The Clocks - Agatha Christie [93]
Poirot paused and looked at me. I bowed.
“Enter our young hero,” I said.
“You see,” Poirot pointed out. “Even you cannot resist a farcical melodramatic tone when you speak of it. The whole thing is melodramatic, fantastic and completely unreal. It is the kind of thing that could occur in the writings of such people as Garry Gregson, for instance. I may mention that when my young friend arrived with this tale I was embarking on a course of thriller writers who had plied their craft over the last sixty years. Most interesting. One comes almost to regard actual crimes in the light of fiction. That is to say that if I observe that a dog has not barked when he should bark, I say to myself, ‘Ha! A Sherlock Holmes crime!’ Similarly, if the corpse is found in a sealed room, naturally I say, ‘Ha! A Dickson Carr case!’ Then there is my friend Mrs. Oliver. If I were to find—but I will say no more. You catch my meaning? So here is the setting of a crime in such wildly improbable circumstances that one feels at once, ‘This book is not true to life. All this is quite unreal.’ But alas, that will not do here, for this is real. It happened. That gives one to think furiously, does it not?”
Hardcastle would not have put it like that, but he fully agreed with the sentiment, and nodded vigorously. Poirot went on:
“It is, as it were, the opposite of Chesterton’s, ‘Where would you hide a leaf? In a forest. Where would you hide a pebble? On a beach.’ Here there is excess, fantasy, melodrama! When I say to myself in imitation of Chesterton, ‘Where does a middle-aged woman hide her fading beauty?’ I do not reply, ‘Amongst other faded middle-aged faces.’ Not at all. She hides it under makeup, under rouge and mascara, with handsome furs wrapped round her and with jewels round her neck and hanging in her ears. You follow me?”
“Well—” said the inspector, disguising the fact that he didn’t.
“Because then, you see, people will look at the furs and the jewels and the coiffure and the haute couture, and they will not observe what the woman herself is like at all! So I say to myself—and I say to my friend Colin—Since this murder has so many fantastic trappings to distract one it must really be very simple. Did I not?”
“You did,” I said. “But I still don’t see how you can possibly be right.”
“For that you must wait. So, then, we discard the trappings of the crime and we go to the essentials. A man has been killed. Why has he been killed? And who is he? The answer to the first question will obviously depend on the answer to the second. And until you get the right answer to these two questions you cannot possibly proceed. He could be a blackmailer, or a confidence trickster, or somebody’s husband whose existence was obnoxious or dangerous to his wife. He could be one of a dozen things. The more I heard, the more everybody seems to agree that he looked a perfectly ordinary, well-to-do, reputable elderly man. And suddenly I think to myself, ‘You say this should be a simple crime? Very well, make it so. Let this man be exactly what he seems—a well-to-do respectable elderly man.’” He looked at the inspector. “You see?”
“Well—” said the inspector again, and paused politely.
“So here is someone, an ordinary, pleasant, elderly man whose removal is necessary to someone. To whom? And here at last we can narrow the field a little. There is local knowledge—of Miss Pebmarsh and her habits, of the Cavendish Secretarial Bureau, of a girl working there called Sheila Webb. And so I say to my friend Colin: ‘The neighbours. Converse with them.