Hallowe'en Party - Agatha Christie [59]
‘Past the church, third house on the left. They board with Mrs Brand, go into Medchester Technical every day to study. They’ll be home by now.’
He gave Poirot an interested glance.
‘So that’s the way your mind is working, is it? There’s some already as thinks the same.’
‘No, I think nothing as yet. But they were among those present—that is all.’
As he took leave and walked away, he mused, ‘Among those present—I have come nearly to the end of my list.’
Chapter 15
Two pairs of eyes looked at Poirot uneasily.
‘I don’t see what else we can tell you. We’ve both been interviewed by the police, M. Poirot.’
Poirot looked from one boy to the other. They would not have described themselves as boys; their manner was carefully adult. So much so that if one shut one’s eyes, their conversation could have passed as that of elderly clubmen. Nicholas was eighteen. Desmond was sixteen.
‘To oblige a friend, I make my inquiries of those present on a certain occasion. Not the Hallowe’en party itself—the preparations for that party. You were both active in these.’
‘Yes, we were.’
‘So far,’ Poirot said, ‘I have interviewed cleaning women, I have had the benefit of police views, of talks to a doctor—the doctor who examined the body first—have talked to a school-teacher who was present, to the headmistress of the school, to distraught relatives, have heard much of the village gossip—By the way, I understand you have a local witch here?’
The two young men confronting him both laughed.
‘You mean Mother Goodbody. Yes, she came to the party and played the part of the witch.’
‘I have come now,’ said Poirot, ‘to the younger generation, to those of acute eyesight and acute hearing and who have up-to-date scientific knowledge and shrewd philosophy. I am eager—very eager—to hear your views on this matter.’
Eighteen and sixteen, he thought to himself, looking at the two boys confronting him. Youths to the police, boys to him, adolescents to newspaper reporters. Call them what you will. Products of today. Neither of them, he judged, at all stupid, even if they were not quite of the high mentality that he had just suggested to them by way of a flattering sop to start the conversation. They had been at the party. They had also been there earlier in the day to do helpful offices for Mrs Drake.
They had climbed up step-ladders, they had placed yellow pumpkins in strategic positions, they had done a little electrical work on fairy lights, one or other of them had produced some clever effects in a nice batch of phoney photographs of possible husbands as imagined hopefully by teenage girls. They were also, incidentally, of the right age to be in the forefront of suspects in the mind of Inspector Raglan and, it seemed, in the view of an elderly gardener. The percentage of murders committed by this group had been increasing in the last few years. Not that Poirot inclined to that particular suspicion himself, but anything was possible. It was even possible that the killing which had occurred two or three years ago might have been committed by a boy, youth, or adolescent of fourteen or twelve years of age. Such cases had occurred in recent newspaper reports.
Keeping all these possibilities in mind he pushed them, as it were, behind a curtain for the moment, and concentrated instead on his own appraisement of these two, their looks, their clothes, their manner, their voices and so on and so forth, in the Hercule Poirot manner, masked behind a foreign shield of flattering words and much increased foreign mannerisms, so that they themselves should feel agreeably contemptuous of him, though hiding that under politeness and good manners. For both of them had excellent manners. Nicholas, the eighteen-year-old, was good-looking, wearing sideburns, hair that grew fairly far down his neck, and a rather funereal outfit of black. Not as a mourning for the recent tragedy, but what was obviously his personal taste in modern clothes. The younger one was wearing a rose-coloured velvet coat, mauve