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By Root 577 0

and sat down. ‘I see I’ve got to make it all clearer. John loved Veronica desperately. Veronica was, and is, a bitch of the first water. She’s the supreme egoist. Her terms were that John was to chuck everything he cared about and become Miss Veronica Cray’s little tame husband. John broke up the whole thing–quite rightly. But he suffered like hell. His one idea was to marry someone as unlike Veronica as possible. He married Gerda, whom you might describe inelegantly as a first-class chump. That was all very nice and safe, but as anyone could have told him the day came when being married to a chump irritated him. He had various affairs–none of them important. Gerda, of course, never knew about them. But I think, myself, that for fifteen years there has been something wrong with John–something connected with Veronica. He never really got over her. And then, last Saturday, he met her again.’

After a long pause, Poirot recited dreamily:

‘He went out with her that night to see her home and returned to The Hollow at 3 am.’

‘How do you know?’

‘A housemaid had the toothache.’

Henrietta said irrelevantly, ‘Lucy has far too many servants.’

‘But you yourself knew that, Mademoiselle.’

‘Yes.’

‘How did you know?’

Again there was an infinitesimal pause.Then Henrietta replied slowly:

‘I was looking out of my window and saw him come back to the house.’

‘The toothache, Mademoiselle?’

She smiled at him.

‘Quite another kind of ache, M. Poirot.’

She got up and moved towards the door, and Poirot said:

‘I will walk back with you, Mademoiselle.’

They crossed the lane and went through the gate into the chestnut plantation.

Henrietta said:

‘We need not go past the pool. We can go up to the left and along the top path to the flower walk.’

A track led steeply uphill towards the woods. After a while they came to a broader path at right angles across the hillside above the chestnut trees. Presently they came to a bench and Henrietta sat down, Poirot beside her. The woods were above and behind them, and below were the closely planted chestnut groves. Just in front of the seat a curving path led downwards, to where just a glimmer of blue water could be seen.

Poirot watched Henrietta without speaking. Her face had relaxed, the tension had gone. It looked rounder and younger. He realized what she must have looked like as a young girl.

He said very gently at last:

‘Of what are you thinking, Mademoiselle?’

‘Of Ainswick.’

‘What is Ainswick?’

‘Ainswick? It’s a place.’ Almost dreamily, she described Ainswick to him. The white, graceful house, the big magnolia growing up it, the whole set in an amphitheatre of wooded hills.

‘It was your home?’

‘Not really. I lived in Ireland. It was where we came, all of us, for holidays. Edward and Midge and myself. It was Lucy’s home actually. It belonged to her father. After his death it came to Edward.’

‘Not to Sir Henry? But it is he who has the title.’

‘Oh, that’s a KCB,’ she explained. ‘Henry was only a distant cousin.’

‘And after Edward Angkatell, to whom does it go, this Ainswick?’

‘How odd, I’ve never really thought. If Edward doesn’t marry–’ She paused. A shadow passed over her face. Hercule Poirot wondered exactly what thought was passing through her mind.

‘I suppose,’ said Henrietta slowly, ‘it will go to David. So that’s why–’

‘Why what?’

‘Why Lucy asked him here…David and Ainswick?’ She shook her head. ‘They don’t fit somehow.’

Poirot pointed to the path in front of them.

‘It is by that path, Mademoiselle, that you went down to the swimming pool yesterday?’

She gave a quick shiver.

‘No, by the one nearer the house. It was Edward who came this way.’ She turned on him suddenly. ‘Must we talk about it any more? I hate the swimming pool. I even hate The Hollow.’

Poirot murmured:

‘I hate the dreadful hollow behind the little wood;

Its lips in the field above are dabbled with blood-red heath,

The red-ribb’d ledges drip with a silent horror of blood

And Echo there, whatever is ask’d her, answers “Death.” ’

Henrietta turned an astonished face on him.

‘Tennyson,’ said Hercule