Third girl - Agatha Christie [81]
Here was the clue. The answer to his perplexity. Here he would find what he needed. The why, the when, the where.
‘Quelle déception,’ said Hercule Poirot, out loud.
He stretched out his hand, and sorted out the neatly typed résumé of a woman’s life. The bald facts of Mrs Charpentier’s existence. A woman of forty-three of good social position, reported to have been a wild girl — two marriages — two divorces — a woman who liked men. A woman who of late years had drunk more than was good for her. A woman who liked parties. A woman who was now reported to go about with men a good many years younger than herself. Living in a flat alone in Borodene Mansions, Poirot could understand and feel the sort of woman she was, and had been, and he could see why such a woman might wish to throw herself out of a high window one early morning when she awoke to despair.
Because she had cancer or thought she had cancer? But at the inquest, the medical evidence had said very definitely that that was not so.
What he wanted was some kind of a link with Norma Restarick. He could not find it. He read through the dry facts again.
Identification had been supplied at the inquest by a solicitor. Louise Carpenter, though she had used a Frenchified form of her surname — Charpentier. Because it went better with her Christian name? Louise? Why was the name Louise familiar? Some casual mention? — a phrase? — his fingers riffled neatly through typewritten pages. Ah! there it was! Just that one reference. The girl for whom Andrew Restarick had left his wife had been a girl named Louise Birell. Someone who had proved to be of little significance in Restarick’s later life. They had quarrelled and parted after about a year. The same pattern, Poirot thought. The same thing obtaining that had probably obtained all through this particular woman’s life. To love a man violently, to break up his home, perhaps, to live with him, and then quarrel with him and leave him. He felt sure, absolutely sure, that this Louise Charpentier was the same Louise.
Even so, how did it tie up with the girl Norma? Had Restarick and Louise Charpentier come together again when he returned to England? Poirot doubted it. Their lives had parted years ago. That they had by any chance come together again seemed unlikely to the point of impossibility! It had been a brief and in reality unimportant infatuation. His present wife would hardly be jealous enough of her husband’s past to wish to push his former mistress out of a window. Ridiculous! The only person so far as he could see who might have been the type to harbour a grudge over many long years, and wish to execute revenge upon the woman who had broken up her home, might have been the first Mrs Restarick. And that sounded wildly impossible also, and anyway, the first Mrs Restarick was dead!
The telephone rang. Poirot did not move. At this particular moment he did not want to be disturbed. He had a feeling of being on a trail of some kind…He wanted to pursue it…The telephone stopped. Good. Miss Lemon would be coping with it.
The door opened and Miss Lemon entered.
‘Mrs Oliver wants to speak to you,’ she said.
Poirot waved a hand. ‘Not now, not now, I pray you! I cannot speak to her now.’
‘She says there is something that she has just thought of — something she forgot to tell you. About a piece of paper — an unfinished letter, which seems to have fallen out of a blotter in a desk in a furniture van. A rather incoherent story,’ added Miss Lemon, allowing a note of disapproval to enter her voice.
Poirot waved more frantically.
‘Not now,’ he urged. ‘I beg of you, not now.’
‘I will tell her you are busy.’
Miss Lemon retreated.
Peace descended once more upon the room. Poirot felt waves of fatigue creeping over him. Too much thinking. One must relax. Yes, one must relax. One must let tension go — in relaxation the pattern would come. He closed his eyes. There were all the components there. He was sure of that now, there was nothing more he could learn from outside. It must come from inside.
And quite suddenly — just as