Third girl - Agatha Christie [93]
‘I can’t think where Mary can be. I’ve rung up. Claudia has left messages in every place we can think of. By now she ought to have rung up at least from somewhere.’
‘Perhaps we have the wrong idea,’ said Hercule Poirot. ‘Perhaps Madame is at least partly here already — in a manner of speaking.’
‘What on earth do you mean?’ shouted Restarick angrily.
‘Might I trouble you, chère Madame?’
Poirot leaned towards Mrs Oliver. Mrs Oliver stared.
‘The parcel I entrusted to you —’
‘Oh.’ Mrs Oliver dived into her shopping bag. She handed the black folder to him.
He heard a sharply indrawn breath near him, but did not turn his head.
He shook off the wrappings delicately and held up — a wig of bouffant golden hair.
‘Mrs Restarick is not here,’ he said, ‘but her wig is. Interesting.’
‘Where the devil did you get that, Poirot?’ asked Neele.
‘From the overnight bag of Miss Frances Cary from which she had as yet no opportunity of removing it. Shall we see how it becomes her?’
With a single deft movement, he swept aside the black hair that masked Frances’s face so effectively. Crowned with a golden aureole before she could defend herself, she glared at them.
Mrs Oliver exclaimed:
‘Good gracious — it is Mary Restarick.’
Frances was twisting like an angry snake. Restarick jumped from his seat to come to her — but Neele’s strong grip restrained him.
‘No. We don’t want any violence from you. The game’s up, you know, Mr Restarick — or shall I call you Robert Orwell —’
A stream of profanity came from the man’s lips. Frances’s voice was raised sharply:
‘Shut up, you damned fool!’ she said.
II
Poirot had abandoned his trophy, the wig. He had gone to Norma, and taken her hand gently in his.
‘Your ordeal is over, my child. The victim will not be sacrificed. You are neither mad, nor have you killed anyone. There are two cruel and heartless creatures who plotted against you, with cunningly administered drugs, with lies, doing their best to drive you either to suicide or to belief in your own guilt and madness.’
Norma was staring with horror at the other plotter.
‘My father. My father? He could think of doing that to me. His daughter. My father who loved me —’
‘Not your father, mon enfant — a man who came here after your father’s death, to impersonate him and lay hands on an enormous fortune. Only one person was likely to recognise him — or rather to recognise that this man was not Andrew Restarick — the woman who had been Andrew Restarick’s mistress fifteen years ago.’
Chapter 25
Four people sat in Poirot’s room. Poirot in his square chair was drinking a glass of sirop de cassis. Norma and Mrs Oliver sat on the sofa. Mrs Oliver was looking particularly festive in unbecoming apple green brocade, surmounted by one of her more painstaking coiffures. Dr Stillingfleet was sprawled out in a chair with his long legs stretched out, so that they seemed to reach half across the room.
‘Now then, there are lots of things I want to know,’ said Mrs Oliver. Her voice was accusatory.
Poirot hastened to pour oil on troubled waters.
‘But, chère Madame, consider. What I owe to you I can hardly express. All, but all my good ideas were suggested to me by you.’
Mrs Oliver looked at him doubtfully.
‘Was it not you who introduced to me the phrase “Third Girl”? It is there that I started — and there, too, that I ended — at the third girl of three living in a flat. Norma was always technically, I suppose, the Third Girl — but when I looked at things the right way round it all fell into place. The missing answer, the lost piece of the puzzle, every time it was the same — the third girl.
‘It was always, if you comprehend me, the person who was not there. She was a name to me, no more.’
‘I wonder I never connected her with Mary Restarick,’ said Mrs Oliver. ‘I’d seen Mary Restarick at Crosshedges, talked to her. Of course the first time I saw Frances Cary, she had black hair hanging all over her face. That would have put anyone