Peril at End House - Agatha Christie [57]
‘You knew, I suppose, that Miss Buckley was engaged to the airman, Michael Seton?’
She stared.
‘What? The one there’s all the fuss in the papers about?’
‘Yes.’
‘Well, I never. To think of that. Engaged to Miss Nick.’
‘Complete and absolute surprise registered very convincingly,’ I remarked, as we got outside.
‘Yes. It really seemed genuine.’
‘Perhaps it was,’ I suggested.
‘And that packet of letters reclining for months under the lingerie? No, mon ami.’
‘All very well,’ I thought to myself. ‘But we are not all Hercule Poirots. We do not all go nosing into what does not concern us.’
But I said nothing.
‘This Ellen—she is an enigma,’ said Poirot. ‘I do not like it. There is something here that I do not understand.’
Chapter 14
The Mystery of the Missing Will
We went straight back to the nursing home.
Nick looked rather surprised to see us.
‘Yes, Mademoiselle,’ said Poirot, answering her look. ‘I am like the Jack in the Case. I pop up again. To begin with I will tell you that I have put the order in your affairs. Everything is now neatly arranged.’
‘Well, I expect it was about time,’ said Nick, unable to help smiling. ‘Are you very tidy, M. Poirot?’
‘Ask my friend Hastings here.’
The girl turned an inquiring gaze on me.
I detailed some of Poirot’s minor peculiarities—toast that had to be made from a square loaf—eggs matching in size—his objection to golf as a game ‘shapeless and haphazard’, whose only redeeming feature was the tee boxes! I ended by telling her the famous case which Poirot had solved by his habit of straightenting ornaments on the mantelpiece.
Poirot sat by smiling.
‘He makes the good tale of it, yes,’ he said, when I had finished. ‘But on the whole it is true. Figure to yourself, Mademoiselle, that I never cease trying to persuade Hastings to part his hair in the middle instead of on the side. See what an air, lop-sided and unsymmetrical, it gives him.’
‘Then you must disapprove of me, M. Poirot,’ said Nick. ‘I wear a side parting. And you must approve of Freddie who parts her hair in the middle.’
‘He was certainly admiring her the other evening,’ I put in maliciously. ‘Now I know the reason.’
‘C’est assez,’ said Poirot. ‘I am here on serious business. Mademoiselle, this will of yours, I find it not.’
‘Oh!’ She wrinkled her brows. ‘But does it matter so much? After all, I’m not dead. And wills aren’t really important till you are dead, are they?’
‘That is correct. All the same, I interest myself in this will of yours. I have various little ideas concerning it. Think Mademoiselle. Try to remember where you placed it—where you saw it last?’
‘I don’t suppose I put it anywhere particular,’ said Nick. ‘I never do put things in places. I probably shoved it into a drawer.’
‘You did not put it in the secret panel by any chance?’
‘The secret what?’
‘Your maid, Ellen, says that there is a secret panel in the drawing-room or the library.’
‘Nonsense,’ said Nick. ‘I’ve never heard of such a thing. Ellen said so?’
‘Mais oui. It seems she was in service at End House as a young girl. The cook showed it to her.’
‘It’s the first I’ve ever heard of it. I suppose Grandfather must have known about it, but, if so, he didn’t tell me. And I’m sure he would have told me. M. Poirot, are you sure Ellen isn’t making it all up?’
‘No, Mademoiselle, I am not at all sure! Il me semble that there is something—odd about this Ellen of yours.’
‘Oh! I wouldn’t call her odd. William’s a half-wit, and the child is a nasty little brute, but Ellen’s all right. The essence of respectability.’
‘Did you give her leave to go out and see the fireworks last night, Mademoiselle?’
‘Of course. They always do. They clear up afterwards.’
‘Yet she did not go out.’
‘Oh, yes, she did.’
‘How do you know, Mademoiselle?’
‘Well—well—I suppose I don’t know. I told her to go and she thanked me—and so, of course, I assumed that she did go.’
‘On the contrary—she remained in the house.’
‘But—how very odd!’
‘You think it