Five Little Pigs (18 page)

This, then, is what happened.

I met Mr. Meredith Blake as I said, and I ran down the path again as quickly as I could. I was wearing sandshoes and I have always been light on my feet. I came to the open Battery door, and this is what I saw.

Mrs. Crale was busily polishing the beer bottle on the table with her handkerchief. Having done so, she took her dead husband's hand and pressed the fingers of it on the beer bottle. All the time she was listening and on the alert. It was the fear I saw on her face that told me the truth.

I knew then, beyond any possible doubt, that Caroline Crale had poisoned her husband. And I, for one, do not blame her. He drove her to a point beyond human endurance, and he brought his fate upon himself.

I never mentioned the incident to Mrs. Crale and she never knew that I had seen it.

Caroline Crale's daughter must not bolster up her life with a
lie. However much it may pain her to know the truth, truth is the only thing that matters.

Tell her, from me, that her mother is not to be judged. She was driven beyond what a loving woman can endure. It is for her daughter to understand and forgive.

 

End of Cecilia Williams's Narrative.

Dear Mr. Poirot,

I am keeping my promise to you and have written down all I can remember of that terrible time sixteen years ago. But it was not until I started that I realized how very little I
did
remember. Until the thing actually happened, you see, there is nothing to fix anything by.

I've just a vague memory of summer days—and isolated incidents, but I couldn't say for certain what summer they happened even! Amyas's death was just a thunderclap coming out of the blue. I'd had no warning of it, and I seem to have missed everything that led up to it.

I've been trying to think whether that was to be expected or not. Are most girls of fifteen as blind and deaf and obtuse as I seem to have been? Perhaps they are. I was quick, I think, to gauge people's moods, but I never bothered my head about what
caused
those moods.

Besides, just at that time, I'd suddenly begun to discover the
intoxication of words. Things that I read, scraps of poetry—of Shakespeare—would echo in my head. I remember now walking along the kitchen garden path repeating to myself in a kind of ecstatic delirium “under the glassy green translucent wave”…It was just so lovely I had to say it over and over again.

And mixed up with these new discoveries and excitements there were all the things I'd liked doing ever since I could remember. Swimming and climbing trees and eating fruit and playing tricks on the stable boy and feeding the horses.

Caroline and Amyas I took for granted. They were the central figures in my world, but I never
thought
about them or about their affairs or what they thought and felt.

I didn't notice Elsa Greer's coming particularly. I thought she was stupid and I didn't even think she was good-looking. I accepted her as someone rich but tiresome, whom Amyas was painting.

Actually, the very first intimation I had of the whole thing was what I overheard from the terrace where I had escaped after lunch one day—Elsa said she was going to marry Amyas! It struck me as just ridiculous. I remember tackling Amyas about it. In the garden at Handcross it was. I said to him:

“Why does Elsa say she's going to marry you? She couldn't. People can't have two wives—it's bigamy and they go to prison.”

Amyas got very angry and said: “How the devil did you hear that?”

I said I'd heard it through the library window.

He was angrier than ever then, and said it was high time I went to school and got out of the habit of eavesdropping.

I still remember the resentment I felt when he said that. Because it was so
unfair
. Absolutely and utterly unfair.

I stammered out angrily that I hadn't been listening—and anyhow, I said, why did Elsa say a silly thing like that?

Amyas said it was just a joke.

That ought to have satisfied me. It did—almost. But not quite.

I said to Elsa when we were on the way back: “I asked Amyas what you meant when you said you were going to marry him, and he said it was just a joke.”

I felt that ought to snub her. But she only smiled.

I didn't like that smile of hers. I went up to Caroline's room. It was when she was dressing for dinner. I asked her then outright if it were possible for Amyas to marry Elsa.

I remember Caroline's answer as though I heard it now. She must have spoken with great emphasis.

“Amyas will only marry Elsa after I am dead,” she said.

That reassured me completely. Death seemed ages away from us all. Nevertheless, I was still very sore with Amyas about what he had said in the afternoon, and I went for him violently all through dinner, and I remember we had a real flaming row, and I rushed out of the room and went up to bed and howled myself to sleep.

I don't remember much about the afternoon at Meredith Blake's, although I
do
remember his reading aloud the passage from the Phaedo describing Socrates' death. I had never heard it before. I thought it was the loveliest, most beautiful thing I had ever heard. I remember that—but I don't remember when it was. As far as I can recall now, it might have been any time that summer.

I don't remember anything that happened the next morning either, though I have thought and thought. I've a vague feeling that I must have bathed, and I think I remember being made to mend something.

But it's all very vague and dim till the time when Meredith came panting up the path from the terrace, and his face was all grey and queer. I remember a coffee cup falling off the table and being broken—Elsa did that. And I remember her running—suddenly running for all she was worth down the path—and the awful look there was on her face.

I kept saying to myself: “Amyas is dead.” But it just didn't seem real.

I remember Dr. Faussett coming and his grave face. Miss Williams was busy looking after Caroline. I wandered about rather forlornly, getting in people's way. I had a nasty sick feeling. They wouldn't let me go down and see Amyas. But by and by the police came and wrote down things in notebooks, and presently they brought his body up on a stretcher covered with a cloth.

Miss Williams took me into Caroline's room later. Caroline was on the sofa. She looked very white and ill.

She kissed me and said she wanted me to go away as soon as I could, and it was all horrible, but I wasn't to worry or think about it any more than I could help. I was to join Carla at Lady Tressillian's because this house was to be kept as empty as possible.

I clung to Caroline and said I didn't want to go away. I wanted to stay with her. She said she knew I did, but it was better for me to go away and would take a lot of worry off her mind. And Miss Williams chipped in and said:

“The best way you can help your sister, Angela, is to do what she wants you to do without making a fuss about it.”

So I said I would do whatever Caroline wished. And Caroline said: “That's my darling Angela.” And she hugged me and said there was nothing to worry about, and to talk about it and think about it all as little as possible.

I had to go down and talk to a Police Superintendent. He was very kind, asked me when I had last seen Amyas and a lot of other questions which seemed to me quite pointless at the time, but which, of course, I see the point of now. He satisfied himself that there was nothing that I could tell him which he hadn't already heard from the others. So he told Miss Williams that he saw no objection to my going over to Ferriby Grange to Lady Tressillian's.

I went there, and Lady Tressillian was very kind to me. But of course I soon had to know the truth. They arrested Caroline almost at once. I was so horrified and dumbfounded that I became quite ill.

I heard afterwards that Caroline was terribly worried about me. It was at her insistence that I was sent out of England before the trial came on. But that I have told you already.

As you see, what I have to put down is pitiably meagre. Since talking to you I have gone over the little I remember painstakingly, racking my memory for details of this or that person's expression or reaction. I can remember nothing consistent with guilt. Elsa's frenzy. Meredith's grey worried face. Philip's grief and fury—they all seem natural enough. I suppose, though, someone
could
have been playing a part?

I only know this,
Caroline did not do it
.

I am quite certain on this point, and always shall be, but I have no evidence to offer except my own intimate knowledge of her character.

 

End of Angela Warren's Narrative.

C
arla Lemarchant looked up. Her eyes were full of fatigue and pain. She pushed back the hair from her forehead in a tired gesture.

She said:

“It's so bewildering all this.” She touched the pile of manuscripts. “Because the angle's different every time! Everybody sees my mother differently. But the facts are the same. Everyone agrees on the facts.”

“It has discouraged you, reading them?”

“Yes. Hasn't it discouraged you?”

“No, I have found those documents very valuable—very informative.”

Poirot spoke slowly and reflectively.

Carla said:

“I wish I'd never read them!”

Poirot looked across at her.

“Ah—so it makes you feel that way?”

Carla said bitterly:

“They all think she did it—all of them except Aunt Angela and what she thinks doesn't count. She hasn't got any reason for it. She's just one of those loyal people who'll stick to a thing through thick and thin. She just goes on saying: “Caroline couldn't have done it.”

“It strikes you like that?”

“How else should it strike me? I've realized, you know, that if my mother didn't do it, then one of these five people must have done it. I've even had theories as to why.”

“Ah! That is interesting. Tell me.”

“Oh, they were only theories. Philip Blake, for instance. He's a stockbroker, he was my father's best friend—probably my father trusted him. And artists are usually careless about money matters. Perhaps Philip Blake was in a jam and used my father's money. He may have got my father to sign something. Then the whole thing may have been on the point of coming out—and only my father's death could have saved him. That's one of the things I thought of.”

“Not badly imagined at all. What else?”

“Well, there's Elsa. Philip Blake says here she had her head screwed on too well to meddle with poison, but I don't think that's true at all. Supposing my mother had gone to her and told her that she wouldn't divorce my father—that nothing would induce her to divorce him. You may say what you like, but I think Elsa had a bourgeois mind—she wanted to be respectably married. I think that then Elsa would have been perfectly capable of pinching the stuff—she had just as good a chance that afternoon—and might have tried to get my mother out of the way by poisoning her. I think that would be quite
like
Elsa. And then, possibly, by some awful accident, Amyas got the stuff instead of Caroline.”

“Again it is not badly imagined. What else?”

Carla said slowly:

“Well, I thought—perhaps—
Meredith!
”

“Ah—Meredith Blake?”

“Yes. You see, he sounds to me just the sort of person who would do a murder. I mean, he was the slow dithering one the others laughed at, and underneath, perhaps, he resented that. Then my father married the girl he wanted to marry. And my father was successful and rich. And he did make all those poisons! Perhaps he really made them because he liked the idea of being able to kill someone one day. He had to call attention to the stuff being taken, so as to divert suspicion from himself. But he himself was far the most likely person to have taken it. He might, even, have liked getting Caroline hanged—because she turned him down long ago. I think, you know, it's rather fishy what he says in his account of it all—how people do things that aren't characteristic of them. Supposing he meant
himself
when he wrote that?”

Hercule Poirot said:

“You are at least right in this—not to take what has been written down as necessarily a true narrative. What has been written may have been written deliberately to mislead.”

“Oh, I know. I've kept that in mind.”

“Any other ideas?”

Carla said slowly:

“I wondered—before I'd read this—about Miss Williams. She lost her job, you see, when Angela went to school. And if Amyas had died suddenly, Angela probably wouldn't have gone after all. I mean if it passed off as a natural death—which it easily might have done, I suppose, if Meredith hadn't missed the coniine. I read up coniine, and it hasn't got any distinctive postmortem appearances.
It might have been thought to be sunstroke. I know that just losing a job doesn't sound a very adequate motive for murder. But murders have been committed again and again for what seem ridiculously inadequate motives. Tiny sums of money sometimes. And a middle-aged, perhaps rather incompetent governess might have got the wind up and just seen no future ahead of her.

“As I say, that's what I thought before I read this. But Miss Williams doesn't sound like that at all. She doesn't sound in the least incompetent—”

“Not at all. She is still a very efficient and intelligent woman.”

“I know. One can see that. And she sounds absolutely trustworthy too. That's what has upset me really. Oh,
you
know—
you
understand. You don't mind, of course. All along you've made it clear it was the truth you wanted. I suppose now we've
got
the truth! Miss Williams is quite right. One must accept truth. It's no good basing your life on a lie because it's what you want to believe. All right then—I can take it! My mother wasn't innocent! She wrote me that letter because she was weak and unhappy and wanted to spare me. I don't judge her. Perhaps I should feel like that too. I don't know what prison does to you. And I don't blame her either—if she felt so desperately about my father, I suppose she couldn't help herself. But I don't blame my father altogether either. I understand—just a little—how
he
felt. So alive—and so full of wanting everything…He couldn't help it—he was made that way. And he was a great painter. I think that excuses a lot.”

She turned her flushed excited face to Hecule Poirot with her chin raised defiantly.

Hercule Poirot said:

“So—you are satisfied?”

“Satisfied?” said Carla Lemarchant. Her voice broke on the word.

Poirot leant forward and patted her paternally on the shoulder.

“Listen,” he said. “You give up the fight at the moment when it is most worth fighting. At the moment when I, Hercule Poirot, have a very good idea of what really happened.”

Carla stared at him. She said:

“Miss Williams loved my mother. She saw her—with her own eyes—faking that suicide evidence. If you believe what she says—”

Hercule Poirot got up. He said:

“Mademoiselle, because Cecilia Williams says she saw your mother faking Amyas Crale's fingerprints on the beer bottle—on the beer
bottle,
mind—that is the only thing I need to tell me definitely, once for all, that your mother did not kill your father.”

He nodded his head several times and went out of the room, leaving Carla staring after him.