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By Root 497 0

scrapes by the skin of his teeth. Hard luck on his wife. Our young man in some ways resembled his father. He was associated once or twice with rather a doubtful crowd. I gave him the benefit of the doubt. He was still young. But I warned him that he was getting himself mixed up with the wrong lot. Too closely connected with fiddling transactions outside the law. Frankly, but for his mother, I wouldn’t have kept him. He was young, and he had ability; I gave him a warning or two which I hoped might do the trick. But there’s a lot of corruption about these days. It’s been on the increase for the last ten years.’

‘Someone might have had it in for him, you think?’

‘Quite possible. These associations—gangs is a rather melodramatic word—but you run a certain danger when you get tangled up with them. Any idea that you may split on them, and a knife between your shoulder blades isn’t an uncommon thing to happen.’

‘Nobody saw it happen?’

‘No. Nobody saw it happen. They wouldn’t, of course. Whoever took the job on would have all the arrangments nicely made. Alibi at the proper place and time, and so on and so on.’

‘Yet somebody might have seen it happen. Somebody quite unlikely. A child, for instance.’

‘Late at night? In the neighbourhood of the Green Swan? Hardly a very credible idea, Monsieur Poirot.’

‘A child,’ persisted Poirot, ‘who might remember. A child coming home from a friend’s house. At some short distance, perhaps, from her own home. She might have been coming by a footpath or seen something from behind a hedge.’

‘Really, Monsieur Poirot, what an imagination you have got. What you are saying seems to me most unlikely.’

‘It does not seem so unlikely to me,’ said Poirot.

‘Children do see things. They are so often, you see, not expected to be where they are.’

‘But surely when they go home and relate what they have seen?’

‘They might not,’ said Poirot. ‘They might not, you see, be sure of what they had seen. Especially if what they had seen had been faintly frightening to them. Children do not always go home and report a street accident they have seen, or some unexpected violence. Children keep their secrets very well. Keep them and think about them. Sometimes they like to feel that they know a secret, a secret which they are keeping to themselves.’

‘They’d tell their mothers,’ said Mr Fullerton.

‘I am not so sure of that,’ said Poirot. ‘In my experience the the things that children do not tell their mothers are quite numerous.’

‘What interests you so much, may I know, about this case of Lesley Ferrier? The regrettable death of a young man by a violence which is so lamentably often amongst us nowadays?’

‘I know nothing about him. But I wanted to know something about him because his is a violent death that occurred not many years ago. That might be important to me.’

‘You know, Mr Poirot,’ said Mr Fullerton, with some slight acerbity. ‘I really cannot quite make out why you have come to me, and in what you are really interested. You cannot surely suspect any tie-up between the death of Joyce Reynolds and the death of a young man of promise but slightly criminal activities who has been dead for some years?’

‘One can suspect anything,’ said Poirot. ‘One has to find out more.’

‘Excuse me, what one has to have in all matters dealing with crime, is evidence.’

‘You have perhaps heard that the dead girl Joyce was heard by several witnesses to say that she had with her own eyes witnessed a murder.’

‘In a place like this,’ said Mr Fullerton, ‘one usually hears any rumour that may be going round. One usually hears it, too, if I may add these words, in a singularly exaggerated form not usually worthy of credence.’

‘That also,’ said Poirot, ‘is quite true. Joyce was, I gather, just thirteen years of age. A child of nine could remember something she had seen—a hit-and-run accident, a fight or a struggle with knives on a dark evening, or a school teacher who was strangled, say—all these things might leave a very strong impression on a child’s mind about which she would not speak,