But the girl was terribly upset and longed to be taken to see her sister in prison. Caroline Crale wouldn’t agree. She said that sort of thing might injure a girl’s mentality for life. She arranged for her to go to school abroad.’
He added:
‘Miss Warren’s turned out a very distinguished woman. Traveller to weird places. Lectures at the Royal Geographical-all that sort of thing.’
‘And no one remembers the trial?’
‘Well, it’s a different name for one thing. They hadn’t even the same maiden name. They had the same mother but different fathers. Mrs Crale’s name was Spalding.’
‘This Miss Williams, was she the child’s governess, or Angela Warren’s?’
‘Angela’s. There was a nurse for the child-but she used to do a few little lessons with Miss Williams every day, I believe.’
‘Where was the child at the time?’
‘She’d gone with the nurse to pay a visit to her grandmother. A Lady Tressillian. A widow lady who’d lost her own two little girls and who was devoted to this kid.’
Poirot nodded. ‘I see.’
Hale continued:
‘As to the movements of the other people on the day of the murder, I can give them to you.
‘Miss Greer sat on the terrace near the library window after breakfast. There, as I say, she overheard the quarrel between Crale and his wife. After that she accompanied Crale down to the Battery and sat for him until lunch time with a couple of breaks to ease her muscles.
‘Philip Blake was in the house after breakfast, and overheard part of the quarrel. After Crale and Miss Greer went off, he read the paper until his brother telephoned him. Thereupon he went down to the shore to meet his brother. They walked together up the path again past the Battery garden. Miss Greer had just gone up to the house to fetch a pullover as she felt chilly and Mrs Crale was with her husband discussing arrangements for Angela’s departure to school.’
‘Ah, an amicable interview.’
‘Well, no, not amicable. Crale was fairly shouting at her, I understand. Annoyed at being bothered with domestic details. I suppose she wanted to get things straightened up if therewas going to be a break.’
Poirot nodded.
Hale went on:
‘The two brothers exchanged a few words with Amyas Crale. Then Miss Greer reappeared and took up her position, and Crale picked up his brush again, obviously wanting to get rid of them. They took the hint and went up to the house. It was when they were at the Battery, by the way, that Amyas Crale complained all the beer down there was hot and his wife promised to send him down some iced beer.’
‘Aha!’
‘Exactly-Aha! Sweet as sugar she was about it. They went up to the house and sat on the terrace outside. Mrs Crale and Angela Warren brought them out beer there.
‘Later, Angela Warren went down to bathe and Philip Blake went with her.
‘Meredith Blake went down to a clearing with a seat just above the Battery garden. He could just see Miss Greer as she posed on the battlements and could hear her voice and Crale’s as they talked. He sat there and thought over the coniine business. He was still very worried about it and didn’t know quite what to do. Elsa Greer saw him and waved her hand to him. When the bell went for lunch he came down to the Battery and Elsa Greer and he went back to the house together. He noticed then that Crale was looking, as he put it, very queer, but he didn’t really think anything of it at the time. Crale was the kind of man who is never ill-and so one didn’t imagine he would be. On the other hand, hedid have moods of fury and despondency according as to whether his painting was not going as he liked it. On those occasions one left him alone and said as little as possible to him. That’s what these two did on this occasion.
‘As to the others, the servants were busy with housework and cooking lunch. Miss Williams was in the schoolroom part of the morning correcting some exercise books. Afterwards she took some household mending to the terrace. Angela Warren spent most of the morning wandering about the garden, climbing trees and eating things-you know what a girl of fifteen is! Plums, sour apples, hard pears, etc. After she came back to the house and, as I say, went down with Philip Blake to the beach and had a bathe before lunch.’
Superintendent Hale paused:
‘Now then,’ he said belligerently, ‘do you find anything phoney about that?’
Poirot said: ‘Nothing at all.’
‘Well, then!’
The two words expressed volumes.
‘But all the same,’ said Hercule Poirot. ‘I am going to satisfy myself. I-’
‘What are you going to do?’
‘I am going to visit these five people-and from each one I am going to get his or her own story.’
Superintendent Hale sighed with a deep melancholy.
He said:
‘Man, you’re nuts! None of their stories are going to agree! Don’t you grasp that elementary fact? No two people remember a thing in the same order anyway. And after all this time! Why, you’ll hear five accounts of five separate murders!’
‘That,’ said Poirot, ‘is what I am counting upon. It will be very instructive.’
Chapter 6. This Little Pig Went to Market…
Philip Blake was recognizably like the description given of him by Montague Depleach. A prosperous, shrewd, jovial-looking man-slightly running to fat.
Hercule Poirot had timed his appointment for half-past six on a Saturday afternoon. Philip Blake had just finished his eighteen holes, and he had been on his game-winning a fiver from his opponent. He was in the mood to be friendly and expansive.
Hercule Poirot explained himself and his errand. On this occasion at least he showed no undue passion for unsullied truth. It was a question, Blake gathered, of a series of books dealing with famous crimes.
Philip Blake frowned. He said:
‘Good Lord, why make up these things?’
Hercule Poirot shrugged his shoulders. He was at his most foreign today. He was out to be despised but patronized.
He murmured:
‘It is the public. They eat it up-yes, eat it up.’
‘Ghouls,’ said Philip Blake.
But he said it good-humouredly-not with the fastidiousness and the distaste that a more sensitive man might have displayed.
Hercule Poirot said with a shrug of the shoulders:
‘It is human nature. You and I, Mr Blake, who know the world, have no illusions about our fellow human beings. Not bad people, most of them, but certainly not to be idealized.’
Blake said heartily:
‘I’ve parted with my illusions long ago.’
‘Instead, you tell a very good story, so I have been told.’
‘Ah!’ Blake’s eyes twinkled.
‘Heard this one?’
Poirot’s laugh came at the right place. It was not an edifying story, but it was funny.
Philip Blake lay back in his chair, his muscles relaxed, his eyes creased with good humour.
Hercule Poirot thought suddenly that he looked rather like a contented pig.
A pig.This little pig went to market…
What was he like, this man, this Philip Blake? A man, it would seem, without cares. Prosperous, contented. No remorseful thoughts, no uneasy twinges of conscience from the past, no haunting memories here. No, a well-fed pig who had gone to market-and fetched the full market price…
But once, perhaps, there had been more to Philip Blake. He must have been, when young, a handsome man. Eyes always a shade too small, a fraction too near together, perhaps-but otherwise a well made, well set up young man. How old was he now? At a guess between fifty and sixty. Nearing forty, then, at the time of Crale’s death. Less stultified, then, less sunk in the gratifications of the minute. Asking more of life, perhaps, and receiving less…
Poirot murmured as a mere catch-phrase:
‘You comprehend my position.’
‘No, really, you know, I’m hanged if I do.’ The stockbroker sat upright again, his glance was once more shrewd. ‘Whyyou? You’re not a writer?’
‘Not precisely-no. Actually I am a detective.’
The modesty of this remark had probably not been equalled before in Poirot’s conversation.
‘Of course you are. We all know that. The famous Hercule Poirot!’
But his tone held a subtly mocking note. Intrinsically, Philip Blake was too much of an Englishman to take the pretensions of a foreigner seriously.
To his cronies he would have said:
‘Quaint little mountebank. Oh well, I expect his stuff goes down with the women all right.’
And although that derisive patronizing attitude was exactly the one which Hercule Poirot had aimed at inducing, nevertheless he found himself annoyed by it.
This man, this successful man of affairs, was unimpressed by Hercule Poirot! It was a scandal.
‘I am gratified,’ said Poirot untruly, ‘that I am so well known to you. My success, let me tell you, has been founded on the psychology-the eternalwhy? of human behaviour. That, M. Blake, is what interests the world in crime today. It used to be romance. Famous crimes were retold from one angle only-the love-story connected with them. Nowadays it is very different. People read with interest that Dr Crippen murdered his wife because she was a big bouncing woman and he was little and insignificant and therefore she made him feel inferior. They read of some famous woman criminal that she killed because she’d been snubbed by her father when she was three years old. It is, as I say, thewhy of crime that interests nowadays.’
Philip Blake said, with a slight yawn:
‘The why of most crimes is obvious enough, I should say. Usually money.’
Poirot cried:
‘Ah, but my dear sir, the why must never be obvious. That is the whole point!’
‘And that’s whereyou come in?’
‘And that, as you say, is where I come in! It is proposed to rewrite the stories of certain bygone crimes-from the psychological angle. Psychology in crime, it is my speciality. I have accepted the commission.’
Philip Blake grinned.
‘Pretty lucrative, I suppose?’
‘I hope so-I certainly hope so.’
‘Congratulations. Now, perhaps, you’ll tell me whereI come in?’
‘Most certainly. The Crale case, Monsieur.’
Phillip Blake did not look startled. But he looked thoughtful. He said:
‘Yes, of course, the Crale case…’
Hercule Poirot said anxiously:
‘It is not displeasing to you, Mr Blake?’
‘Oh, as to that.’ Philip Blake shrugged his shoulders. ‘It’s no use resenting a thing that you’ve no power to stop. The trial of Caroline Crale is public property. Any one can go ahead and write it up. It’s no usemy objecting. In a way-I don’t mind telling you-I do dislike it a good deal. Amyas Crale was one of my best friends. I’m sorry the whole unsavoury business has to be raked up again. But these things happen.’
‘You are a philosopher, Mr Blake.’
‘No, no. I just know enough not to start kicking against the pricks. I dare say you’ll do it less offensively than many others.’
‘I hope, at least, to write with delicacy and good taste,’ said Poirot.
Philip Blake gave a loud guffaw but without any real amusement. ‘Makes me chuckle to hear you say that.’
‘I assure you, Mr Blake, I am really interested. It is not just a matter of money with me. I genuinely want to recreate the past, to feel and see the events that took place, to see behind the obvious and to visualize the thoughts and feelings of the actors in the drama.’
Philip Blake said:
‘I don’t know that there was much subtlety about it. It was a pretty obvious business. Crude female jealousy, that was all there was to it.’
‘It would interest me enormously, Mr Blake, if I could have your own reactions to the affair.’
Philip Blake said with sudden heat, his face deepening in colour.
‘Reactions! Reactions! Don’t speak so pedantically. I didn’t just stand there and react! You don’t seem to understand that my friend-my friend, I tell you, had been killed-poisoned! And that if I’d acted quicker I could have saved him.’
‘How do you make that out, Mr Blake?’
‘Like this. I take it that you’ve already read up the facts of the case?’ Poirot nodded. ‘Very well. Now on that morning my brother Meredith called me up. He was in a pretty good stew. One of his Hell brews was missing-and it was a fairly deadly Hell brew. What did I do? I told him to come along and we’d talk it over. Decide what was best to be done. “Decide what was best.” It beats me now how I could have been such a hesitating fool! I ought to have realized that there was no time to lose. I ought to have gone to Amyas straight away and warned him. I ought to have said: “Caroline’s pinched one of Meredith’s patent poisons, and you and Elsa had better look out for yourselves.” ’
Blake got up. He strode up and down in his excitement.
‘Good God, man. Do you suppose I haven’t gone over it in my mind again and again? Iknew. I had the chance to save him-and I dallied about-waiting for Meredith! Why hadn’t I the sense to realize that Caroline wasn’t going to have any qualms or hesitancies. She’d taken that stuff to use-and, by God, she’d used it at the very first opportunity. She wouldn’t wait till Meredith discovered his loss. I knew-of course I knew-that Amyas was in deadly danger-and I did nothing!’
‘I think you reproach yourself unduly, Monsieur.