Curtain - Agatha Christie [46]
Poirot nodded. ‘Yes. There have been people here – several of them – who desired deeply that someone else should die. That is true enough.’
‘I believe it gets hold of one in some way. But now, Poirot, tell me, what am I to do about all this – Judith and Allerton, I mean. It’s got to be stopped somehow. What do you think I’d better do?’
‘Do nothing,’ said Poirot with emphasis.
‘Oh, but –’
‘Believe me, you will do least harm by not interfering.’
‘If I were to tackle Allerton –’
‘What can you say or do? Judith is twenty-one and her own mistress.’
‘But I feel I ought to be able –’
Poirot interrupted me. ‘No, Hastings. Do not imagine that you are clever enough, forceful enough, or even cunning enough to impose your personality on either of those two people. Allerton is accustomed to dealing with angry and impotent fathers and probably enjoys it as a good joke. Judith is not the sort of creature who can be browbeaten. I would advise you – if I advised you at all – to do something very different. I would trust her if I were you.’
I stared at him.
‘Judith,’ said Hercule Poirot, ‘is made of very fine stuff. I admire her very much.’
I said, my voice unsteady: ‘I admire her, too. But I’m afraid for her.’
Poirot nodded his head with sudden energy. ‘I, too, am afraid for her,’ he said. ‘But not in the way you are. I am terribly afraid. And I am powerless – or nearly so. And the days go by. There is danger, Hastings, and it is very close.’
II
I knew as well as Poirot that the danger was very close. I had more reason to know it than he had, because of what I had actually overheard the previous night.
Nevertheless I pondered on that phrase of Poirot’s as I went down to breakfast. ‘I would trust her if I were you.’
It had come unexpectedly, but it had given me an odd sense of comfort. And almost immediately, the truth of it was justified. For Judith had obviously changed her mind about going up to London that day.
Instead she went off with Franklin to the lab as usual directly after breakfast, and it was clear that they were to have an arduous and busy day there.
A feeling of intense thanksgiving rushed over me. How mad, how despairing I had been last night. I had assumed – assumed quite certainly – that Judith had yielded to Allerton’s specious proposals. But it was true, I reflected now, that I had never heard her actually assent. No, she was too fine, too essentially good and true, to give in. She had refused the rendezvous.
Allerton had breakfasted early, I found, and gone off to Ipswich. He, then, had kept to the plan and must assume that Judith was going up to London as arranged.
‘Well,’ I thought grimly, ‘he will get a disappointment.’
Boyd Carrington came along and remarked rather grumpily that I looked very cheerful this morning.
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I’ve had some good news.’
He said that it was more than he had. He’d had a tiresome telephone call from the architect, some building difficulty – a local surveyor cutting up rough. Also worrying letters. And he was afraid he’d let Mrs Franklin overdo herself the day before.
Mrs Franklin was certainly making up for her recent bout of good health and spirits. She was, so I gathered from Nurse Craven, making herself quite impossible.
Nurse Craven had had to give up her day off which had been promised her to go and meet some friends,
and she was decidedly sour about it. Since early morning Mrs Franklin had been calling for sal volatile, hot-water bottles, various patent food and drinks, and was unwilling to let Nurse leave the room. She had neuralgia, a pain round the heart, cramps in her feet and legs, cold shivers and I don’t know what else.
I may say here and now that neither I, nor anyone else, was inclined to be really alarmed. We all put it down as part of Mrs Franklin’s hypochondriacal tendencies.
This was true of Nurse Craven and Dr Franklin as well.
The latter was fetched from the laboratory; he listened to his wife’s complaints, asked her if she would like the local doctor called in (violently negatived