Sad cypress - Agatha Christie [36]
‘Probably. I don’t know much about it.’
‘Who would know?’
Peter Lord grinned.
‘I’d better put you on to Nurse Hopkins. She’s the town crier. She knows everything that goes on in Maidensford.’
‘I was going to ask you to give me your impressions of the two nurses.’
‘Well, O’Brien’s Irish, good nurse, competent, a bit silly, could be spiteful, a bit of a liar – the imaginative kind that’s not so much deceitful, but just has to make a good story out of everything.’
Poirot nodded.
‘Hopkins is a sensible, shrewd, middle-aged woman, quite kindly and competent, but a sight too much interested in other people’s business!’
‘If there had been trouble over some young man in the village, would Nurse Hopkins know about it?’
‘You bet!’
He added slowly:
‘All the same, I don’t believe there can be anything very obvious in that line. Mary hadn’t been home long. She’d been away in Germany for two years.’
‘She was twenty-one?’
‘Yes.’
‘There may be some German complication.’
Peter Lord’s face brightened.
He said eagerly:
‘You mean that some German fellow may have had it in for her? He may have followed her over here, waited his time, and finally achieved his object?’
‘It sounds a little melodramatic,’ said Hercule Poirot doubtfully.
‘But it’s possible?’
‘Not very probable, though.’
Peter Lord said:
‘I don’t agree. Someone might get all het up about the girl, and see red when she turned him down. He may have fancied she treated him badly. It’s an idea.’
‘It is an idea, yes,’ said Hercule Poirot, but his tone was not encouraging.
Peter Lord said pleadingly:
‘Go on, M. Poirot.’
‘You want me, I see, to be the conjurer. To take out of the empty hat rabbit after rabbit.’
‘You can put it that way if you like.’
‘There is another possibility,’ said Hercule Poirot.
‘Go on.’
‘Someone abstracted a tube of morphine from Nurse Hopkins’ case that evening in June. Suppose Mary Gerrard saw the person who did it?’
‘She would have said so.’
‘No, no, mon cher. Be reasonable. If Elinor Carlisle, or Roderick Welman, or Nurse O’Brien, or even any of the servants, were to open that case and abstract a little glass tube, what would anyone think? Simply that the person in question had been sent by the nurse to fetch something from it. The matter would pass straight out of Mary Gerrard’s mind again, but it is possible that, later, she might recollect the fact and might mention it casually to the person in question – oh, without the least suspicion in the world. But to the person guilty of the murder of Mrs Welman, imagine the effect of that remark! Mary had seen: Mary must be silenced at all costs! I can assure you, my friend, that anyone who has once committed a murder finds it only too easy to commit another!’
Peter Lord said with a frown:
‘I’ve believed all along that Mrs Welman took the stuff herself…’
‘But she was paralysed – helpless – she had just had a second stroke.’
‘Oh, I know. My idea was that, having got hold of morphine somehow or other, she kept it by her in a receptacle close at hand.’
‘But in that case she must have got hold of the morphine before her second attack and the nurse missed it afterwards.’
‘Hopkins may only have missed the morphine that morning. It might have been taken a couple of days before, and she hadn’t noticed it.’
‘How would the old lady have got hold of it?’
‘I don’t know. Bribed a servant, perhaps. If so, that servant’s never going to tell.’
‘You don’t think either of the nurses were bribable?’
Lord shook his head.
‘Not on your life! To begin with, they’re both very strict about their professional ethics – and in addition they’d be scared to death to do such a thing. They’d know the danger to themselves.’
Poirot said:
‘That is so.’
He added thoughtfully:
‘It looks, does it not, as though we return to our muttons? Who is the most likely person to have taken that morphine tube? Elinor Carlisle. We may say that she wished to make sure of inheriting a large fortune. We may be more generous