Sad cypress - Agatha Christie [73]
He said:
‘You’ll be quite safe here. No one will bother you.’
Impulsively she laid her hand on his arm.
She said:
‘You – you’ll come and see me?’
‘Of course.’
‘Often?’
Peter Lord said:
‘As often as you want me.’
She said:
‘Please come – very often…’
Chapter 6
Hercule Poirot said:
‘So you see, my friend, the lies people tell are just as useful as the truth?’
Peter Lord said:
‘Did everyone tell you lies?’
Hercule Poirot nodded.
‘Oh, yes! For one reason or another, you comprehend. The one person to whom truth was an obligation and who was sensitive and scrupulous concerning it – that person was the one who puzzled me most!’
Peter Lord murmured:
‘Elinor herself !’
‘Precisely. The evidence pointed to her as the guilty party. And she herself, with her sensitive and fastidious conscience, did nothing to dispel that assumption. Accusing herself of the will, if not the deed, she came very near to abandoning a distasteful and sordid fight and pleading guilty in court to a crime she had not committed.’
Peter Lord breathed a sigh of exasperation.
‘Incredible.’
Poirot shook his head.
‘Not at all. She condemned herself – because she judged herself by a more exacting standard than ordinary humanity applies!’
Peter Lord said thoughtfully:
‘Yes, she’s like that.’
Hercule Poirot went on:
‘From the moment that I started my investigations there was always the strong possibility that Elinor Carlisle was guilty of the crime of which she was accused. But I fulfilled my obligations towards you and I discovered that a fairly strong case could be made out against another person.’
‘Nurse Hopkins?’
‘Not to begin with. Roderick Welman was the first person to attract my attention. In his case, again, we start with a lie. He told me that he left England on July 9th and returned on August 1st. But Nurse Hopkins had mentioned casually that Mary Gerrard had rebuffed Roderick. Welman’s advances both in Maidensford “and again when she saw him in London”. Mary Gerrard, you informed me, went to London on July 10th – a day after Roderick Welman had left England. When then did Mary Gerrard have an interview with Roderick Welman in London? I set my burglarious friend to work, and by an examination of Welman’s passport I discovered that he had been in England from July 25th to the 27th. And he had deliberately lied about it.
‘There had always been that period of time in my mind when the sandwiches were on a plate in the pantry and Elinor Carlisle was down at the Lodge. But all along I realized that in that case Elinor must have been the intended victim, not Mary. Had Roderick Welman any motive for killing Elinor Carlisle? Yes, a very good one. She had made a will leaving him her entire fortune; and by adroit questioning I discovered that Roderick Welman could have made himself acquainted with that fact.’
Peter Lord said:
‘And why did you decide that he was innocent?’
‘Because of one more lie. Such a silly stupidnegligible little lie, too. Nurse Hopkins said that she had scratched her wrist on a rose tree, that she had got a thorn in it. And I went and saw the rose tree, and it had no thorns… So clearly Nurse Hopkins had told a lie – and the lie was so silly and so seemingly pointless that it focused my attention upon her.
‘I began to wonder about Nurse Hopkins. Up till then she had struck me as a perfectly credible witness, consistent throughout, with a strong bias against the accused arising naturally enough out of her affection for the dead girl. But now, with that silly pointless little lie in my mind, I considered Nurse Hopkins and her evidence very carefully, and I realized something that I had not been clever enough to see before. Nurse Hopkins knew something about Mary Gerrard which she was very anxious should come out.’
Peter Lord said in surprise:
‘I thought it was the other way round?’
‘Ostensibly, yes. She gave a very fine performance of someone who knows something and isn’t going to tell! But when I thought it over