Third girl - Agatha Christie [59]
‘How can you know these things?’
‘Because I have employed someone to check the facts. I beg of you, Madame, do not jump to impossible conclusions in this rash way.’
‘I thought I was being rather clever,’ said Mrs Oliver obstinately. ‘If I was making it happen in a book that’s how I would arrange it. And I’d make the child have done it. Not meaning to, but just by her father telling her to give her mother a drink made of pounded up box hedge.’
‘Non d’un nom d’um nom!’ said Poirot.
‘All right,’ said Mrs Oliver. ‘You tell it your way.’
‘Alas, I have nothing to tell. I look for a murder and I do not find one.’
‘Not after Mary Restarick is ill and goes to hospital and gets better and comes back and is ill again, and if they looked they’d probably find arsenic or something hidden away by Norma somewhere.’
‘That is exactly what they did find.’
‘Well, really, M. Poirot, what more do you want?’
‘I want you to pay some attention to the meaning of language. That girl said to me the same thing as she had said to my manservant, Georges. She did not say on either occasion “I have tried to kill someone” or “I have tried to kill my stepmother.” She spoke each time of a deed that had been done, something that had already happened. Definitely happened. In the past tense.’
‘I give up,’ said Mrs Oliver. ‘You just won’t believe that Norma tried to kill her stepmother.’
‘Yes, I believe it is perfectly possible that Norma may have tried to kill her stepmother. I think it is probably what happened — it is in accord psychologically. With her distraught frame of mind. But it is not proved. Anyone, remember, could have hidden a preparation of arsenic amongst Norma’s things. It could even have been put there by the husband.’
‘You always seem to think that husbands are the ones who kill their wives,’ said Mrs Oliver.
‘A husband is usually the most likely person,’ said Hercule Poirot, ‘so one considers him first. It could have been the girl, Norma, or it could have been one of the servants, or it could have been the au pair girl, or it could have been old Sir Roderick. Or it could have been Mrs Restarick herself.’
‘Nonsense. Why?’
‘There could be reasons. Rather far-fetched reasons, but not beyond the bounds of belief.’
‘Really, Monsieur Poirot, you can’t suspect everybody.’
‘Mais oui, that is just what I can do. I suspect everybody. First I suspect, then I look for reasons.’
‘And what reason would that poor foreign child have?’
‘It might depend on what she is doing in that house, and what her reasons are for coming to England and a good deal more beside.’
‘You’re really crazy.’
‘Or it could have been the boy David. Your Peacock.’
‘Much too far-fetched. David wasn’t there. He’s never been near the house.’
‘Oh yes he has. He was wandering about its corridors the day I went there.’
‘But not putting poison in Norma’s room.’
‘How do you know?’
‘But she and that awful boy are in love with each other.’
‘They appear to be so, I admit.’
‘You always want to make everything difficult,’ complained Mrs Oliver.
‘Not at all. Things have been made difficult for me. I need information and there is only one person who can give me information. And she has disappeared.’
‘You mean Norma.’
‘Yes, I mean Norma.’
‘But she hasn’t disappeared. We found her, you and I.’
‘She walked out of that café and once more she has disappeared.’
‘And you let her go?’ Mrs Oliver’s voice quivered with reproach.
‘Alas!’
‘You let her go? You didn’t even try to find her again?’
‘I did not say I had not tried to find her.’
‘But so far you have not succeeded. M. Poirot, I really am disappointed with you.’
‘There is a pattern,’ said Hercule Poirot almost dreamily. ‘Yes, there is a pattern. But because there is one factor missing, the pattern does not make sense. You see that, don’t you?’
‘No,’ said Mrs Oliver, whose head was aching.
Poirot continued to talk more to himself than his listener. If Mrs Oliver could be said to be listening. She was highly indignant with Poirot and she thought to herself that the Restarick girl had been