Agatha Christie - Dead Man's Folly

Poirot tried to remember exactly what she had said to him that morning. "He is a bad man. He does wicked things." And, according to Bland, she had said to her husband: "He kills people."

There was something rather significant about that, now that one came to examine all the facts. He kills people.

On the day Etienne De Sousa had come to Nasse House one person certainly had been killed, possibly two people. Mrs Folliat had said that one should pay no attention to these melodramatic remarks of Hattie's. She had said so very insistently. Mrs Folliat…

Hercule Poirot frowned, then brought his hand down with a bang on the arm of his chair.

"Always, always – I return to Mrs Folliat. She is the key to the whole business. If I knew what she knows… I can no longer sit in an arm-chair and just think. No, I must take a train and go again to Devon and visit Mrs Folliat."

Hercule Poirot paused for a moment outside the big wrought-iron gates of Nasse House. He looked ahead of him along the curving drive. It was no longer summer. Golden-brown leaves fluttered gently down from the trees. Near at hand the grassy banks were coloured with small mauve cyclamen. Poirot sighed. The beauty of Nasse House appealed to him in spite of himself. He was not a great admirer of nature in the wild, he liked things trim and neat, yet he could not but appreciate the soft wild beauty of massed shrubs and trees.

At his left was the small white porticoed lodge. It was a fine afternoon. Probably Mrs Folliat would not be at home. She would be out somewhere with her gardening basket or else visiting some friends in the neighbourhood. She had many friends. This was her home, and had been her home for many long years. What was it the old man on the quay had said? "There'll always be Folliats at Nasse House."

Poirot rapped gently upon the door of the Lodge. After a few moments' delay, he heard footsteps inside. They sounded to his ear slow and almost hesitant. Then the door was opened and Mrs Folliat stood framed in the doorway. He was startled to see how old and frail she looked. She stared at him incredulously for a moment or two, then she said:

"M. Poirot? You!"

He thought for a moment that he had seen fear leap into her eyes, but perhaps that was sheer imagination on his part. He said politely:

"May I come in, Madame?"

"But of course."

She had recovered all her poise now, beckoned him in with a gesture and led the way into her small sitting-room. There were some delicate Chelsea figures on the mantelpiece, a couple of chairs covered in exquisite petit point, and a Derby tea service stood on the small table. Mrs Folliat said:

"I will fetch another cup."

Poirot raised a faintly protesting hand, but she pushed the protest aside.

"Of course you must have some tea."

She went out of the room. He looked round him once more. A piece of needlework, a petit point chair seat, lay on a table with a needle sticking in it. Against the wall was a bookcase with books. There was a little cluster of miniatures on the wall and a faded photograph in a silver frame of a man in uniform with a stiff moustache and a weak chin.

Mrs Folliat came back into the room with a cup and saucer in her hand.

Poirot said, "Your husband, Madame?"

"Yes."

Noticing that Poirot's eyes swept along the top of the bookcase as though in search of further photographs, she said brusquely:

"I'm not fond of photographs. They make one live in the past too much. One must learn to forget. One must cut away the dead wood."

Poirot remembered how the first time he had seen Mrs Folliat she had been clipping with secateurs at a shrub on the bank. She had said then, he remembered, something about dead wood. He looked at her thoughtfully, appraising her character. An enigmatical woman, he thought, and a woman who, in spite of the gentleness and fragility of her appearance, had a side to her that could be ruthless. A woman who could cut away dead wood not only from plants but from her own life…

She sat down and poured out a cup of tea, asking:

"Milk? Sugar?"

"Three lumps if you will be so good, Madame?"

She handed him his cup and said conversationally:

"I was surprised to see you. Somehow I did not imagine you would be passing through this part of the world again."

"I am not exactly passing through," said Poirot.

"No?" She queried him with slightly uplifted eyebrows.

"My visit to this part of the world is intentional."

She still looked at him in inquiry.

"I came here partly to see you, Madame."

"Really?"

"First of all – there has been no news of the young Lady Stubbs?"

Mrs Folliat shook her head.

"There was a body washed up the other day in Cornwall," she said. "George went there to see if he could identify it. But it was not her." She added: "I am very sorry for George. The strain has been very great."

"Does he still believe that his wife may be alive?"

Slowly Mrs Folliat shook her head.

"I think," she said, "that he has given up hope. After all, if Hattie were alive, she couldn't possibly conceal herself successfully with the whole of the Press and the Police looking for her. Even if something like loss of memory had happened to her – well, surely the police would have found her by now?"

"It would seem so, yes," said Poirot. "Do the police still search?"

"I suppose so. I do not really know."

"But Sir George has given up hope."

"He does not say so," said Mrs Folliat. "Of course I have not seen him lately. He has been mostly in London."

"And the murdered girl? There have been no developments there?"

"Not that I know of." She added, "It seems a senseless crime – absolutely pointless. Poor child -"

"It still upsets you, I see, to think of her, Madame."

Mrs Folliat did not reply for a moment or two. Then she said:

"I think when one is old, the death of anyone who is young upsets one out of due proportion. We old folks expect to die, but that child had her life before her."

"It might not have been a very interesting life."

"Not from our point of view, perhaps, but it might have been interesting to her."

"And although, as you say, we old folk must expect to die," said Poirot, "we do not really want to. At least I do not want to. I find life very interesting still."

"I don't think that I do."

She spoke more to herself than him, her shoulders drooped still more.

"I am very tired, M. Poirot. I shall be not only ready, but thankful, when my time comes."

He shot a quick glance at her. He wondered, as he had wondered before, whether it was a sick woman who sat talking to him, a woman who had perhaps the knowledge or even the certainty of approaching death. He could not otherwise account for the intense weariness and lassitude of her manner. That lassitude, he felt, was not really characteristic of the woman. Amy Folliat, he felt, was a woman of character, energy and determination. She had lived through many troubles, loss of her home, loss of wealth, the deaths of her sons. All these, he felt, she had survived. She had cut away the "dead wood," as she herself had expressed it. But there was something now in her life that she could not cut away, that no one could cut away for her. If it was not physical illness he did not see what it could be. She gave a sudden little smile as though she were reading his thoughts.

"Really, you know, I have not very much to live for, M. Poirot," she said. "I have many friends but no near relations, no family."

"You have your home," said Poirot on an impulse.

"You mean Nasse? Yes -"

"It is your home, isn't it? Although technically it is the property of Sir George Stubbs? Now Sir George Stubbs has gone to London you rule in his stead."