Hallowe'en Party - Agatha Christie [91]
‘Mad,’ said Judith Butler. ‘He must have been mad.’
‘Madame, your daughter is safe—but there is something I would like to know very much.’
‘I think you deserve to know anything I can tell you, Monsieur Poirot.’
‘She is your daughter—was she also Michael Garfield’s daughter?’
Judith was silent for a moment, and then she said, ‘Yes.’
‘But she doesn’t know that?’
‘No. She has no idea. Meeting him here was a pure coincidence. I knew him when I was a young girl. I fell wildly in love with him and then—and then I got afraid.’
‘Afraid?’
‘Yes. I don’t know why. Not of anything he would do or that sort of thing, just afraid of his nature. His gentleness, but behind it, a coldness and a ruthlessness. I was even afraid of his passion for beauty and for creation in his work. I didn’t tell him I was going to have a child. I left him—I went away and the baby was born. I invented the story of a pilot husband who had had a crash. I moved about rather restlessly. I came to Woodleigh Common more or less by chance. I had got contacts in Medchester where I could find secretarial work.
‘And then one day Michael Garfield came here to work in the Quarry Wood. I don’t think I minded. Nor did he. All that was over long ago, but later, although I didn’t realize how often Miranda went there to the Wood, I did worry–’
‘Yes,’ said Poirot, ‘there was a bond between them. A natural affinity. I saw the likeness between them—only Michael Garfield, the follower of Lucifer the beautiful, was evil, and your daughter has innocence and wisdom, and there is no evil in her.’
He went over to his desk and brought back an envelope. Out of it he drew a delicate pencil drawing.
‘Your daughter,’ he said.
Judith looked at it. It was signed ‘Michael Garfield.’
‘He was drawing her by the stream,’ said Poirot, ‘in the Quarry Wood. He drew it, he said, so that he should not forget. He was afraid of forgetting. It wouldn’t have stopped him killing her, though.’
Then he pointed to a pencilled word across the top left hand corner.
‘Can you read that?’
She spelt it out slowly.
‘Iphigenia.’
‘Yes,’ said Poirot, ‘Iphigenia. Agamemnon sacrificed his daughter, so that he should get a wind to take his ships to Troy. Michael would have sacrificed his daughter so that he should have a new Garden of Eden.’
‘He knew what he was doing,’ said Judith. ‘I wonder—if he would ever have had regrets?’
Poirot did not answer. A picture was forming in his mind of a young man of singular beauty lying by the megalithic stone marked with a double axe, and still clasping in his dead fingers the golden goblet he had seized and drained when retribution had come suddenly to save his victim and to deliver him to justice.
It was so that Michael Garfield had died—a fitting death, Poirot thought—but, alas, there would be no garden blossoming on an island in the Grecian Seas…
Instead there would be Miranda—alive and young and beautiful.
He raised Judith’s hand and kissed it.
‘Goodbye, Madame, and remember me to your daughter.’
‘She ought always to remember you and what she owes you.’
‘Better not—some memories are better buried.’
He went on to Mrs Oliver.
‘Good night, chère Madame. Lady Macbeth and Narcissus. It has been remarkably interesting. I have to thank you for bringing it to my notice–’
‘That’s right,’ said Mrs Oliver in an exasperated voice, ‘blame it all on me as usual!’
E-Book Extras
The Poirots
Essay by Charles Osborne
The Poirots
The Mysterious Affair at Styles; The Murder on the Links; Poirot Investigates; The Murder of Roger Ackroyd; The Big Four; The Mystery of the Blue Train; Black Coffee; Peril at End House; Lord Edgware Dies; Murder on the Orient Express; Three-Act Tragedy; Death in the Clouds; The ABC Murders; Murder in Mesopotamia; Cards on the Table; Murder in the Mews; Dumb Witness; Death on the Nile; Appointment with Death; Hercule Poirot’s Christmas; Sad Cypressv One, Two, Buckle My Shoe; Evil Under the Sun; Five Little