Dead Man's Folly - Agatha Christie [60]
‘Yes,’ murmured Poirot to himself, ‘that is what one must do. The unlikely piece here, the improbable piece there, the oh-so-rational piece that is not what it seems; all of these have their appointed place, and once they are fitted in, eh bien, there is an end of the business! All is clear. All is – as they say nowadays – in the picture.’
He fitted in, in rapid succession, a small piece of a minaret, another piece that looked as though it was part of a striped awning and was actually the backside of a cat, and a missing piece of sunset that had changed with Turneresque suddenness from orange to pink.
If one knew what to look for, it would be so easy, said Hercule Poirot to himself. But one does not know what to look for. And so one looks in the wrong places or for the wrong things. He sighed vexedly. His eyes strayed from the jigsaw puzzle in front of him to the chair on the other side of the fireplace. There, not half an hour ago, Inspector Bland had sat consuming tea and crumpets (square crumpets) and talking sadly. He had had to come to London on police business and that police business having been accomplished, he had come to call upon M. Poirot. He had wondered, he explained, whether M. Poirot had any ideas. He had then proceeded to explain his own ideas. On every point he outlined, Poirot had agreed with him. Inspector Bland, so Poirot thought, had made a very fair and unprejudiced survey of the case.
It was now a month, nearly five weeks, since the occurrences at Nasse House. It had been five weeks of stagnation and of negation. Lady Stubbs’ body had not been recovered. Lady Stubbs, if living, had not been traced. The odds, Inspector Bland pointed out, were strongly against her being alive. Poirot agreed with him.
‘Of course,’ said Bland, ‘the body might not have been washed up. There’s no telling with a body once it’s in the water. It may show up yet, though it will be pretty unrecognizable when it does.’
‘There is a third possibility,’ Poirot pointed out.
Bland nodded.
‘Yes,’ he said, ‘I’ve thought of that. I keep thinking of that, in fact. You mean the body’s there – at Nasse, hidden somewhere where we’ve never thought of looking. It could be, you know. It just could be. With an old house, and with grounds like that, there are places you’d never think of – that you’d never know were there.’
He paused a moment, ruminated, and then said:
‘There’s a house I was in only the other day. They’d built an air-raid shelter, you know, in the war. A flimsy sort of more or less home-made job in the garden, by the wall of the house, and had made a way from it into the house – into the cellar. Well, the war ended, the shelters tumbled down, they heaped it up in irregular mounds and made a kind of rockery of it. Walking through that garden now, you’d never think that the place had once been an air-raid shelter and that there was a chamber underneath. Looks as though it was always meant to be a rockery. And all the time, behind a wine bin in the cellar, there’s a passage leading into it. That’s what I mean. That kind of thing. Some sort of way into some kind of place that no outsider would know about. I don’t suppose there’s an actual Priest’s Hole or anything of that kind?’
‘Hardly – not at that period.’
‘That’s what Mr Weyman says – he says the house was built about 1790 or thereabouts. No reason for priests to hide themselves by that date. All the same, you know, there might be – somewhere, some alteration in the structure – something that one of the family might know about. What do you think, M. Poirot?’
‘It is possible, yes,’ said Poirot. ‘Mais oui, decidedly it is an idea. If one accepts the possibility, then the next thing