Eighteen
POIROT MAKES A SPEECH
Franklin Clarke arrived at three o’clock on the following afternoon and came straight to the point without beating about the bush.
“M. Poirot,” he said, “I’m not satisfied.”
“No, Mr. Clarke?”
“I’ve no doubt that Crome is a very efficient officer, but, frankly, he puts my back up. That air of his of knowing best! I hinted something of what I had in mind to your friend here when he was down at Churston, but I’ve had all my brother’s affairs to settle up and I haven’t been free until now. My idea is, M. Poirot, that we oughtn’t to let the grass grow under our feet—”
“Just what Hastings is always saying!”
“—but go right ahead. We’ve got to get ready for the next crime.”
“So you think there will be a next crime?”
“Don’t you?”
“Certainly.”
“Very well, then. I want to get organized.”
“Tell me your idea exactly?”
“I propose, M. Poirot, a kind of special legion—to work under your orders—composed of the friends and relatives of the murdered people.”
“Une bonne idée.”
“I’m glad you approve. By putting our heads together I feel we might get at something. Also, when the next warning comes, by being on the spot, one of us might—I don’t say it’s probable—but we might recognize some person as having been near the scene of a previous crime.”
“I see your idea, and I approve, but you must remember, Mr. Clarke, the relations and friends of the other victims are hardly in your sphere of life. They are employed persons and though they might be given a short vacation—”
Franklin Clarke interrupted.
“That’s just it. I’m the only person in a position to foot the bill. Not that I’m particularly well off myself, but my brother died a rich man and it will eventually come to me. I propose, as I say, to enrol a special legion, the members to be paid for their services at the same rate as they get habitually, with, of course, the additional expenses.”
“Who do you propose should form this legion?”
“I’ve been into that. As a matter of fact, I wrote to Miss Megan Barnard—indeed, this is partly her idea. I suggest myself, Miss Barnard, Mr. Donald Fraser, who was engaged to the dead girl. Then there is a niece of the Andover woman—Miss Barnard knows her address. I don’t think the husband would be of any use to us—I hear he’s usually drunk. I also think the Barnards—the father and mother—are a bit old for active campaigning.”
“Nobody else?”
“Well—er—Miss Grey.”
He flushed slightly as he spoke the name.
“Oh! Miss Grey?”
Nobody in the world could put a gentle nuance of irony into a couple of words better than Poirot. About thirty-five years fell away from Franklin Clarke. He looked suddenly like a shy schoolboy.
“Yes. You see, Miss Grey was with my brother for over two years. She knows the countryside and the people round, and everything. I’ve been away for a year and a half.”
Poirot took pity on him and turned the conversation.
“You have been in the East? In China?”
“Yes. I had a kind of roving commission to purchase things for my brother.”
“Very interesting it must have been. Eh bien, Mr. Clarke, I approve very highly of your idea. I was saying to Hastings only yesterday that a rapprochement of the people concerned was needed. It is necessary to pool reminiscences, to compare notes—enfin to talk the thing over—to talk—to talk—and again to talk. Out of some innocent phrase may come enlightenment.”
A few days later the “Special Legion” met at Poirot’s rooms.
As they sat round looking obediently towards Poirot, who had his place, like the chairman at a board meeting, at the head of the table, I myself passed them, as it were, in review, confirming or revising my first impressions of them.
The three girls were all of them striking-looking—the extraordinary fair beauty of Thora Grey, the dark intensity of Megan Barnard, with her strange Red Indian immobility of face—Mary Drower, neatly dressed in a black coat and skirt, with her pretty, intelligent face. Of the two men, Franklin Clarke, big, bronzed and talkative, Donald Fraser, self-contained and quiet, made an interesting contrast to each other.
Poirot, unable, of course, to resist the occasion, made a little speech.
“Mesdames and Messieurs, you know what we are here for. The police are doing their utmost to track down the criminal. I, too, in my different way. But it seems to me a reunion of those who have a personal interest in the matter—and also, I may say, a personal knowledge of the victims—might have results that an outside investigation cannot pretend to attain.
“Here we have three murders—an old woman, a young girl, an elderly man. Only one thing links these three people together—the fact that the same person killed them. That means that the same person was present in three different localities and was seen necessarily by a large number of people. That he is a madman in an advanced stage of mania goes without saying. That his appearance and behaviour give no suggestion of such a fact is equally certain. This person—and though I say he, remember it may be a man or a woman—has all the devilish cunning of insanity. He has succeeded so far in covering his traces completely. The police have certain vague indications but nothing upon which they can act.
“Nevertheless, there must exist indications which are not vague but certain. To take one particular point—this assassin, he
did not arrive at Bexhill at midnight and find conveniently on the beach a young lady whose name began with B—”
“Must we go into that?”
It was Donald Fraser who spoke—the words wrung from him, it seemed, by some inner anguish.
“It is necessary to go into everything, monsieur,” said Poirot, turning to him. “You are here, not to save your feelings by refusing to think of details, but if necessary to harrow them by going into the matter au fond. As I say, it was not chance that provided A B C with a victim in Betty Barnard. There must have been deliberate selection on his part—and therefore premeditation. That is to say, he must have reconnoitred the ground beforehand. There were facts of which he had informed himself—the best hour for the committing of the crime at Andover—the mise en scène at Bexhill—the habits of Sir Carmichael Clarke at Churston. Me, for one, I refuse to believe that there is no indication—no slightest hint—that might help to establish his identity.
“I make the assumption that one—or possibly all of you—knows something that they do not know they know.
“Sooner or later, by reason of your association with one another, something will come to light, will take on a significance as yet undreamed of. It is like the jig-saw puzzle—each of you may have a piece apparently without meaning, but which when reunited may show a definite portion of the picture as a whole.”
“Words!” said Megan Barnard.
“Eh?” Poirot looked at her inquiringly.
“What you’ve been saying. It’s just words. It doesn’t mean anything.”
She spoke with that kind of desperate intensity that I had come to associate with her personality.
“Words, mademoiselle, are only the outer clothing of ideas.”
“Well, I think it’s sense,” said Mary Drower. “I do really, miss. It’s often when you’re talking over things that you seem to see your way clear. Your mind gets made up for you sometimes without your knowing how it’s happened. Talking leads to a lot of things one way and another.”
“If ‘least said is soonest mended,’ it’s the converse we want here,” said Franklin Clarke.
“What do you say, Mr. Fraser?”
“I rather doubt the practical applicability of what you say, M. Poirot.”
“What do you think, Thora?” asked Clarke.
“I think the principle of talking things over is always sound.”
“Suppose,” suggested Poirot, “that you all go over your own remembrances of the time preceding the murder. Perhaps you’ll start, Mr. Clarke.”
“Let me see, on the morning of the day Car was killed I went off sailing. Caught eight mackerel. Lovely out there on the bay. Lunch at home. Irish stew, I remember. Slept in the hammock. Tea. Wrote some letters, missed the post, and drove into Paignton to post them. Then dinner and—I’m not ashamed to say it—reread a book of E. Nesbit’s that I used to love as a kid. Then the telephone rang—”
“No further. Now reflect, Mr. Clarke, did you meet anyone on your way down to the sea in the morning?”
“Lots of people.”
“Can you remember anything about them?”
“Not a damned thing now.”
“Sure?”
“Well—let’s see—I remember a remarkably fat woman—she wore a striped silk dress and I wondered why—had a couple of kids with her—two young men with a fox terrier on the beach throwing stones for it—Oh, yes, a girl with yellow hair squeaking as she bathed—funny how things come back—like a photograph developing.”
“You are a good subject. Now later in the day—the garden—going to the post—”
“The gardener watering…Going to the post? Nearly ran down a bicyclist—silly woman wobbling and shouting to a friend. That’s all, I’m afraid.”
Poirot turned to Thora Grey.
“Miss Grey?”
Thora Grey replied in her clear, positive voice:
“I did correspondence with Sir Carmichael in the morning—saw the housekeeper. I wrote letters and did needlework in the afternoon, I fancy. It is difficult to remember. It was quite an ordinary day. I went to bed early.”
Rather to my surprise, Poirot asked no further. He said:
“Miss Barnard—can you bring back your remembrances of the last time you saw your sister?”
“It would be about a fortnight before her death. I was down for Saturday and Sunday. It was fine weather. We went to Hastings to the swimming pool.”
“What did you talk about most of the time?”
“I gave her a piece of my mind,” said Megan.
“And what else? She conversed of what?”
The girl frowned in an effort of memory.