Hallowe'en Party - Agatha Christie [40]
‘That is my name,’ said Poirot.
‘I came to meet you,’ said the child. ‘You are coming to tea with us, aren’t you?’
‘With Mrs Butler and Mrs Oliver? Yes.’
‘That’s right. That’s Mummy and Aunt Ariadne.’ She added with a note of censure: ‘You’re rather late.’
‘I am sorry. I stopped to speak to someone.’
‘Yes, I saw you. You were talking to Michael, weren’t you?’
‘You know him?’
‘Of course. We’ve lived here quite a long time. I know everybody.’
Poirot wondered how old she was. He asked her. She said,
‘I’m twelve years old. I’m going to boarding-school next year.’
‘Will you be sorry or glad?’
‘I don’t really know till I get there. I don’t think I like this place very much, not as much as I did.’ She added, ‘I think you’d better come with me now, please.’
‘But certainly. But certainly. I apologize for being late.’
‘Oh, it doesn’t really matter.’
‘What’s your name?’
‘Miranda.’
‘I think it suits you,’ said Poirot.
‘Are you thinking of Shakespeare?’
‘Yes. Do you have it in lessons?’
‘Yes. Miss Emlyn read us some of it. I asked Mummy to read some more. I liked it. It has a wonderful sound. A brave new world. There isn’t anything really like that, is there?’
‘You don’t believe in it?’
‘Do you?’
‘There is always a brave new world,’ said Poirot, ‘but only, you know, for very special people. The lucky ones. The ones who carry the making of that world within themselves.’
‘Oh, I see,’ said Miranda, with an air of apparently seeing with the utmost ease, though what she saw Poirot rather wondered.
She turned, started along the path and said,
‘We go this way. It’s not very far. You can go through the hedge of our garden.’
Then she looked back over her shoulder and pointed, saying:
‘In the middle there, that’s where the fountain was.’
‘A fountain?’
‘Oh, years ago. I suppose it’s still there, underneath the shrubs and the azaleas and the other things. It was all broken up, you see. People took bits of it away but nobody has put a new one there.’
‘It seems a pity.’
‘I don’t know. I’m not sure. Do you like fountains very much?’
‘Ca dépend,’ said Poirot.
‘I know some French,’ said Miranda. ‘That’s it depends, isn’t it?’
‘You are quite right. You seem very well educated.’
‘Everyone says Miss Emlyn is a very fine teacher. She’s our head-mistress. She’s awfully strict and a bit stern, but she’s terribly interesting sometimes in the things she tells us.’
‘Then she is certainly a good teacher,’ said Hercule Poirot. ‘You know this place very well—you seem to know all the paths. Do you come here often?’
‘Oh yes, it’s one of my favourite walks. Nobody knows where I am, you see, when I come here. I sit in trees—on the branches, and watch things. I like that. Watching things happen.’
‘What sort of things?’
‘Mostly birds and squirrels. Birds are very quarrelsome, aren’t they? Not like in the bit of poetry that says “birds in their little nests agree.” They don’t really, do they? And I watch squirrels.’
‘And you watch people?’
‘Sometimes. But there aren’t many people who come here.’
‘Why not, I wonder?’
‘I suppose they are afraid.’
‘Why should they be afraid?’
‘Because someone was killed here long ago. Before it was a garden, I mean. It was a quarry once and then there was a gravel pile or a sand pile and that’s where they found her. In that. Do you think the old saying is true—about you’re born to be hanged or born to be drowned?’
‘Nobody is born to be hanged nowadays. You do not hang people any longer in this country.’
‘But they hang them in some other countries. They hang them in the streets. I’ve read it in the papers.’
‘Ah. Do you think that is a good thing or a bad thing?’
Miranda’s response was not strictly in answer to the question, but Poirot felt that it was perhaps meant to be.
‘Joyce was drowned,’ she said. ‘Mummy didn’t want to tell me, but that was rather silly, I think, don’t you? I mean, I’m twelve years old.’
‘Was Joyce a friend