Agatha Christie - Dead Man's Folly

"You know, Bland," said Merrall, "you've got something there. But what's her motive, if so?"

"No motive for killing the girl," said Bland; "but I do think, you know, that she might have a motive for killing Lady Stubbs. According to M. Poirot, whom I told you about, she's head over heels in love with her employer. Supposing she followed Lady Stubbs into the woods and killed her and that Marlene Tucker, bored in the boathouse, came out and happened to see it? Then of course she'd have to kill Marlene too. What would she do next? Put the girl's body in the boathouse, come back to the house, fetch the tray and go down to the boathouse again. Then she's covered her own absence from the fête and we've got her testimony, our only reliable testimony on the face of it, that Marlene Tucker was alive at a quarter past four."

"Well," said Major Merrall, with a sigh, "keep after it, Bland. Keep after it. What do you think she did with Lady Stubbs's body, if she's the guilty party?"

"Hid it in the woods, buried it, or threw it into the river."

"The last would be rather difficult, wouldn't it?"

"It depends where the murder was committed," said the inspector. "She's quite a hefty woman. If it was not far from the boathouse, she could have carried her down there and thrown her off the edge of the quay."

"With every pleasure steamer on the Helm looking on?"

"It would be just another piece of horse-play. Risky, but possible. But I think it far more likely myself that she hid the body somewhere, and just threw the hat into the Helm. It's possible, you see, that she, knowing the house and grounds well, might know some place where you could conceal a body. She may have managed to dispose of it in the river later. Who knows? That is, of course, if she did it," added Inspector Bland as an afterthought. "But actually, sir, I stick to de Sousa -"

Major Merall had been noting down points on a pad. He looked up now, clearing his throat.

"It comes to this, then. We can summarise it as follows: we've got five or six people who could have killed Marlene Tucker. Some of them are more likely than others, but that's as far as we can go. In a general way, we know why she was killed. She was killed because she saw something. But until we know exactly what it was she saw – we don't know who killed her."

"Put like that, you make it sound a bit difficult, sir."

"Oh, it is difficult. But we shall get there – in the end."

"And meantime that chap will have left England – laughing in his sleeve – having got away with two murders."

"You're fairly sure about him, aren't you? I don't say you're wrong. All the same…"

The chief constable was silent for a moment or two, then he said, with a shrug of his shoulders:

"Anyway, it's better than having one of these psychopathic murderers. We'd probably having a third murer on our hands by now."

"They do say things go in threes," said the inspector gloomily.

He repeated that remark the following morning when he heard that old Merdell, returning home from a visit to his favourite pub across the river at Gitcham, must have exceeded his usual potations and fallen in the river when boarding the quay. His boat was found adrift, and the old man's body was recovered that evening.

The inquest was short and simple. The night had been dark and overcast, old Merdell had had three pints of beer and, after all, he was ninety-two.

The verdict brought in was Accidental Death.

Hercule Poirot sat in a square chair in front of the square fireplace in the square room of his London flat. In front of him were various objects that were not square: that were instead violently and almost impossibly curved. Each of them, studied separately, looked as if they could not have any conceivable function in a sane world. They appeared improbable, irresponsible, and wholly fortuitous. In actual fact, of course, they were nothing of the sort.

Assessed correctly, each had its particular place in a particular universe. Assembled in their proper place in their particular universe, they not only made sense, they made a picture. In other words, Hercule Poirot was doing a jigsaw puzzle.

He looked down at where a rectangle still showed improbably shaped gaps. It was an occupation he found soothing and pleasant. It brought disorder into order. It had, he reflected, a certain resemblance to his own profession. There, too, one was faced with various improbably shaped and unlikely facts which, though seeming to bear no relationship to each other, yet did each have its properly balanced part in assembling the whole. His fingers deftly picked up an improbable piece of dark grey and fitted it into a blue sky. It was, he now perceived, part of an aeroplane.

"Yes," murmured Poirot to himself, "that is what one must do. The unlikely piece here, the improbable piece there, the oh-so-rational piece that is not what it seems; all of these have their appointed place, and once they are fitted in, eh bien, there is an end of the business! All is clear. All is – as they say nowadays – in the picture."

He fitted in, in rapid succession, a small piece of a minaret, another piece that looked as though it was part of a striped awning and was actually the backside of a cat, and a missing piece of sunset that had changed with Turneresque suddenness from orange to pink.

If one knew what to look for, it would be so easy, said Hercule Poirot to himself. But one does not know what to look for. And so one looks in the wrong places or for the wrong things. He sighed vexedly. His eyes strayed from the jigsaw puzzle in front of him to the chair on the other side of the fireplace. There, not half an hour ago, Inspector Bland had sat consuming tea and crumpets (square crumpets) and talking sadly. He had had to come to London on police business and that police business having been accomplished, he had come to call upon M. Poirot. He had wondered, he explained, whether M. Poirot had any ideas. He had then proceeded to explain his own ideas. On every point he outlined, Poirot had agreed with him. Inspector Bland, so Poirot thought, had made a very fair and unprejudiced survey of the case.

It was now a month, nearly five weeks, since the occurrences at Nasse House. It had been five weeks of stagnation and of negation. Lady Stubbs's body had not been recovered. Lady Stubbs, if living, had not been traced. The odds, Inspector Bland pointed out, were strongly against her being alive. Poirot agreed with him.

"Of course," said Bland, "the body might not have been washed up. There's no telling with a body once it's in the water. It may show up yet, though it will be pretty unrecognisable when it does."

"There is a third possibility," Poirot pointed out. Bland nodded.

"Yes," he said," I've thought of that. I keep thinking of that, in fact. You mean the body's there – at Nasse, hidden somewhere where we've never thought of looking. It could be, you know. It just could be. With an old house, and with grounds like that, there are places you'd never think of – that you'd never know were there."

He paused a moment, ruminated, and then said;

"There's a house I was in only the other day. They'd built an air-raid shelter, you know, in the war. A flimsy sort of more or less home-made job in the garden, by the wall of the house, and had made a way from it into the house – into the cellar. Well, the war ended, the shelter tumbled down, they heaped it up in irregular mounds and made a kind of rockery of it. Walking through that garden now, you'd never think that the place had once been an air-raid shelter and that there was a chamber underneath. Looks as though it was always meant to be a rockery. And all the time, behind a wine bin in the cellar, there's a passage leading into it. That's what I mean. That kind of thing. Some sort of way into some kind of place that no outsider would know about. I don't suppose there's an actual Priest's Hole or anything of that kind?"