Agatha Christie - Dead Man's Folly

A public telephone box stood adjacent to the village post office. He entered it and rang up a number. A few minutes later he was speaking to Inspector Bland.

"Well, M. Poirot, where are you?"

"I am here, in Nassecombe."

"But you were in London yesterday afternoon?"

"It only takes three and a half hours to come here by a good train," Poirot pointed out. "I have a question for you."

"Yes?"

"What kind of a yacht did Etienne De Sousa have?"

"Maybe I can guess what you're thinking, M. Poirot, but I assure you there was nothing of that kind. It wasn't fitted up for smuggling if that's what you mean. There were no fancy hidden partitions or secret cubbyholes. We'd have found them if there had been. There was nowhere on it you could have stowed away a body."

"You are wrong, mon cher, that is not what I mean. I only asked what kind of a yacht, big or small?"

"Oh, it was very fancy. Must have cost the earth. All very smart, newly painted, luxury fittings."

"Exactly," said Poirot. He sounded so pleased that Inspector Bland felt quite surprised.

"What are you getting at, M. Poirot?" he asked.

"Etienne De Sousa," said Poirot, "is a rich man. That, my friend, is very significant."

"Why?" demanded Inspector Bland.

"It fits in with my latest idea," said Poirot.

"You've got an idea, then?"

"Yes. At last I have an idea. Up to now I have been very stupid."

"You mean we've all been very stupid."

"No," said Poirot, "I mean specially myself. I had the good fortune to have a perfectly clear trail presented to me, and I did not see it."

"But now you're definitely on to something?"

"I think so, yes."

"Look here, M. Poirot -"

But Poirot had rung off. After searching his pockets for available change, he put through a personal call to Mrs Oliver at her London number.

"But do not," he hastened to add, when he made his demand, "disturb the lady to answer the telephone if she is at work."

He remembered how bitterly Mrs Oliver had once reproached him for interrupting a train of creative thought and how the world in consequence had been deprived of an intriguing mystery centring round an old-fashioned long-sleeved woollen vest. The exchange, however, was unable to appreciate his scruples.

"Well," it demanded, "do you want a personal call or don't you?"

"I do," said Poirot, sacrificing Mrs Oliver's creative genius upon the altar of his own impatience. He was relieved when Mrs Oliver spoke. She interrupted his apologies.

"It's splendid that you've rung me up," she said. "I was just going out to give a talk on How I Write My Books. Now I can get my secretary to ring up and say I am unavoidably detained."

"But, Madame, you must not let me prevent -"

"It's not a case of preventing," said Mrs Oliver joyfully. "I'd have made the most awful fool of myself. I mean, what can you say about how you write books? What I mean is, first you've got to think of something, and when you've thought of it you've got to force yourself to sit down and write it. That's all. It would have taken me just three minutes to explain that, and then the Talk would have been ended and everyone would have been very fed up. I can't imagine why everybody is always so keen for authors to talk about writing. I should have thought it was an author's business to write, not talk."

"And yet it is about how you write that I want to ask you."

"You can ask," said Mrs Oliver; "but I probably shan't know the answer. I mean one just sits down and writes. Half a minute, I've got a frightfully silly hat on for the Talk – and I must take it off. It scratches my forehead." There was a momentary pause and then the voice of Mrs Oliver resumed in a relieved voice, "Hats are really only a symbol, nowadays, aren't they? I mean, one doesn't wear them for sensible reasons any more; to keep one's head warm, or shield one from the sun, or hide one's face from people one doesn't want to meet. I beg your pardon, M. Poirot, did you say something?"

"It was an ejaculation only. It is extraordinary," said Poirot, and his voice was awed. "Always you give me ideas. So also did my friend Hastings whom I have not seen for many, many years. You have given me now the clue to yet another piece of my problem. But no more of all that. Let me ask you instead my question. Do you know an atom scientist, Madame?"

"Do I know an atom scientist?" said Mrs Oliver in a surprised voice. "I don't know. I suppose I may. I mean, I know some professors and things. I'm never quite sure what they actually do."

"Yet you made an atom scientist one of the suspects in your Murder Hunt?"

"Oh, that! That was just to be up to date. I mean, when I went to buy presents for my nephews last Christmas, there was nothing but science fiction and the stratosphere and supersonic toys, and so I thought when I started on the Murder Hunt, 'Better have an atom scientist as the chief suspect and be modern.' After all, if I'd needed a little technical jargon for it I could always have got it from Alec Legge."

"Alec Legge – the husband of Sally Legge? Is he an atom scientist?"

"Yes, he is. Not Harwell. Wales somewhere. Cardiff. Or Bristol, is it? It's just a holiday cottage they have on the Helm. Yes, so, of course, I do know an atom scientist after all."

"And it was meeting him at Nasse House that probably put the idea of an atom scientist into your head? But his wife is not Yugoslavian."

"Oh, no," said Mrs Oliver, "Sally is English as English. Surely you realise that?"

"Then what put the idea of the Yugoslavian wife into your head?"

"I really don't know… Refugees perhaps? Students? All those foreign girls at the hostel trespassing through the woods and speaking broken English."

"I see… Yes, I see now a lot of things."

"It's about time," said Mrs Oliver.

"Pardon?"

"I said it was about time," said Mrs Oliver. "That you did see things, I mean. Up to now you don't seem to have done anything" Her voice held reproach.

"One cannot arrive at things all in a moment," said Poirot, defending himself. "The police," he added, "have been completely baffled."

"Oh, the police," said Mrs Oliver. "Now if a woman were the head of Scotland Yard…"

Recognising this well-known phrase, Poirot hastened to interrupt.

"The matter has been complex," he said. "Extremely complex. But now – I tell you this in confidence – but now I arrive!"

Mrs Oliver remained unimpressed.

"I dare say," she said; "but in the meantime there have been two murders."

"Three," Poirot corrected her.

"Three murders? Who's the third?"

"An old man called Merdell," said Hercule Poirot.

"I haven't heard of that one," said Mrs Oliver. "Will it be in the paper?"

"No," said Poirot, "up to now no one has suspected that it was anything but an accident."

"And it wasn't an accident?"

"No," said Poirot, "it was not an accident."

"Well, tell me who did it – did them, I mean – or can't you over the telephone?"

"One does not say these things over the telephone," said Poirot.

"Then I shall ring off," said Mrs Oliver. "I can't bear it."

"Wait a moment," said Poirot, "there is something else I wanted to ask you. Now, what was it?"

"That's a sign of age," said Mrs Oliver. "I do that, too. Forget things -"

"There was something, some little point – it worried me. I was in the boathouse…"

He cast his mind back. That pile of comics. Marlene's phrases scrawled on the margin. "Albert goes with Doreen." He had had a feeling that there was something lacking – that there was something he must ask Mrs Oliver.

"Are you still there, M. Poirot?" demanded Mrs Oliver. At the same time the operator requested more money.

These formalities completed, Poirot spoke once more.