bitch of the first water.
She’s the supreme egoist. Her terms were that John was to chuck everything he cared about and
become Miss Veronica Cray’s little tame husband. John broke up the whole thing—quite rightly.
But he suffered like hell. His one idea was to marry someone as unlike Veronica as possible. He
married Gerda, whom you might describe inelegantly as a first-class chump. That was all very nice
and safe, but as anyone could have told him the day came when being married to a chump irritated
him. He had various affairs—none of them important. Gerda, of course, never knew about them.
But I think, myself, that for fifteen years there has been something wrong with John—something
connected with Veronica. He never really got over her. And then, last Saturday, he met her again.”
After a long pause, Poirot recited dreamily:
“He went out with her that night to see her home and returned to The Hollow at 3 a.m.”
“How do you know?”
“A housemaid had the toothache.”
Henrietta said irrelevantly, “Lucy has far too many servants.”
“But you yourself knew that, Mademoiselle.”
“Yes.”
“How did you know?”
Again there was an infinitesimal pause. Then Henrietta replied slowly:
“I was looking out of my window and saw him come back to the house.”
“The toothache, Mademoiselle?”
She smiled at him.
“Quite another kind of ache, M. Poirot.”
She got up and moved towards the door, and Poirot said:
“I will walk back with you, Mademoiselle.”
They crossed the lane and went through the gate into the chestnut plantation.
Henrietta said:
“We need not go past the pool. We can go up to the left and along the top path to the flower
walk.”
A track led steeply uphill towards the woods. After a while they came to a broader path at right
angles across the hillside above the chestnut trees. Presently they came to a bench and Henrietta
sat down, Poirot beside her. The woods were above and behind them, and below were the closely
planted chestnut groves. Just in front of the seat a curving path led downwards, to where just a
glimmer of blue water could be seen.
Poirot watched Henrietta without speaking. Her face had relaxed, the tension had gone. It
looked rounder and younger. He realized what she must have looked like as a young girl.
He said very gently at last:
“Of what are you thinking, Mademoiselle?”
“Of Ainswick.”
“What is Ainswick?”
“Ainswick? It’s a place.” Almost dreamily, she described Ainswick to him. The white, graceful
house, the big magnolia growing up it, the whole set in an amphitheatre of wooded hills.
“It was your home?”
“Not really. I lived in Ireland. It was where we came, all of us, for holidays. Edward and Midge
and myself. It was Lucy’s home actually. It belonged to her father. After his death it came to
Edward.”
“Not to Sir Henry? But it is he who has the title.”
“Oh, that’s a KCB,” she explained. “Henry was only a distant cousin.”
“And after Edward Angkatell, to whom does it go, this Ainswick?”
“How odd, I’ve never really thought. If Edward doesn’t marry—” She paused. A shadow passed
over her face. Hercule Poirot wondered exactly what thought was passing through her mind.
“I suppose,” said Henrietta slowly, “it will go to David. So that’s why—”
“Why what?”
“Why Lucy asked him here… David and Ainswick?” She shook her head. “They don’t fit
somehow.”
Poirot pointed to the path in front of them.
“It is by that path, Mademoiselle, that you went down to the swimming pool yesterday?”
She gave a quick shiver.
“No, by the one nearer the house. It was Edward who came this way.” She turned on him
suddenly. “Must we talk about it any more? I hate the swimming pool. I even hate The Hollow.”
Poirot murmured:
“I hate the dreadful hollow behind the little wood;
Its lips in the field above are dabbled with blood-red heath,
The red-ribb’d ledges drip with a silent horror of blood
And Echo there, whatever is ask’d her, answers ‘Death.’”
Henrietta turned an astonished face on him.
“Tennyson,” said Hercule Poirot, nodding his head proudly. “The poetry of your Lord
Tennyson.”
Henrietta was repeating:
“And Echo there, whatever is ask’d her…” She went on, almost to herself, “But of course—I
see—that’s what it is—Echo!”
“How do you mean, Echo?”
“This place—The Hollow itself! I almost saw it before—on Saturday when Edward and I
walked up to the ridge. An echo of Ainswick. And that’s what we are, we Angkatells. Echoes!
We’re not real—not real as John was real.” She turned to Poirot. “I wish you had known him, M.
Poirot. We’re all shadows compared to John. John was really alive.”
“I knew that even when he was dying, Mademoiselle.”
“I know. One felt it…And John is dead, and we, the echoes, are alive…It’s like, you know, a
very bad joke.”
The youth had gone from her face again. Her lips were twisted, bitter with sudden pain.
When Poirot spoke, asking a question, she did not, for a moment, take in what he was saying.
“I am sorry. What did you say, M. Poirot?”
“I was asking whether your aunt, Lady Angkatell, liked Dr. Christow?”
“Lucy? She is a cousin, by the way, not an aunt. Yes, she liked him very much.”
“And your—also a cousin?—Mr. Edward Angkatell—did he like Dr. Christow?”
Her voice was, he thought, a little constrained, as she replied:
“Not particularly—but then he hardly knew him.”
“And your—yet another cousin? Mr. David Angkatell?”
Henrietta smiled.
“David, I think, hates all of us. He spends his time immured in the library reading the
Encyclopædia Britannica.”
“Ah, a serious temperament.”
“I am sorry for David. He has had a difficult home life. His mother was unbalanced—an invalid.
Now his only way of protecting himself is to try to feel superior to everyone. It’s all right as long
as it works, but now and then it breaks down and the vulnerable David peeps through.”
“Did he feel himself superior to Dr. Christow?”
“He tried to—but I don’t think it came off. I suspect that John Christow was just the kind of
man that David would like to be. He disliked John in consequence.”
Poirot nodded his head thoughtfully.
“Yes—self-assurance, confidence, virility—all the intensive male qualities. It is interesting—
very interesting.”
Henrietta did not answer.
Through the chestnuts, down by the pool, Hercule Poirot saw a man stooping, searching for
something, or so it seemed.
He murmured: “I wonder—”
“I beg your pardon?”
Poirot said: “That is one of Inspector Grange’s men. He seems to be looking for something.”
“Clues, I suppose. Don’t policemen look for clues? Cigarette ash, footprints, burnt matches.”
Her voice held a kind of bitter mockery. Poirot answered seriously.
“Yes, they look for these things—and sometimes they find them. But the real clues, Miss
Savernake, in a case like this, usually lie in the personal relationships of the people concerned.”
“I don’t think I understand you.”
“Little things,” said Poirot, his head thrown back, his eyes half-closed. “Not cigarette ash, or a
rubber heel mark—but a gesture, a look, an unexpected action….”
Henrietta turned her head sharply to look at him. He felt her eyes, but he did not turn his head.
She said:
“Are you thinking of—anything in particular?”
“I was thinking of how you stepped forward and took the revolver out of Mrs. Christow’s hand
then dropped it in the pool.”
He felt the slight start she gave. But her voice was quite normal and calm.
“Gerda, M. Poirot, is rather a clumsy person. In the shock of the moment, and if the revolver
had had another cartridge in it, she might have fired it and—and hurt someone.”
“But it was rather clumsy of you, was it not, to drop it in the pool?”
“Well, I had had a shock too.” She paused. “What are you suggesting, M. Poirot?”
Poirot sat up, turned his head, and spoke in a brisk, matter-of-fact way.
“If there were fingerprints on that revolver, that is to say, fingerprints made before Mrs.
Christow handled it, it would be interesting to know whose they were—and that we shall never
know now.”
Henrietta said quietly but steadily:
“Meaning that you think they were mine. You are suggesting that I shot John and then left the
revolver beside him so that Gerda could come along and pick it up and be left holding the baby.
That is what you are suggesting, isn’t it? But surely, if I did that, you will give me credit for
enough intelligence to have wiped off my own fingerprints first!”
“But surely you are intelligent enough to see, Mademoiselle, that if you had done so and if the
revolver had had no fingerprints on it but Mrs. Christow’s, that would have been very remarkable!
For you were all shooting with that revolver the day before. Gerda Christow would hardly have
wiped the revolver clean of fingerprints before using it—why should she?”
Henrietta said slowly:
“So you think I killed John?”
“When Dr. Christow was dying, he said: ‘Henrietta.’”
“And you think that that was an accusation? It was not.”
“What was it then?”
Henrietta stretched out her foot and traced a pattern with the toe. She said in a low voice:
“Aren’t you forgetting—what I told you not very long ago? I mean—the terms we were on?”
“Ah, yes—he was your lover—and so, as he is dying, he says: ‘Henrietta.’ That is very
touching.”
She turned blazing eyes upon him.
“Must you sneer?”
“I am not sneering. But I do not like being lied to—and that, I think, is what you are trying to
do.”
Henrietta said quietly:
“I have told you that I am not very truthful—but when John said: ‘Henrietta’ he was not
accusing me of having murdered him. Can’t you understand that people of my kind, who make
things, are quite incapable of taking life? I don’t kill people, M. Poirot. I couldn’t kill anyone.
That’s the plain stark truth. You suspect me simply because my name was murmured by a dying
man who hardly knew what he was saying.”
“Dr. Christow knew perfectly what he was saying. His voice was as alive and conscious as that
of a doctor doing a vital operation who says sharply and urgently: ‘Nurse, the forceps, please.’”
“But—” She seemed at a loss, taken aback. Hercule Poirot went on rapidly:
“And it is not just on account of what Dr. Christow said when he was dying. I do not believe for
one moment that you are capable of premeditated murder—that, no. But you might have fired that
shot in a sudden moment of fierce resentment—and if so—if so, Mademoiselle, you have the
creative imagination and ability to cover your tracks.”
Henrietta got up. She stood for a moment, pale and shaken, looking at him. She said with a
sudden, rueful smile:
“And I thought you liked me.”
Hercule Poirot sighed. He said sadly:
“That is what is so unfortunate for me. I do.”
|
|||||
上一篇：空幻之屋25 下一篇：没有了 |
- 发表评论
-
- 最新评论 进入详细评论页>>
