Elephants Can Remember - Agatha Christie [23]
‘See if you could help – and you did help, didn’tyou?’ said Spence.
Poirot sighed.
‘Fortunately, yes. But what a tiresome young man he was. If ever a young man deserved to be hanged, not because he had done a murder but because he wouldn’t help anyone to prove that he hadn’t. Now we have the Ravenscroft case. You say, Superintendent Garroway, something was wrong?’
‘Yes, I felt quite sure of it if you understand what I mean.’
‘I do understand,’ said Poirot. ‘And so does Spence. One does come across these things sometimes. The proofs are there, the motive, the opportunity, the clues, the mise-en-scène, it’s all there. A complete blueprint, as you might say. But all the same, those whose profession it is, know. They know that it’s all wrong, just like a critic in the artistic world knows when a picture is all wrong. Knows when it’s a fake and not the real thing.’
‘There wasn’t anything I could do about it, either,’ said Superintendent Garroway. ‘I looked into it, around it, up above it and down below it, as you might say. I talked to the people. There was nothing there. It looked like a suicide pact, it had all the marks of the suicide pact. Alternatively, of course, it could be a husband who shot a wife and then himself, or a wife who shot her husband and then herself. All those three things happen. When one comes across them, one knows they have happened. But in most cases one has some idea of why.’
‘There wasn’t any real idea of why in this case, was that it?’ said Poirot.
‘Yes. That’s it. You see, the moment you begin to enquire into a case, to enquire about people and things, you get a very good picture as a rule of what their lives have been like. This was a couple, ageing, the husband with a good record, a wife affectionate, pleasant, on good terms together. That’s a thing one soon finds out about. They were happy living together. They went for walks, they played picquet, and poker patience with each other in the evenings, they had children who caused them no particular anxiety. A boy in school in England and a girl in a pensionnat in Switzerland. There was nothing wrong with their lives as far as one could tell. From such medical evidence as one could obtain, there was nothing definitely wrong with their health. The husband had suffered from high blood pressure at one time, but was in good condition by the taking of suitable medicaments which kept him on an even keel. His wife was slightly deaf and had had a little minor heart trouble, nothing to be worried about. Of course it could be, as does happen sometimes, that one or other of them had fears for their health. There are a lot of people who are in good health but are quite convinced they have cancer, are quite sure that they won’t live another year. Sometimes that leads to their taking their own life. The Ravenscrofts didn’t seem that kind of person. They seemed well balanced and placid.’
‘So what did you really think?’ said Poirot. ‘The trouble is that I couldn’t think. Looking back, I said to myself it was suicide. It could only have been suicide. For some reason or other they decided that life was unbearable to them. Not through financial trouble, not through health difficulties, not because of unhappiness. And there, you see, I came to a full stop. It had all the marks of suicide. I cannot see any other thing that could have happened except suicide. They went for a walk. In that walk they took a revolver with them. The revolver lay between the two bodies. There were blurred fingerprints of both of them. Both of them in fact had handled it, but there was nothing to show who had fired it last. One tends to think the husband perhaps shot his wife and then himself. That is only because it seems more likely. Well, why? A great many years have passed. When something reminds