Agatha Christie - Evil Under the Sun

That person was Arlena Marshall.

Clad in her white bathing-dress, the green Chinese hat on her head, she was trying to launch a white wooden float. Poirot came gallantly to the rescue, completely immersing a pair of white suede shoes in doing so.

She thanked him with one of those sideways glances of hers.

Just as she was pushing off, she called him.

‘M. Poirot?’

Poirot leaped to the water’s edge.

‘Madame.’

Arlena Marshall said:

‘Do something for me, will you?’

‘Anything.’

She smiled at him. She murmured:

‘Don’t tell any one where I am.’ She made her glance appealing. ‘Every one will follow me about so. I just want for once to be alone.’

She paddled off vigorously.

Poirot walked up the beach. He murmured to himself:

‘Ah ca, jamais! That, par exemple, I do not believe.’

He doubted if Arlena Stuart, to give her her stage name, had ever wanted to be alone in her life.

Hercule Poirot, that man of the world, knew better. Arlena Marshall was doubtless keeping a rendezvous, and Poirot had a very good idea with whom.

Or thought he had, but there he found himself proved wrong.

For just as she floated rounded the point of the bay and disappeared out of sight, Patrick Redfern closely followed by Kenneth Marshall, came striding down the beach from the hotel.

Marshall nodded to Poirot, ‘ ’Morning, Poirot. Seen my wife anywhere about?’

Poirot’s answer was diplomatic.

‘Has Madame then risen so early?’

Marshall said:

‘She’s not in her room.’ He looked up at the sky. ‘Lovely day. I shall have a bathe right away. Got a lot of typing to do this morning.’

Patrick Redfern, less openly, was looking up and down the beach. He sat down near Poirot and prepared to wait for the arrival of his lady.

Poirot said:

‘And Madame Redfern? Has she too risen early?’

Patrick Redfern said:

‘Christine? Oh, she’s going off sketching. She’s rather keen on art just now.’

He spoke impatiently, his mind clearly elsewhere. As time passed he displayed his impatience for Arlena’s arrival only too crudely. At every footstep he turned an eager head to see who it was coming down from the hotel.

Disappointment followed disappointment.

First Mr and Mrs Gardener complete with knitting and book and then Miss Brewster arrived.

Mrs Gardener, industrious as ever, settled herself in her chair, and began to knit vigorously and talk at the same time.

‘Well, M. Poirot. The beach seems very deserted this morning. Where is everybody?’

Poirot replied that the Mastermans and the Cowans, two families with young people in them, had gone off on an all-day sailing excursion.

‘Why that certainly does make all the difference, not having them about laughing and calling out. And only one person bathing, Captain Marshall.’

Marshall had just finished his swim. He came up the beach swinging his towel.

‘Pretty good in the sea this morning,’ he said. ‘Unfortunately I’ve got a lot of work to do. Must go and get on with it.’

‘Why, if that isn’t too bad, Captain Marshall. On a beautiful day like this, too. My, wasn’t yesterday too terrible? I said to Mr Gardener that if the weather was going to continue like that we’d just have to leave. It’s the melancholy, you know, with the mist right up around the island. Gives you a kind of ghostly feeling, but then I’ve always been very susceptible to atmosphere ever since I was a child. Sometimes, you know, I’d feel I just had to scream and scream. And that, of course, was very trying to my parents. But my mother was a lovely woman and she said to my father, “Sinclair, if the child feels like that, we must let her do it. Screaming is her way of expressing herself.” And of course, my father agreed. He was devoted to my mother and just did everything she said. They were a perfectly lovely couple, as I’m sure Mr Gardener will agree. They were a very remarkable couple, weren’t they, Odell?’

‘Yes, darling,’ said Mr Gardener.

‘And where’s your girl this morning, Captain Marshall?’

‘Linda? I don’t know. I expect she’s mooning round the island somewhere.’

‘You know, Captain Marshall, that girl looks kind of peaky to me. She needs feeding up and very very sympathetic treatment.’

Kenneth Marshall said curtly:

‘Linda’s all right.’

He went up to the hotel.

Patrick Redfern did not go into the water. He sat about, frankly looking up towards the hotel. He was beginning to look a shade sulky.

Miss Brewster was brisk and cheerful when she arrived.

The conversation was much as it had been on a previous morning. Gentle yapping from Mrs Gardener and short staccato barks from Miss Brewster.

She remarked at last: ‘Beach seems a bit empty. Everyone off on excursions?’

Mrs Gardener said:

‘I was saying to Mr Gardener only this morning that we simply must make an excursion to Dartmoor. It’s quite near and the associations are all so romantic. And I’d like to see that convict prison-Princetown, isn’t it? I think we’d better fix up right away and go there tomorrow, Odell.’

Mr Gardener said:

‘Yes, darling.’

Hercule Poirot said to Miss Brewster.

‘You are going to bathe, Mademoiselle?’

‘Oh I’ve had my morning dip before breakfast. Somebody nearly brained me with a bottle, too. Chucked it out of one of the hotel windows.’

‘Now that’s a very dangerous thing to do,’ said Mrs Gardener. ‘I had a very dear friend who got concussion by a toothpaste tin falling on him in the street-thrown out of a thirty-fifth storey window it was. A most dangerous thing to do. He got very substantial damages.’ She began to hunt among her skeins of wool. ‘Why, Odell, I don’t believe I’ve got that second shade of purple wool. It’s in the second drawer of the bureau in our bedroom or it might be the third.’

‘Yes, darling.’

Mr Gardener rose obediently and departed on his search.

Mrs Gardener went on:

‘Sometimes, you know, I do think that maybe we’re going a little too far nowadays. What with all our great discoveries and all the electrical waves there must be in the atmosphere, I do think it leads to a great deal of mental unrest, and I just feel that maybe the time has come for a new message to humanity. I don’t know, M. Poirot, if you’ve ever interested yourself in the prophecies from the Pyramids.’

‘I have not,’ said Poirot.

‘Well, I do assure you that they’re very, very interesting. What with Moscow being exactly a thousand miles due north of-now what was it?-would it be Nineveh?-but anyway you take a circle and it just shows the most surprising things-and one can just see that there must have been special guidance, and that those ancient Egyptians couldn’t have thought of what they did all by themselves. And when you’ve gone into the theory of the numbers and their repetition, why it’s all just so clear that I can’t see how anyone can doubt the truth of it for a moment.’

Mrs Gardener paused triumphantly but neither Poirot nor Miss Emily Brewster felt moved to argue the point.

Poirot studied his white suede shoes ruefully.

Emily Brewster said:

‘You been paddling with your shoes on, M. Poirot?’

Poirot murmured:

‘Alas! I was precipitate.’

Emily Brewster lowered her voice. She said:

‘Where’s our vamp this morning? She’s late.’

Mrs Gardener, raising her eyes from her knitting to study Patrick Redfern, murmured:

‘He looks just like a thundercloud. Oh dear, I do feel the whole thing is such a pity. I wonder what Captain Marshall thinks about it all. He’s such a nice quiet man-very British and unassuming. You just never know what he’s thinking about things.’