Agatha Christie: Mrs McGinty's Dead

"And yet she was killed?"

"And yet she was killed."

"The niece didn't know of anyone who had a grudge against her aunt?"

"She says not."

Poirot rubbed his nose in an exasperated fashion.

"You comprehend, my dear friend, it would be so much easier if Mrs McGinty was not Mrs McGinty, so to speak. If she could be what is called a Mystery Woman – a woman with a past."

"Well, she wasn't," said Spence stolidly. "She was just Mrs McGinty, a more or less uneducated woman, who let rooms and went our charring. Thousands of them all over England."

"But they do not all get murdered."

"No. I grant you that."

"So why should Mrs McGinty get murdered? The obvious answer we do not accept. What remains? A shadowy and improbable niece. An even more shadowy and improbable stranger. Facts? Let us stick to facts. What are the facts? An elderly charwoman is murdered. A shy and uncouth young man is arrested and convicted of the murder. Why was James Bentley arrested?"

Spence stared.

"The evidence against him. I've told you -"

"Yes. Evidence. But tell me, my Spence, was it real evidence or was it contrived?"

"Contrived?"

"Yes. Granted the premises that James Bentley is innocent, two possibilities remain. The evidence was manufactured, deliberately, to throw suspicion against him. Or else he was just the unfortunate victim of circumstances."

"Yes. I see what you're driving at."

"There is nothing to show that the former was the case. But again there is nothing to show that it was not so. The money was taken and hidden outside the house in a place easily found. To have actually hidden it in his room would have been a little too much for the police to swallow. The murder was committed at a time when Bentley was taking a lonely walk, as he often did. Did the bloodstain come on his sleeve as he said it did at his trial, or was that, too, contrived? Did someone brush against him in the darkness and smear tell-tale evidence on his sleeve?"

"I think that's going a bit far, M. Poirot."

"Perhaps, perhaps. But we have got to go far. I think that in this case we have got to go so far that the imagination cannot as yet see the path clearly… For, you see, Mon cher Spence, if Mrs McGinty is just an ordinary char woman – it is the murderer who must be extraordinary. Yes – that follows clearly. It is in the murderer and not the murdered that the interest of this case lies. That is not the case in most crimes. Usually it is in the personality of the murdered person that the crux of the situation lies. It is the silent dead in whom I am usually interested. Their hates, their loves, their actions. And when you really know the murdered victim, then the victim speaks, and those dead lips utter a name – the name you want to know."

Spence looked rather uncomfortable.

"These foreigners!" he seemed to be saying to himself.

"But here," continued Poirot, "it is the opposite. Here we guess at a veiled personality – a figure still hidden in darkness. How did Mrs McGinty die? Why did she die? The answer is not to be found in studying the life of Mrs McGinty. The answer is to be found in the personality of the murderer. You agree with me there?"

"I suppose so," said Superintendent Spence cautiously.

"Someone who wanted what? To strike down Mrs McGinty? Or to strike down James Bentley?"

The Superintendent gave a doubtful "H'm!"

"Yes – yes, that is one of the first points to be decided. Who is the real victim? Who was intended to be the victim?"

Spence said incredulously: "You really think someone would bump off a perfectly inoffensive old woman in order to get someone else hanged for murder?"

"One cannot make an omelette, they say, without breaking eggs. Mrs McGinty, then, may be the egg, and James Bentley is the omelette. So let me hear, now, what you know of James Bentley."

"Nothing much. Father was a doctor – died when Bentley was nine years old. He went to one of the smaller public schools, unfit for the Army, had a weak chest, was in one of the Ministries during the war and lived with a possessive mother."

"Well," said Poirot, "there are certain possibilities there… More than there are in the life history of Mrs McGinty."

"Do you seriously believe what you are suggesting?"

"No, I do not believe anything as yet. But I say that there are two distinct lines of research, and that we have to decide, very soon, which is the right one to follow."

"How are you going to set about things, M. Poirot? Is there anything I can do?"

"First, I should like an interview with James Bentley."

"That can be managed. I'll get on to his solicitors."

"After that and subject, of course, to the result, if any – I am not hopeful – of that interview, I shall go to Broadhinny. There, aided by your notes, I shall, as quickly as possible, go over that same ground where you have passed before me."

"In case I've missed anything," said Spence with a wry smile.

"In case, I would prefer to say, that some circumstance should strike me in a different light to the one in which it struck you. Human reactions vary and so does human experience. The resemblance of a rich financier to a soap boiler whom I had known in Liege once brought about a most satisfactory result. But no need to go into that. What I should like to do is to eliminate one or other of the trails I indicated just now. And to eliminate the Mrs McGinty trail – trail No. 1 – will obviously be quicker and easier than to attack trail No. 2. Where, now, can I stay in Broadhinny? Is there an inn of moderate comfort?"

"There's the Three Ducks – but it doesn't put people up. There's the Lamb in Cullavon three miles away – or there is a kind of a Guest House in Broadhinny itself. It's not really a Guest House, just a rather decrepit country house where the young couple who own it take in paying guests. I don't think," said Spence dubiously, "that it's very comfortable."

Hercule Poirot closed his eyes in agony.

"If I suffer, I suffer," he said. "It has to be."

"I don't know what you'll go there as," continued Spence doubtfully as he eyed Poirot. "You might be some kind of an opera singer. Voice broken down. Got to rest. That might do."

"I shall go," said Hercule Poirot, speaking with accents of royal blood, "as myself."

Spence received this pronouncement with pursed lips.

"D'you think that's advisable?"

"I think it is essential! But yes, essential. Consider, cher ami, it is time we are up against. What do we know? Nothing. So the hope, the best hope, is to go pretending that I know a great deal. I am Hercule Poirot. I am the great, the unique Hercule Poirot. And I, Hercule Poirot, am not satisfied about the verdict in the McGinty case. I, Hercule Poirot, have a very shrewd suspicion of what really happened. There is a circumstance that I, alone, estimate at its true value. You see?"

"And then?"

"And then, having made my effect, I observe the reactions. For there should be reactions. Very definitely, there should be reactions."

Superintendent Spence looked uneasily at the little man.

"Look here, M. Poirot," he said. "Don't go sticking out your neck. I don't want anything to happen to you."

"But if it does, you would be proved right beyond the shadow of doubt, is it not so?"

"I don't want it proved the hard way," said Superintendent Spence.

With great distaste, Hercule Poirot looked round the room in which he stood. It was a room of gracious proportions but there its attraction ended. Poirot made an eloquent grimace as he drew a suspicious finger along the top of a book case. As he had suspected – dust! He sat down gingerly on a sofa and its broken springs sagged depressingly under him. The two faded armchairs were, as he knew, little better. A large fierce-looking dog whom Poirot suspected of having mange growled from his position on a moderately comfortable fourth chair.