The Hollow (17 page)

Henrietta said:

“We need not go past the pool. We can go up to the left and along the top path to the flower walk.”

A track led steeply uphill towards the woods. After a while they came to a broader path at right angles across the hillside above the chestnut trees. Presently they came to a bench and Henrietta sat down, Poirot beside her. The woods were above and behind them, and below were the closely planted chestnut groves. Just in front of the seat a curving path led downwards, to where just a glimmer of blue water could be seen.

Poirot watched Henrietta without speaking. Her face had relaxed, the tension had gone. It looked rounder and younger. He realized what she must have looked like as a young girl.

He said very gently at last:

“Of what are you thinking, Mademoiselle?”

“Of Ainswick.”

“What is Ainswick?”

“Ainswick? It's a place.” Almost dreamily, she described Ainswick to him. The white, graceful house, the big magnolia growing up it, the whole set in an amphitheatre of wooded hills.

“It was your home?”

“Not really. I lived in Ireland. It was where we came, all of us, for holidays. Edward and Midge and myself. It was Lucy's home actually. It belonged to her father. After his death it came to Edward.”

“Not to Sir Henry? But it is he who has the title.”

“Oh, that's a KCB,” she explained. “Henry was only a distant cousin.”

“And after Edward Angkatell, to whom does it go, this Ainswick?”

“How odd, I've never really thought. If Edward doesn't marry—” She paused. A shadow passed over her face. Hercule Poirot wondered exactly what thought was passing through her mind.

“I suppose,” said Henrietta slowly, “it will go to David. So that's why—”

“Why what?”

“Why Lucy asked him here…David and Ainswick?” She shook her head. “They don't fit somehow.”

Poirot pointed to the path in front of them.

“It is by that path, Mademoiselle, that you went down to the swimming pool yesterday?”

She gave a quick shiver.

“No, by the one nearer the house. It was Edward who came this way.” She turned on him suddenly. “Must we talk about it any more? I hate the swimming pool. I even hate The Hollow.”

Poirot murmured:

Henrietta turned an astonished face on him.

“Tennyson,” said Hercule Poirot, nodding his head proudly. “The poetry of your Lord Tennyson.”

Henrietta was repeating:

“
And Echo there, whatever is ask'd her…
” She went on, almost to herself, “But of course—I see—that's what it is—Echo!”

“How do you mean, Echo?”

“This place—The Hollow itself! I almost saw it before—on Saturday when Edward and I walked up to the ridge. An echo of Ainswick. And that's what we are, we Angkatells. Echoes! We're not real—not real as John was real.” She turned to Poirot. “I wish you had known him, M. Poirot. We're all shadows compared to John. John was really alive.”

“I knew that even when he was dying, Mademoiselle.”

“I know. One felt it…And John is dead, and we, the echoes, are alive…It's like, you know, a very bad joke.”

The youth had gone from her face again. Her lips were twisted, bitter with sudden pain.

When Poirot spoke, asking a question, she did not, for a moment, take in what he was saying.

“I am sorry. What did you say, M. Poirot?”

“I was asking whether your aunt, Lady Angkatell, liked Dr. Christow?”

“Lucy? She is a cousin, by the way, not an aunt. Yes, she liked him very much.”

“And your—also a cousin?—Mr. Edward Angkatell—did he like Dr. Christow?”

Her voice was, he thought, a little constrained, as she replied:

“Not particularly—but then he hardly knew him.”

“And your—yet another cousin? Mr. David Angkatell?”

Henrietta smiled.

“David, I think, hates all of us. He spends his time immured in the library reading the
Encyclopædia Britannica.
”

“Ah, a serious temperament.”

“I am sorry for David. He has had a difficult home life. His mother was unbalanced—an invalid. Now his only way of protecting himself is to try to feel superior to everyone. It's all right as long as it works, but now and then it breaks down and the vulnerable David peeps through.”

“Did he feel himself superior to Dr. Christow?”

“He tried to—but I don't think it came off. I suspect that John Christow was just the kind of man that David would like to be. He disliked John in consequence.”

Poirot nodded his head thoughtfully.

“Yes—self-assurance, confidence, virility—all the intensive male qualities. It is interesting—very interesting.”

Henrietta did not answer.

Through the chestnuts, down by the pool, Hercule Poirot saw a man stooping, searching for something, or so it seemed.

He murmured: “I wonder—”

“I beg your pardon?”

Poirot said: “That is one of Inspector Grange's men. He seems to be looking for something.”

“Clues, I suppose. Don't policemen look for clues? Cigarette ash, footprints, burnt matches.”

Her voice held a kind of bitter mockery. Poirot answered seriously.

“Yes, they look for these things—and sometimes they find them. But the real clues, Miss Savernake, in a case like this, usually lie in the personal relationships of the people concerned.”

“I don't think I understand you.”

“Little things,” said Poirot, his head thrown back, his eyes half-closed. “Not cigarette ash, or a rubber heel mark—but a gesture, a look, an unexpected action….”

Henrietta turned her head sharply to look at him. He felt her eyes, but he did not turn his head. She said:

“Are you thinking of—anything in particular?”

“I was thinking of how you stepped forward and took the revolver out of Mrs. Christow's hand then dropped it in the pool.”

He felt the slight start she gave. But her voice was quite normal and calm.

“Gerda, M. Poirot, is rather a clumsy person. In the shock of
the moment, and if the revolver had had another cartridge in it, she might have fired it and—and hurt someone.”

“But it was rather clumsy of
you,
was it not, to drop it in the pool?”

“Well, I had had a shock too.” She paused. “What are you suggesting, M. Poirot?”

Poirot sat up, turned his head, and spoke in a brisk, matter-of-fact way.

“If there were fingerprints on that revolver, that is to say, fingerprints made
before Mrs. Christow handled it,
it would be interesting to know whose they were—and that we shall never know now.”

Henrietta said quietly but steadily:

“Meaning that you think they were
mine.
You are suggesting that I shot John and then left the revolver beside him so that Gerda could come along and pick it up and be left holding the baby. That is what you are suggesting, isn't it? But surely, if I did that, you will give me credit for enough intelligence to have wiped off my own fingerprints first!”

“But surely
you
are intelligent enough to see, Mademoiselle, that if you had done so and if the revolver had had
no fingerprints on it but Mrs. Christow's, that
would have been very remarkable! For you were all shooting with that revolver the day before. Gerda Christow would hardly have wiped the revolver clean of fingerprints
before
using it—why should she?”

Henrietta said slowly:

“So you think I killed John?”

“When Dr. Christow was dying, he said: ‘
Henrietta.
'”

“And you think that that was an accusation? It was not.”

“What was it then?”

Henrietta stretched out her foot and traced a pattern with the toe. She said in a low voice:

“Aren't you forgetting—what I told you not very long ago? I mean—the terms we were on?”

“Ah, yes—he was your lover—and so, as he is dying, he says:
‘Henrietta.'
That is very touching.”

She turned blazing eyes upon him.

“Must you sneer?”

“I am not sneering. But I do not like being lied to—and that, I think, is what you are trying to do.”

Henrietta said quietly:

“I have told you that I am not very truthful—but when John said:
‘Henrietta'
he was not accusing me of having murdered him. Can't you understand that people of my kind, who
make
things, are quite incapable of taking life? I don't kill people, M. Poirot. I
couldn't
kill anyone. That's the plain stark truth. You suspect me simply because my name was murmured by a dying man who hardly knew what he was saying.”

“Dr. Christow knew perfectly what he was saying. His voice was as alive and conscious as that of a doctor doing a vital operation who says sharply and urgently: ‘Nurse, the forceps, please.'”

“But—” She seemed at a loss, taken aback. Hercule Poirot went on rapidly:

“And it is not just on account of what Dr. Christow said when he was dying. I do not believe for one moment that you are capable of premeditated murder—that, no. But you might have fired that shot in a sudden moment of fierce resentment—and if so—
if
so, Mademoiselle, you have the creative imagination and ability to cover your tracks.”

Henrietta got up. She stood for a moment, pale and shaken, looking at him. She said with a sudden, rueful smile:

“And I thought you liked me.”

Hercule Poirot sighed. He said sadly:

“That is what is so unfortunate for me. I do.”

I

W
hen Henrietta had left him, Poirot sat on until he saw below him Inspector Grange walk past the pool with a resolute, easy stride and take the path on past the pavilion.

The inspector was walking in a purposeful way.

He must be going, therefore, either to Resthaven or to Dovecotes. Poirot wondered which.

He got up and retraced his steps along the way he had come. If Inspector Grange was coming to see him, he was interested to hear what the inspector had to say.

But when he got back to Resthaven there was no sign of a visitor. Poirot looked thoughtfully up the lane in the direction of Dovecotes. Veronica Cray had not, he knew, gone back to London.

He found his curiosity rising about Veronica Cray. The pale, shining fox furs, the heaped boxes of matches, that sudden imperfectly explained invasion on the Saturday night, and finally Henrietta Savernake's revelations about John Christow and Veronica.

It was, he thought, an interesting pattern. Yes, that was how he saw it: a pattern.

A design of intermingled emotions and the clash of personalities. A strange involved design, with dark threads of hate and desire running through it.

Had
Gerda Christow shot her husband? Or was it not quite so simple as that?

He thought of his conversation with Henrietta and decided that it was not so simple.

Henrietta had jumped to the conclusion that he suspected her of the murder, but actually he had not gone nearly as far as that in his mind. No further indeed than the belief that Henrietta knew something. Knew something or was concealing something—which?

He shook his head, dissatisfied.

The scene by the pool. A set scene. A stage scene.

Staged by whom? Staged
for
whom?

The answer to the second question was, he strongly suspected, Hercule Poirot. He had thought so at the time. But he had thought then that it was an impertinence—a joke.

It was still an impertinence—but not a joke.

And the answer to the first question?

He shook his head. He did not know. He had not the least idea.

But he half-closed his eyes and conjured them up—all of them—seeing them clearly in his mind's eye. Sir Henry, upright, responsible, trusted administrator of Empire. Lady Angkatell, shadowy, elusive, unexpectedly and bewilderingly charming, with that deadly power of inconsequent suggestion. Henrietta Savernake, who had loved John Christow better than she loved herself. The
gentle and negative Edward Angkatell. The dark, positive girl called Midge Hardcastle. The dazed, bewildered face of Gerda Christow clasping a revolver in her hand. The offended adolescent personality of David Angkatell.

There they all were, caught and held in the meshes of the law. Bound together for a little while in the relentless aftermath of sudden and violent death. Each of them had their own tragedy and meaning, their own story.

And somewhere in that interplay of characters and emotions lay the truth.

To Hercule Poirot there was only one thing more fascinating than the study of human beings, and that was the pursuit of truth.

He meant to know the truth of John Christow's death.

II

“But of course, Inspector,” said Veronica. “I'm only too anxious to help you.”

“Thank you, Miss Cray.”

Veronica Cray was not, somehow, at all what the inspector had imagined.

He had been prepared for glamour, for artificiality, even possibly for heroics. He would not have been at all surprised if she had put on an act of some kind.

In fact, she was, he shrewdly suspected, putting on an act. But it was not the kind of act he had expected.

There was no overdone feminine charm—glamour was not stressed.

Instead he felt that he was sitting opposite to an exceed
ingly good-looking and expensively dressed woman who was also a good businesswoman. Veronica Cray, he thought, was no fool.

“We just want a clear statement, Miss Cray. You came over to The Hollow on Saturday evening?”

“Yes, I'd run out of matches. One forgets how important these things are in the country.”

“You went all the way to The Hollow? Why not to your next-door neighbour, M. Poirot?”

She smiled—a superb, confident camera smile.

“I didn't know who my next-door neighbour was—otherwise I should have. I just thought he was some little foreigner and I thought, you know, he might become a bore—living so near.”

“Yes,” thought Grange, “quite plausible.” She'd worked that one out ready for the occasion.

“You got your matches,” he said. “And you recognized an old friend in Dr. Christow, I understand?”

She nodded.

“Poor John. Yes, I hadn't seen him for fifteen years.”

“Really?” There was polite disbelief in the inspector's tone.

“Really.” Her tone was firmly assertive.

“You were pleased to see him?”

“Very pleased. It's always delightful, don't you think, Inspector, to come across an old friend?”

“It can be on some occasions.”

Veronica Cray went on without waiting for further questioning:

“John saw me home. You'll want to know if he said anything that could have a bearing on the tragedy, and I've been think
ing over our conversation very carefully—but really there wasn't a pointer of any kind.”

“What did you talk about, Miss Cray?”

“Old days. ‘Do you remember this, that and the other?'” She smiled pensively. “We had known each other in the South of France. John had really changed very little—older, of course, and more assured. I gather he was quite well-known in his profession. He didn't talk about his personal life at all. I just got the impression that his married life wasn't perhaps frightfully happy—but it was only the vaguest impression. I suppose his wife, poor thing, was one of those dim, jealous women—probably always making a fuss about his better-looking lady patients.”

“No,” said Grange. “She doesn't really seem to have been that way.”

Veronica said quickly:

“You mean—it was all
underneath?
Yes—yes, I can see that that would be far more dangerous.”

“I see you think Mrs. Christow shot him, Miss Cray?”

“I oughtn't to have said that. One mustn't comment—is that it—before a trial? I'm extremely sorry, Inspector. It was just that my maid told me she'd been found actually standing over the body with the revolver still in her hand. You know how in these quiet country places everything gets so exaggerated and servants do pass things on.”

“Servants can be very useful sometimes, Miss Cray.”

“Yes, I suppose you get a lot of your information that way?”

Grange went on stolidly:

“It's a question, of course, of who had a motive—”

He paused. Veronica said with a faint, rueful smile:

“And a wife is always the first suspect? How cynical! But there's usually what's called ‘the other woman.' I suppose
she
might be considered to have a motive too?”

“You think there was another woman in Dr. Christow's life?”

“Well—yes, I did rather imagine there might be. One just gets an impression, you know.”

“Impressions can be very helpful sometimes,” said Grange.

“I rather imagined—from what he said—that that sculptress woman was, well, a very close friend. But I expect you know all about that already?”

“We have to look into all these things, of course.”

Inspector Grange's voice was strictly noncommittal, but he saw, without appearing to see, a quick, spiteful flash of satisfaction in those large blue eyes.

He said, making the question very official:

“Dr. Christow saw you home, you say. What time was it when you said good night to him?”

“Do you know, I really can't remember! We talked for some time, I do know that. It must have been quite late.”

“He came in?”

“Yes, I gave him a drink.”

“I see. I imagined your conversation might have taken place in the—er—pavilion by the swimming pool.”

He saw her eyelids flicker. There was hardly a moment's hesitation before she said:

“You really
are
a detective, aren't you? Yes, we sat there and smoked and talked for some time. How did you know?”

Her face bore the pleased, eager expression of a child asking to be shown a clever trick.

“You left your furs behind there, Miss Cray.” He added just without emphasis: “And the matches.”

“Yes, of course I did.”

“Dr. Christow returned to The Hollow at 3 a.m.,” announced the inspector, again without emphasis.

“Was it really as late as that?” Veronica sounded quite amazed.

“Yes, it was, Miss Cray.”

“Of course, we had so much to talk over—not having seen each other for so many years.”

“Are you sure it was quite so long since you had seen Dr. Christow?”

“I've just told you I hadn't seen him for fifteen years.”

“Are you quite sure you're not making a mistake? I've got the impression you might have been seeing quite a lot of him.”

“What on earth makes you think that?”

“Well, this note for one thing.” Inspector Grange took out a letter from his pocket, glanced down at it, cleared his throat and read:

“Ye-es.” She smiled. “It
is
a little peremptory, perhaps. I'm afraid Hollywood makes one—well, rather arrogant.”

“Dr. Christow came over to your house the following morning in answer to that summons. You had a quarrel. Would you care to tell me, Miss Cray, what that quarrel was about?”

The inspector had unmasked his batteries. He was quick to seize the flash of anger, the ill-tempered tightening of the lips. She snapped out:

“We didn't quarrel.”

“Oh, yes, you did, Miss Cray. Your last words were: ‘I think I hate you more than I believed I could hate anyone.'”

She was silent now. He could feel her thinking—thinking quickly and warily. Some women might have rushed into speech. But Veronica Cray was too clever for that.

She shrugged her shoulders and said lightly:

“I see. More servants' tales. My little maid has rather a lively imagination. There are different ways of saying things, you know. I can assure you that I wasn't being melodramatic. It was really a mildly flirtatious remark. We had been sparring together.”

“The words were not intended to be taken seriously?”

“Certainly not. And I can assure you, Inspector, that it
was
fifteen years since I had last seen John Christow. You can verify that for yourself.”

She was poised again, detached, sure of herself.

Grange did not argue or pursue the subject. He got up.

“That's all for the moment, Miss Cray,” he said pleasantly.

He went out of Dovecotes and down the lane, and turned in at the gate of Resthaven.

III

Hercule Poirot stared at the inspector in the utmost surprise. He repeated incredulously:

“The revolver that Gerda Christow was holding and which was
subsequently dropped into the pool was not the revolver that fired the fatal shot? But that is extraordinary.”

“Exactly, M. Poirot. Put bluntly, it just doesn't make sense.”

Poirot murmured softly:

“No, it does not make sense. But all the same, Inspector, it has got to make sense, eh?”

The inspector sighed heavily: “That's just it, M. Poirot. We've got to find some way that it does make sense—but at the moment I can't see it. The truth is that we shan't get much further until we've found the gun that
was
used. It came from Sir Henry's collection all right—at least, there's one missing—and that means that the whole thing is still tied up with The Hollow.”

“Yes,” murmured Poirot. “It is still tied up with The Hollow.”

“It seemed a simple, straightforward business,” went on the inspector. “Well, it isn't so simple or so straightforward.”

“No,” said Poirot, “it is not simple.”

“We've got to admit the possibility that the thing was a frame-up—that's to say that it was all set to implicate Gerda Christow. But if that was so, why not leave the right revolver lying by the body for her to pick up?”

“She might not have picked it up.”

“That's true, but even if she didn't, so long as nobody else's fingerprints were on the gun—that's to say if it was wiped after use—she would probably have been suspected all right. And that's what the murderer wanted, wasn't it?”

“Was it?”

Grange stared.

“Well, if you'd done a murder, you'd want to plant it good and
quick on someone else, wouldn't you? That would be a murderer's normal reaction.”

“Ye-es,” said Poirot. “But then perhaps we have here a rather unusual type of murderer. It is possible that
that
is the solution of our problem.”

“What is the solution?”

Poirot said thoughtfully:

“An unusual type of murderer.”

Inspector Grange stared at him curiously. He said:

“But then—what
was
the murderer's idea? What was he or she getting at?”

Poirot spread out his hands with a sigh.

“I have no idea—I have no idea at all. But it seems to me—dimly—”

“Yes?”

“That the murderer is someone who wanted to kill John Christow but who did not want to implicate Gerda Christow.”

“H'h! Actually, we suspected her right away.”

“Ah, yes, but it was only a matter of time before the facts about the gun came to light, and that was bound to give a new angle. In the interval the murderer has had time—” Poirot came to a full stop.