Hallowe'en Party - Agatha Christie [42]
‘Believe that Joyce noticed it?’
‘I meant believe that if she saw such a thing she never spoke about it earlier. That seems very unlike Joyce.’
‘The first thing that everybody seems to tell me here,’ said Poirot, in a mild voice, ‘is that this girl, Joyce Reynolds, was a liar.’
‘I suppose it’s possible,’ said Judith Butler, ‘that a child might make up a thing and then it might turn out to be true?’
‘That is certainly the focal point from which we start,’ said Poirot. ‘Joyce Reynolds was unquestionably murdered.’
‘And you have started. Probably you know already all about it,’ said Mrs Oliver.
‘Madame, do not ask impossibilities of me. You are always in such a hurry.’
‘Why not?’ said Mrs Oliver. ‘Nobody would ever get anything done nowadays if they weren’t in a hurry.’
Miranda returned at this moment with a plateful of scones.
‘Shall I put them down here?’ she asked. ‘I expect you’ve finished talking by now, haven’t you? Or is there anything else you would like me to get from the kitchen?’
There was a gentle malice in her voice. Mrs Butler lowered the Georgian silver teapot to the fender, switched on an electric kettle which had been turned off just before it came to the boil, duly filled the teapot and served the tea. Miranda handed hot scones and cucumber sandwiches with a serious elegance of manner.
‘Ariadne and I met in Greece,’ said Judith.
‘I fell into the sea,’ said Mrs Oliver, ‘when we were coming back from one of the islands. It had got rather rough and the sailors always say “jump” and, of course, they always say jump just when the thing’s at its furthest point which makes it come right for you, but you don’t think that can possibly happen and so you dither and you lose your nerve and you jump when it looks close and, of course, that’s the moment when it goes far away.’ She paused for breath. ‘Judith helped fish me out and it made a kind of bond between us, didn’t it?’
‘Yes, indeed,’ said Mrs Butler. ‘Besides, I liked your Christian name,’ she added. ‘It seemed very appropriate, somehow.’
‘Yes, I suppose it is a Greek name,’ said Mrs Oliver.
‘It’s my own, you know. I didn’t just make it up for literary purposes. But nothing Ariadne-like has ever happened to me. I’ve never been deserted on a Greek island by my own true love or anything like that.’
Poirot raised a hand to his moustache in order to hide the slight smile that he could not help coming to his lips as he envisaged Mrs Oliver in the rôle of a deserted Greek maiden.
‘We can’t all live up to our names,’ said Mrs Butler.
‘No, indeed. I can’t see you in the rôle of cutting off your lover’s head. That is the way it happened, isn’t it, Judith and Holofernes, I mean?’
‘It was her patriotic duty,’ said Mrs Butler, ‘for which, if I remember rightly, she was highly commended and rewarded.’
‘I’m not really very well up in Judith and Holofernes. It’s the Apochrypha, isn’t it? Still, if one comes to think of it, people do give other people—their children, I mean—some very queer names, don’t they? Who was the one who hammered some nails in someone’s head? Jael or Sisera. I never remember which is the man or which is the woman there. Jael, I think. I don’t think I remember any child having been christened Jael.’
‘She laid butter before him in a lordly dish,’ said Miranda unexpectedly, pausing as she was about to remove the tea-tray.
‘Don’t look at me,’ said Judith Butler to her friend, ‘it wasn’t I who introduced Miranda to the Apochrypha.
‘That’s her school training.’
‘Rather unusual for schools nowadays, isn’t it?’ said Mrs Oliver. ‘They give them ethical ideas instead, don’t they?’
‘Not Miss Emlyn,’ said Miranda. ‘She says that if we go to church nowadays we only get the modern version of the Bible read to us in the lessons and things, and that it has no literary merit whatsoever. We should at least know the fine prose and blank verse sometimes of the Authorized Version. I enjoyed the story of Jael