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By Root 515 0

It was not quite a welcoming smile, it was just a smile of quiet recognition. He was tall, slender, with features of great perfection such as a classical sculptor might have produced. His eyes were dark, his hair was black and fitted him as a woven chain mail helmet or cap might have done. For a moment Poirot wondered whether he and this young man might not be meeting in the course of some pageant that was being rehearsed. If so, thought Poirot, looking down at his galoshes, I, alas, shall have to go to the wardrobe mistress to get myself better equipped. He said:

‘I am perhaps trespassing here. If so, I must apologize. I am a stranger in this part of the world. I only arrived yesterday.’

‘I don’t think one could call it trespassing.’ The voice was very quiet; it was polite yet in a curious way uninterested, as if this man’s thoughts were really somewhere quite far away. ‘It’s not exactly open to the public, but people do walk round here. Old Colonel Weston and his wife don’t mind. They would mind if there was any damage done, but that’s not really very likely.’

‘No vandalism,’ said Poirot, looking round him. ‘No litter that is noticeable. Not even a little basket. That is very unusual, is it not? And it seems deserted—strange. Here you would think,’ he went on, ‘there would be lovers walking.’

‘Lovers don’t come here,’ said the young man. ‘It’s supposed to be unlucky for some reason.’

‘Are you, I wonder, the architect? But perhaps I’m guessing wrong.’

‘My name is Michael Garfield,’ said the young man.

‘I thought it might be,’ said Poirot. He gesticulated with a hand around him. ‘You made this?’

‘Yes,’ said Michael Garfield.

‘It is beautiful,’ said Poirot. ‘Somehow one feels it is always rather unusual when something beautiful is made in—well, frankly, what is a dull part of the English landscape.

‘I congratulate you,’ he said. ‘You must be satisfied with what you have done here.’

‘Is one ever satisfied? I wonder.’

‘You made it, I think, for a Mrs Llewellyn-Smythe. No longer alive, I believe. There is a Colonel and Mrs Weston, I believe? Do they own it now?’

‘Yes. They got it cheap. It’s a big, ungainly house—not easy to run—not what most people want. She left it in her Will to me.’

‘And you sold it.’

‘I sold the house.’

‘And not the Quarry Garden?’

‘Oh yes. The Quarry Garden went with it, practically thrown in, as one might say.’

‘Now why?’ said Poirot. ‘It is interesting, that. You do not mind if I am perhaps a little curious?’

‘Your questions are not quite the usual ones,’ said Michael Garfield.

‘I ask not so much for facts as for reasons. Why did A do so and so? Why did B do something else? Why was C’s behaviour quite different from that of A and B?’

‘You should be talking to a scientist,’ said Michael.

‘It is a matter—or so we are told nowadays—of genes or chromosomes. The arrangement, the pattern, and so on.’

‘You said just now you were not entirely satisfied because no-one ever was. Was your employer, your patron, whatever you like to call her—was she satisfied? With this thing of beauty?’

‘Up to a point,’ said Michael. ‘I saw to that. She was easy to satisfy.’

‘That seems most unlikely,’ said Hercule Poirot. ‘She was, I have learned, over sixty. Sixty-five at least. Are people of that age often satisfied?’

‘She was assured by me that what I had carried out was the exact carrying out of her instructions and imagination and ideas.’

‘And was it?’

‘Do you ask me that seriously?’

‘No,’ said Poirot. ‘No. Frankly I do not.’

‘For success in life,’ said Michael Garfield, ‘one has to pursue the career one wants, one has to satisfy such artistic leanings as one has got, but one has as well to be a tradesman. You have to sell your wares. Otherwise you are tied to carrying out other people’s ideas in a way which will not accord with one’s own. I carried out mainly my own ideas and I sold them, marketed them perhaps is a better word, to the client who employed me, as a direct carrying out of her plans and schemes. It is not a very difficult