The Hollow - Agatha Christie [36]
It was clear to Hercule Poirot that several different paths converged here at the swimming pool and that these people had each arrived by a different path.
It was all very mathematical and artificial.
He sighed. Enfin, what did they expect him to do? Was he to pretend to believe in this ‘crime’? Was he to register dismay–alarm? Or was he to bow, to congratulate his hostess: ‘Ah, but it is very charming, what you arrange for me here’?
Really, the whole thing was very stupid–not spirituel at all! Was it not Queen Victoria who had said: ‘We are not amused’? He felt very inclined to say the same: ‘I, Hercule Poirot, am not amused.’
Lady Angkatell had walked towards the body. He followed, conscious of Gudgeon, still breathing hard, behind him. ‘He is not in the secret, that one,’ Hercule Poirot thought to himself. From the other side of the pool, the other two people joined them. They were all quite close now, looking down on that spectacular sprawling figure by the pool’s edge.
And suddenly, with a terrific shock, with that feeling as of blurring on a cinematograph screen before the picture comes into focus, Hercule Poirot realized that this artificially set scene had a point of reality.
For what he was looking down at was, if not a dead, at least a dying man.
It was not red paint dripping off the edge of the concrete, it was blood. This man had been shot, and shot a very short time ago.
He darted a quick glance at the woman who stood there, revolver in hand. Her face was quite blank, without feeling of any kind. She looked dazed and rather stupid.
‘Curious,’ he thought.
Had she, he wondered, drained herself of all emotion, all feeling, in the firing of the shot? Was she now all passion spent, nothing but an exhausted shell? It might be so, he thought.
Then he looked down on the shot man, and he started. For the dying man’s eyes were open. They were intensely blue eyes and they held an expression that Poirot could not read but which he described to himself as a kind of intense awareness.
And suddenly, or so it felt to Poirot, there seemed to be in all this group of people only one person who was really alive–the man who was at the point of death.
Poirot had never received so strong an impression of vivid and intense vitality. The others were pale shadowy figures, actors in a remote drama, but this man was real.
John Christow opened his mouth and spoke. His voice was strong, unsurprised and urgent.
‘Henrietta–’ he said.
Then his eyelids dropped, his head jerked sideways.
Hercule Poirot knelt down, made sure, then rose to his feet, mechanically dusting the knees of his trousers.
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘He is dead.’
II
The picture broke up, wavered, refocused itself. There were individual reactions now–trivial happenings. Poirot was conscious of himself as a kind of magnified eyes and ears–recording. Just that, recording.
He was aware of Lady Angkatell’s hand relaxing its grip on her basket and Gudgeon springing forward, quickly taking it from her.
‘Allow me, my lady.’
Mechanically, quite naturally, Lady Angkatell murmured:
‘Thank you, Gudgeon.’
And then, hesitantly, she said:
‘Gerda–’
The woman holding the revolver stirred for the first time. She looked round at them all. When she spoke, her voice held what seemed to be pure bewilderment.
‘John’s dead,’ she said. ‘John’s dead.’
With a kind of swift authority, the tall young woman with the leaf-brown hair came swiftly to her.
‘Give that to me, Gerda,’ she said.
And dexterously, before Poirot could protest or intervene, she had taken the revolver out of Gerda Christow’s hand.
Poirot took a quick step forward.
‘You should not do that, Mademoiselle–’
The young woman started nervously at the sound of his voice. The revolver slipped through her fingers.