Hallowe'en Party - Agatha Christie [53]
‘Well, they’ve all gone now,’ said Rowena Drake, hearing the final shutting of the hall door. ‘Now what can I do for you? Something more about that dreadful party? I wish I’d never had it here. But no other house really seemed suitable. Is Mrs Oliver still staying with Judith Butler?’
‘Yes. She is, I believe, returning to London in a day or two. You had not met her before?’
‘No. I love her books.’
‘She is, I believe, considered a very good writer,’ said Poirot.
‘Oh well, she is a good writer. No doubt of that. She’s a very amusing person too. Has she any ideas herself—I mean about who might have done this dreadful thing?’
‘I think not. And you, Madame?’
‘I’ve told you already. I’ve no idea whatever.’
‘You would perhaps say so, and yet—you might, might you not, have, perhaps, what amounts to a very good idea, but only an idea. A half-formed idea. A possible idea.’
‘Why should you think that?’
She looked at him curiously.
‘You might have seen something—something quite small and unimportant but which on reflection might seem more significant to you, perhaps, than it had done at first.’
‘You must have something in your mind, Monsieur Poirot, some definite incident.’
‘Well, I admit it. It is because of what someone said to me.’
‘Indeed! And who was that?’
‘A Miss Whittaker. A school-teacher.’
‘Oh yes, of course. Elizabeth Whittaker. She’s the mathematics mistress, isn’t she, at The Elms? She was at the party, I remember. Did she see something?’
‘It was not so much that she saw something as she had the idea that you might have seen something.’
Mrs Drake looked surprised and shook her head.
‘I can’t think of anything I can possibly have seen,’ said Rowena Drake, ‘but one never knows.’
‘It had to do with a vase,’ said Poirot. ‘A vase of flowers.’
‘A vase of flowers?’ Rowena Drake looked puzzled. Then her brow cleared. ‘Oh, of course, I know. Yes, there was a big vase of autumn leaves and chrysanthemums on the table in the angle of the stairs. A very nice glass vase. One of my wedding presents. The leaves seemed to be drooping and so did one or two of the flowers. I remember noticing it as I passed through the hall—it was near the end of the party, I think, by then, but I’m not sure—I wondered why it looked like that, and I went up and dipped my fingers into it and found that some idiot must have forgotten to put any water into it after arranging it. It made me very angry. So I took it into the bathroom and filled it up. But what could I have seen in that bathroom? There was nobody in it. I am quite sure of that. I think one or two of the older girls and boys had done a little harmless, what the Americans call “necking”, there during the course of the party, but there was certainly nobody when I went into it with the vase.’
‘No, no, I do not mean that,’ said Poirot. ‘But I understood that there was an accident. That the vase slipped out of your hand and it fell to the hall below and was shattered to pieces.’
‘Oh yes,’ said Rowena. ‘Broken to smithereens. I was rather upset about it because as I’ve said, it had been one of our wedding presents, and it was really a perfect flower vase, heavy enough to hold big autumn bouquets and things like that. It was very stupid of me. My fingers just slipped. It went out of my hand and crashed on the hall floor below. Elizabeth Whittaker was standing there. She helped me to pick up the pieces and sweep some of the broken glass out of the way in