Curtain - Agatha Christie [66]
Chapter 19
I am writing this in Eastbourne.
I came to Eastbourne to see George, formerly Poirot’s valet.
George had been with Poirot many years. He was a competent matter-of-fact man, with absolutely no imagination. He always stated things literally and took them at their face value.
Well, I went to see him. I told him about Poirot’s death and George reacted as George would react. He was distressed and grieved and managed very nearly to conceal the fact.
Then I said: ‘He left you, did he not, a message for me?’
George said at once: ‘For you, sir? No, not that I am aware of.’
I was surprised. I pressed him, but he was quite definite.
I said at last: ‘My mistake, I suppose. Well, that’s that. I wish you had been with him at the end.’
‘I wish so, too, sir.’
‘Still I suppose if your father was ill you had to come to him.’
George looked at me in a very curious manner. He said: ‘I beg your pardon, sir, I don’t quite understand you.’
‘You had to leave in order to look after your father, isn’t that right?’
‘I didn’t wish to leave, sir. M. Poirot sent me away.’
‘Sent you away?’ I stared. ‘I don’t mean, sir, that he discharged me. The understanding was that I was to return to his service later. But I left by his wish, and he arranged for suitable remuneration whilst I was here with my old father.’
‘But why, George, why?’
‘I really couldn’t say, sir.’
‘Didn’t you ask?’
‘No, sir. I didn’t think it was my place to do so. M. Poirot always had his ideas, sir. A very clever gentleman, I always understood, sir, and very much respected.’
‘Yes, yes,’ I murmured abstractedly.
‘Very particular about his clothes, he was – though given to having them rather foreign and fancy if you know what I mean. But that, of course, is understandable as he was a foreign gentleman. His hair, too, and his moustache.’
‘Ah, those famous moustaches.’ I felt a twinge of pain as I remembered his pride in them.
‘Very particular about his moustache, he was,’ went on George. ‘Not very fashionable the way he wore it, but it suited him, sir, if you know what I mean.’
I said I did know. Then I murmured delicately: ‘I suppose he dyed it as well as his hair?’
‘He did – er – touch up his moustache a little – but not his hair – not of late years.’
‘Nonsense,’ I said. ‘It was as black as a raven – looked quite like a wig it was so unnatural.’
George coughed apologetically. ‘Excuse me, sir, it was a wig. M. Poirot’s hair came out a good deal lately, so he took to a wig.’
I thought how odd it was that a valet knew more about a man than his closest friend did.
I went back to the question that puzzled me.
‘But have you really no idea why M. Poirot sent you away as he did? Think, man, think.’
George endeavoured to do so, but he was clearly not very good at thinking.
‘I can only suggest, sir,’ he said at last, ‘that he discharged me because he wanted to engage Curtiss.’
‘Curtiss? Why should he want to engage Curtiss?’
George coughed again. ‘Well, sir, I really cannot say. He did not seem to me, when I saw him, as a – excuse me – particularly bright specimen, sir. He was strong physically, of course, but I should hardly have thought that he was quite the class M. Poirot would have liked. He’d been assistant in a mental home at one time, I believe.’
I stared at George.
Curtiss!
Was that the reason why Poirot had insisted on telling me so little? Curtiss, the one man I had never considered! Yes, and Poirot was content to have it so, to have me combing the guests at Styles for the mysterious X. But X was not a guest.
Curtiss!
One-time assistant in a mental home. And hadn’t I read somewhere that people who have been patients in mental homes and asylums sometimes remain or go back there as assistants?
A queer, dumb, stupid-looking man – a man who might kill for some strange warped reason of his own . . .
And if so – if so . . .
Why, then a great cloud would roll away from me! Curtiss . . . ?
Postscript
Note by Captain