The Clocks (11 page)

I
t had been quite a long time since I had visited Whitehaven Mansions. Some years ago it had been an outstanding building of modern flats. Now there were many other more imposing and even more modern blocks of buildings flanking it on either side. Inside, I noted, it had recently had a face-lift. It had been repainted in pale shades of yellow and green.

I went up in the lift and pressed the bell of Number 203. It was opened to me by that impeccable manservant, George. A smile of welcome came to his face.

“Mr. Colin! It's a long time since we've seen you here.”

“Yes, I know. How are you, George?”

“I am in good health, I am thankful to say, sir.”

I lowered my voice. “And how's he?”

George lowered his own voice, though that was hardly necessary since it had been pitched in a most discreet key from the beginning of our conversation.

“I think, sir, that sometimes he gets a little depressed.”

I nodded sympathetically.

“If you will come this way, sir—” He relieved me of my hat.

“Announce me, please, as Mr. Colin Lamb.”

“Very good, sir.” He opened a door and spoke in a clear voice. “Mr. Colin Lamb to see you, sir.”

He drew back to allow me to pass him and I went into the room.

My friend, Hercule Poirot, was sitting in his usual large, square armchair in front of the fireplace. I noted that one bar of the rectangular electric fire glowed red. It was early September, the weather was warm, but Poirot was one of the first men to recognize the autumn chill, and to take precautions against it. On either side of him on the floor was a neat pile of books. More books stood on the table at his left side. At his right hand was a cup from which steam rose. A tisane, I suspected. He was fond of tisanes and often urged them on me. They were nauseating to taste and pungent to smell.

“Don't get up,” I said, but Poirot was already on his feet. He came towards me on twinkling, patent-leather shod feet with outstretched hands.

“Aha, so it is
you,
it is
you,
my friend! My young friend Colin. But why do you call yourself by the name of Lamb? Let me think now. There is a proverb or a saying. Something about mutton dressed as lamb. No. That is what is said of elderly ladies who are trying to appear younger than they are. That does not apply to you. Aha, I have it. You are a wolf in sheep's clothing. Is that it?”

“Not even that,” I said. “It's just that in my line of business I thought my own name might be rather a mistake, that it might be connected too much with my old man. Hence Lamb. Short, simple, easily remembered. Suiting, I flatter myself, my personality.”

“Of that I cannot be sure,” said Poirot. “And how is my good friend, your father?”

“The old man's fine,” I said. “Very busy with his holly-hocks—or is it chrysanthemums? The seasons go by so fast I can never remember what it is at the moment.”

“He busies himself then, with the horticulture?”

“Everyone seems to come to that in the end,” I said.

“Not me,” said Hercule Poirot. “Once the vegetable marrows, yes—but never again. If you want the best flowers, why not go to the florist's shop? I thought the good Superintendent was going to write his memoirs?”

“He started,” I said, “but he found that so much would have to be left out that he finally came to the conclusion that what was left in would be so unbearably tame as not to be worth writing.”

“One has to have the discretion, yes. It is unfortunate,” said Poirot, “because your father could tell some very interesting things. I have much admiration for him. I always had. You know, his methods were to me very interesting. He was so straightforward. He used the obvious as no man has used it before. He would set the trap, the very obvious trap and the people he wished to catch would say ‘it is too obvious, that. It cannot be true' and so they fell into it!”

I laughed. “Well,” I said, “it's not the fashion nowadays for sons to admire their fathers. Most of them seem to sit down, venom in their pens, and remember all the dirty things they can and put them down with obvious satisfaction. But personally, I've got enormous respect for my old man. I hope I'll even be as good as he was. Not that I'm exactly in his line of business, of course.”

“But related to it,” said Poirot. “Closely related to it, though
you have to work behind the scenes in a way that he did not.” He coughed delicately. “I think I am to congratulate you on having had a rather spectacular success lately. Is it not so? The
affaire Larkin.
”

“It's all right so far as it goes,” I said. “But there's a good deal more that I'd like to have, just to round it off properly. Still, that isn't really what I came here to talk to you about.”

“Of course not, of course not,” said Poirot. He waved me to a chair and offered me some tisane, which I instantly refused.

George entered at the apposite moment with a whisky decanter, a glass and a siphon which he placed at my elbow.

“And what are you doing with yourself these days?” I asked Poirot.

Casting a look at the various books around him I said: “It looks as though you are doing a little research?”

Poirot sighed. “You may call it that. Yes, perhaps in a way it is true. Lately I have felt very badly the need for a problem. It does not matter, I said to myself, what the problem is. It can be like the good Sherlock Holmes, the depth at which the parsley has sunk in the butter. All that matters is that there should
be
a problem. It is not the muscles I need to exercise, you see, it is the cells of the brain.”

“Just a question of keeping fit. I understand.”

“As you say.” He sighed. “But problems,
mon cher,
are not so easy to come by. It is true that last Thursday one presented itself to me. The unwarranted appearance of three pieces of dried orange peel in my umbrella stand. How did they come there? How
could
they have come there? I do not eat oranges myself. George would
never put old pieces of orange peel in the umbrella stand. Nor is a visitor likely to bring with him three pieces of orange peel. Yes, it was quite a problem.”

“And you solved it?”

“I solved it,” said Poirot.

He spoke with more melancholy than pride.

“It was not in the end very interesting. A question of a
remplacement
of the usual cleaning woman and the new one brought with her, strictly against orders, one of her children. Although it does not sound interesting, nevertheless it needed a steady penetration of lies, camouflage and all the rest of it. It was satisfactory, shall we say, but not important.”

“Disappointing,” I suggested.

“
Enfin,
” said Poirot, “I am modest. But one should not need to use a rapier to cut the string of a parcel.”

I shook my head in a solemn manner. Poirot continued, “I have occupied myself of late in reading various real life unsolved mysteries. I apply to them my own solutions.”

“You mean cases like the Bravo case, Adelaide Bartlett and all the rest of them?”

“Exactly. But it was in a way too easy. There is no doubt whatever in my own mind as to who murdered Charles Bravo. The companion may have been involved, but she was certainly not the moving spirit in the matter. Then there was that unfortunate adolescent, Constance Kent. The true motive that lay behind her strangling of the small brother whom she undoubtedly loved has always been a puzzle. But not to me. It was clear as soon as I read about the case. As for Lizzie Borden, one wishes only that one could put
a few necessary questions to various people concerned. I am fairly sure in my own mind of what the answers would be. Alas, they are all by now dead, I fear.”

I thought to myself, as so often before, that modesty was certainly not Hercule Poirot's strong point.

“And what did I do next?” continued Poirot.

I guessed that for some time now he had had no one much to talk to and was enjoying the sound of his own voice.

“From real life I turned to fiction. You see me here with various examples of criminal fiction at my right hand and my left. I have been working backwards. Here—” he picked up the volume that he had laid on the arm of his chair when I entered, “—here, my dear Colin, is
The Leavenworth Case.
” He handed the book to me.

“That's going back quite a long time,” I said. “I believe my father mentioned that he read it as a boy. I believe I once read it myself. It must seem rather old-fashioned now.”

“It is admirable,” said Poirot. “One savours its period atmosphere, its studied and deliberate melodrama. Those rich and lavish descriptions of the golden beauty of Eleanor, the moonlight beauty of Mary!”

“I must read it again,” I said. “I'd forgotten the parts about the beautiful girls.”

“And there is the maidservant, Hannah, so true to type, and the murderer, an excellent psychological study.”

I perceived that I had let myself in for a lecture. I composed myself to listen.

“Then we will take the
Adventures of Arsene Lupin,
” Poirot went on. “How fantastic, how unreal. And yet what vitality there is in
them, what vigour, what life! They are preposterous, but they have panache. There is humour, too.”

He laid down the
Adventures of Arsene Lupin
and picked up another book. “And there is
The Mystery of the Yellow Room.
That—ah, that is really a
classic!
I approve of it from start to finish. Such a logical approach! There were criticisms of it, I remember, which said that it was unfair. But it is not unfair, my dear Colin. No, no. Very nearly so, perhaps, but not quite. There is the hair's breadth of difference. No. All through there is truth, concealed with a careful and cunning use of words. Everything should be clear at that supreme moment when the men meet at the angle of three corridors.” He laid it down reverently. “Definitely a masterpiece, and, I gather, almost forgotten nowadays.”

Poirot skipped twenty years or so, to approach the works of somewhat later authors.

“I have read also,” he said, “some of the early works of Mrs. Ariadne Oliver. She is by way of being a friend of mine, and of yours, I think. I do not wholly approve of her works, mind you. The happenings in them are highly improbable. The long arm of coincidence is far too freely employed. And, being young at the time, she was foolish enough to make her detective a Finn, and it is clear that she knows nothing about Finns or Finland except possibly the works of Sibelius. Still, she has an original habit of mind, she makes an occasional shrewd deduction, and of later years she has learnt a good deal about things which she did not know before. Police procedure for instance. She is also now a little more reliable on the subject of firearms. What was even more needed, she has possibly acquired a solicitor or a barrister friend who has put her right on certain points of the law.”

He laid aside Mrs. Ariadne Oliver and picked up another book.

“Now here is Mr. Cyril Quain. Ah, he is a master, Mr. Quain, of the alibi.”

“He's a deadly dull writer if I remember rightly,” I said.

“It is true,” said Poirot, “that nothing particularly thrilling happens in his books. There is a corpse, of course. Occasionally more than one. But the whole point is always the alibi, the railway timetable, the bus routes, the plans of the cross-country roads. I confess I enjoy this intricate, this elaborate use of the alibi. I enjoy trying to catch Mr. Cyril Quain out.”

“And I suppose you always succeed,” I said.

Poirot was honest.

“Not always,” he admitted. “No, not always. Of course, after a time one realizes that one book of his is almost exactly like another. The alibis resemble each other every time, even though they are not exactly the same. You know,
mon cher
Colin, I imagine this Cyril Quain sitting in his room, smoking his pipe as he is represented to do in his photographs, sitting there with around him the A.B.C.s, the continental Bradshaws, the airline brochures, the timetables of every kind. Even the movements of liners. Say what you will, Colin, there is order and method in Mr. Cyril Quain.”

He laid Mr. Quain down and picked up another book.

“Now here is Mr. Garry Gregson, a prodigious writer of thrillers. He has written at least sixty-four, I understand. He is almost the exact opposite of Mr. Quain. In Mr. Quain's books nothing much happens, in Garry Gregson's far too many things happen. They happen implausibly and in mass confusion. They are all highly coloured. It is melodrama stirred up with a stick. Bloodshed—bodies—clues—thrills piled up and bulging over. All lurid, all very
unlike life. He is not quite, as you would say, my cup of tea. He is, in fact, not a cup of tea at all. He is more like one of these American cocktails of the more obscure kind, whose ingredients are highly suspect.”

Poirot paused, sighed and resumed his lecture. “Then we turn to America.” He plucked a book from the left-hand pile. “Florence Elks, now. There is order and method there, colourful happenings, yes, but plenty of point in them. Gay and alive. She has wit, this lady, though perhaps, like so many American writers, a little too obsessed with drink. I am, as you know,
mon ami,
a connoisseur of wine. A claret or a burgundy introduced into a story, with its vintage and date properly authenticated, I always find pleasing. But the exact amount of rye and bourbon that are consumed on every other page by the detective in an American thriller do not seem to me interesting at all. Whether he drinks a pint or a half-pint which he takes from his collar drawer does not seem to me really to affect the action of the story in any way. This drink motive in American books is very much what King Charles's head was to poor Mr. Dick when he tried to write his memoirs. Impossible to keep it out.”