Elephants Can Remember - Agatha Christie [52]
‘You saw Desmond, didn’t you?’ she said. ‘He went to see you. He told me he had.’
‘Yes. He came to see me. Did you not want him to do so?’
‘He didn’t ask me.’
‘If he had asked you?’
‘I don’t know. I don’t know whether I should have forbidden him to do so, told him on no acount to do such a thing, or whether I should have encouraged it.’
‘I would like to ask you one question, mademoiselle. I want to know if there is one clear thing in your mind that matters to you, that could matter to you more than anythings else.’
‘Well, what is that?’
‘As you say, Desmond Burton-Cox came to see me. A very attractive and likeable young man, and very much in earnest over what he came to say. Now that – that is the really important thing. The important thing is if you and he really wish to marry – because that is serious. That is – though young people do not always think so nowadays – that is a link together for life. Do you want to enter into that state? It matters. What difference can it make to you or to Desmond whether the death of two people was a double suicide or something quite different?’
‘You think it is something quite different – or, it was?’
‘I do not as yet know,’ said Poirot. ‘I have reason to believe that it might be. There are certain things that do not accord with a double suicide, but as far as I can go on the opinion of the police – and the police are very reliable, Mademoiselle Celia, very reliable – they put together all the evidence and they thought very definitely that it could be nothing else but a double suicide.’
‘But they never knew the cause of it? That’s what you mean.’
‘Yes,’ said Poirot, ‘that’s what I mean.’
‘And don’t you know the cause of it, either? I mean, from looking into things or thinking about them, or whatever you do?’
‘No, I am not sure about it,’ said Poirot. ‘I think there might be something very painful to learn and I am asking you whether you will be wise enough to say: “The past is the past. Here is a young man whom I care for and who cares for me. This is the future we are spending together, not the past.”’
‘Did he tell you he was an adopted child?’ asked Celia.
‘Yes, he did.’
‘You see, what business is it really, of hers? Why should she come worrying Mrs Oliver here, trying to make Mrs Oliver ask me questions, find out things? She’s not his own mother.’
‘Does he care for her?’
‘No,’ said Celia. ‘I’d say on the whole he dislikes her. I think he always has.’
‘She’s spent money on him, schooling and on clothes and on all sorts of different things. And you think she cares for him?’
‘I don’t know. I don’t think so. She wanted, I suppose, a child to replace her own child. She’d had a child who died in an accident, that was why she wanted to adopt someone, and her husband had died quite recently. All these dates are so difficult.’
‘I know, I know. I would like perhaps to know one thing.’
‘About her or about him?’
‘Is he provided for financially?’
‘I don’t know quite what you mean by that. He’ll be able to support me – to support a wife. I gather some money was settled on him when he was adopted. A sufficient sum, that is. I don’t mean a fortune or anything like that.’
‘There is nothing that she could – withhold?’
‘What, you mean that she’d cut off the money supplies if he married me? I don’t think she’s ever threatened to do that, or indeed that she could do it. I think it was all fixed up by lawyers or whoever arranges adoptions. I mean, they make a lot of fuss, these adoption societies, from all I hear.’
‘I would ask you something else which you might know but nobody else does. Presumably Mrs Burton-Cox knows it. Do you know who his actual mother was?’
‘You think that might have been one of the reasons for her being so nosey and all that? Something to do with, as you say, what he was really. I don’t know. I suppose he might have been an illegitimate child. They’re the usual ones that go for adoption, aren’t they? She might have known something about his real mother or his real father, or something like that. If so, she didn’t tell him. I gather she just told him the