Hallowe'en Party - Agatha Christie [57]
She paused and then said:
‘Miss Emlyn, too.’
‘The head-mistress?’ Poirot looked surprised.
‘Yes. She knows things. I mean, she is a natural psychologist. You said I might have ideas—half-formed ones—as to who killed Joyce. I haven’t—but I think Miss Emlyn might.’
‘This is interesting…’
‘I don’t mean has evidence. I mean she just knows. She could tell you—but I don’t think she will.’
‘I begin to see,’ said Poirot, ‘that I have still a long way to go. People know things—but they will not tell them to me.’ He looked thoughtfully at Rowena Drake.
‘Your aunt, Mrs Llewellyn-Smythe, had an au pair girl who looked after her, a foreign girl.’
‘You seem to have got hold of all the local gossip.’ Rowena spoke dryly. ‘Yes, that is so. She left here rather suddenly soon after my aunt’s death.’
‘For good reasons, it would seem.’
‘I don’t know whether it’s libel or slander to say so—but there seems no doubt that she forged a codicil to my aunt’s Will—or that someone helped her to do so.’
‘Someone?’
‘She was friendly with a young man who worked in a solicitor’s office in Medchester. He had been mixed up in a forgery case before. The case never came to court because the girl disappeared. She realized the Will would not be admitted to probate, and that there was going to be a court case. She left the neighbourhood and has never been heard of since.’
‘She too came, I have heard, from a broken home,’ said Poirot.
Rowena Drake looked at him sharply but he was smiling amiably.
‘Thank you for all you have told me, Madame,’ he said.
II
When Poirot had left the house, he went for a short walk along a turning off the main road which was labelled ‘Helpsly Cemetery Road.’ The cemetery in question did not take him long to reach. It was at most ten minutes’ walk. It was obviously a cemetery that had been made in the last ten years, presumably to cope with the rising importance of Woodleigh as a residential entity. The church, a church of reasonable size dating from some two or three centuries back, had had a very small enclosure round it already well filled. So the new cemetery had come into being with a foot-path connecting it across two fields. It was, Poirot thought, a business-like, modern cemetery with appropriate sentiments on marble or granite slabs; it had urns, chippings, small plantations of bushes or flowers. No interesting old epitaphs or inscriptions. Nothing much for an antiquarian. Cleaned, neat, tidy and with suitable sentiments expressed.
He came to a halt to read a tablet erected on a grave contemporary with several others near it, all dating within two or three years back. It bore a simple inscription, ‘Sacred to the Memory of Hugo Edmund Drake, beloved husband of Rowena Arabella Drake, who departed this life March the 20th 19–’
He giveth his beloved sleep
It occurred to Poirot, fresh from the impact of the dynamic Rowena Drake, that perhaps sleep might have come in welcome guise to the late Mr Drake.
An alabaster urn had been fixed in position there and contained the remains of flowers. An elderly gardener, obviously employed to tend the graves of good citizens departed this life, approached Poirot in the pleasurable hopes of a few minutes’ conversation while he laid his hoe and his broom aside.
‘Stranger in these parts, I think,’ he said, ‘aren’t you, sir?’
‘It is very true,’ said Poirot. ‘I am a stranger with you as were my fathers before me.’
‘Ah, aye. We’ve got that text somewhere or summat very like it. Over down the other corner, it is.’ He went on, ‘He was a nice gentleman, he were, Mr Drake. A cripple, you know. He had that infant paralysis, as they call it, though as often as not it isn’t infants as suffer from it. It’s grown-ups. Men and women too. My wife, she had an aunt, who caught it in Spain, she did. Went there with a tour, she did, and bathed somewhere in some river. And they said afterwards as it was the water infection, but I don’t think they know much. Doctors don’t, if you