Agatha Christie - Hallowe'en Party

"Somewhere where you can improve, or help, nature? Somewhere where you can experiment or you can put strange things where they have never grown before, where neither sun will blister nor frost destroy?

Some good stretch of barren land where you can have the fun of playing at being Adam all over again? Have you always been restless?"

"I never stayed anywhere very long."

"You have been to Greece?"

"Yes. I should like to go to Greece again. Yes, you have something there. A garden on a Greek hillside. There may be cypresses there, not much else. A barren rock. But if you wished, what could there not be?"

"A garden for gods to walk "

"Yes. You're quite a mind reader, aren't you, Mr. Poirot?"

"I wish I were. There are so many things I would like to know and do not know."

"You are talking now of something quite prosaic, are you not?"

"Unfortunately so."

"Arson, murder and sudden death?"

"More or less. I do not know that I was considering arson. Tell me, Mr. Garfield, you have been here some considerable time, did you know a young man called Lesley Ferrier?"

"Yes, I remember him. He was in a Medchester solicitor's office, wasn't he?

Fullerton, Harrison and Leadbetter.

Junior clerk, something of that kind.

Good-looking chap."

"He came to a sudden end, did he not?"

"Yes. Got himself knifed one evening.

Woman trouble, I gather. Everyone seems to think that the police know quite well who did it, but they can't get the evidence they want. He was more or less tied up with a woman called Sandra-can't remember her name for the moment-Sandra Somebody, yes. Her husband kept the local pub. She and young Lesley were running an affair, and then Lesley took up with another girl. Or that was the story."

"And Sandra did not like it?"

"No, she did not like it at all. Mind you, he was a great one for the girls. There were two or three that he went around with."

"Were they all English girls?"

"Why do you ask that, I wonder? No, I don't think he confined himself to English girls, so long as they could speak enough English to understand more or less what he said to them, and he could understand what they said to him."

"There are doubtless from time to time foreign girls in this neighbourhood?"

"Of course there are. Is there any neighbourhood where there aren't?

Au pair girls -they're a part of daily life. Ugly ones, pretty ones, honest ones, dishonest ones, ones that do some good to distracted mothers and some who are no use at all and some who walk out of the house."

"Like the girl Olga did."

"As you say, like the girl Olga did."

"Was Lesley a friend of Olga's?"

"Oh, that's the way your mind is running. Yes, he was. I don't think Mrs. Llewellyn-Smythe knew much about it.

Olga was rather careful, I think. She spoke gravely of someone she hoped to marry some day in her own country. I don't know whether that was true or whether she made it up. Young Lesley was an attractive young man, as I said. I don't know what he saw in Olga-she wasn't very beautiful. Still-" he considered a minute or two "-she had a kind of intensity about her. A young Englishman might have found that attractive, I think.

Anyway, Lesley did all right, and his other girl friends weren't pleased."

"That is very interesting," said Poirot. "I thought you might give me information that I wanted."

Michael Garfield looked at him curiously.

"Why? What's it all about? Where does Lesley come in? Why this raking up of the past?"

"Well, there are things one wants to know. One wants to know how things come into being. I am even looking farther back still. Before the time that those two, Olga Seminoff and Lesley Ferrier, met secretly without Mrs. Llewellyn-Smythe knowing about it."

"Well, I'm not sure about that. That's only my-well, it's only my idea. I did come across them fairly frequently but Olga never confided in me. As for Lesley Ferrier, I hardly knew him."

"I want to go back behind that. He had, I gather, certain disadvantages in his past."

"I believe so. Yes, well, anyway it's been said here locally. Mr. Fullerton took him on and hoped to make an honest man of him. He's a good chap, old Fullerton."

"His offence had been, I believe, forgery?"

"Yes."

"It was a first offence, and there were said to be extenuating circumstances. He had a sick mother or drunken father or something of that kind. Anyway, he got off lightly."

"I never heard any of the details. It was something that he seemed to have got away with to begin with, then accountants came along and found him out. I'm very vague.

It's only hearsay. Forgery. Yes, that was the charge. Forgery."

"And where Mrs. Llewellyn-Smythe died and her Will was to be admitted to probate, it was found the Will was forged."

"Yes, I see the way your mind's working. You're fitting those two things as having a connection with each other."

"A man who was up to a point successful in forging. A man who became friends with the girl, a girl who, if a Will had been accepted when submitted to probate, would have inherited the larger part of a vast fortune."

"Yes, yes, that's the way it goes."

"And this girl and the man who had committed forgery were great friends. He had given up his own girl and he'd tied up with the foreign girl instead."

"What you're suggesting is that that forged Will was forged by Lesley Ferrier."

"There seems a likelihood of it, does there not?"

"Olga was supposed to have been able to copy Mrs. Llewellyn-Smythe's handwriting fairly well, but it seemed to me always that that was rather a doubtful point. She wrote handwritten letters for Mrs. Llewellyn-Smythe but I don't suppose that they were really particularly similar. Not enough to pass muster. But if she and Lesley were in it together, that's different. I daresay he could pass off a good enough job and he was probably quite cocksure that it would go through.

But then he must have been sure of that when he committed his original offence, and he was wrong there, and I suppose he was wrong this time.

I suppose that when the balloon went up, when the lawyers began making trouble and difficulties, and experts were called in to examine things and started asking questions, it could be that she lost her nerve, and had a row with Lesley. And then she cleared out, hoping he'd carry the can."

He gave his head a sharp shake.

"Why do you come and talk to me about things like that here, in my beautiful wood?"

"I wanted to know."

"It's better not to know. It's better never to know. Better to leave things as they are. Not push and pry and poke."

"You want beauty," said Hercule Poirot. "Beauty at any price. For me, it is truth I want. Always truth."

Michael Garfield laughed.

"Go on home to your police friends and leave me here in my local paradise. Get thee beyond me, Satan."

POIROT went on up the hill.

Suddenly he no longer felt the pain of his feet. Something had come to him. The fitting together of the things he had thought and felt, had known they were connected, but had not seen how they were connected. He was conscious now of danger - danger that might come to someone any minute now unless steps were taken to prevent it. Serious danger.

Elspeth McKay came out to the door to meet him.

"You look fagged out," she said. "Come and sit down."

"Your brother is here?"

"No. He's gone down to the station. Something's happened, I believe."

"Something has happened?" He was startled. "So soon? Not possible."

"Eh?" said Elspeth. "What do you mean?"

"Nothing. Nothing. Something has happened to somebody, do you mean?"

"Yes, but I don't know who exactly. Anyway, Tim Raglan rang up and asked for him to go down there. I'll get you a cup of tea, shall I?"