Elizabeth Whittaker sat down again.
'Go on,' she said, 'ask anything you like.'
'Can you remember exactly the order in which the various events occurred at the party?'
'I think so.' Elizabeth Whittaker reflected for a moment or two. 'It started with a broomstick competition. Decorated broomsticks.
There were three or four different small prizes for that. Then there was a kind of contest with balloons, punching them and batting them about. A sort of mild horse-play to get the children warmed up. There was a looking-glass business where the girls went into a small room and held a mirror where a boy's or young man's face reflected in it.'
'How was that managed?'
'Oh, very simply. The transom of the door had been removed, and so different faces looked through and were reflected in the mirror a girl was holding.'
'Did the girls know who it was they saw reflected in the glass?'
'I presume some of them did and some of them didn't. A little make-up was employed on the male half of the arrangement.
You know, a mask or a wig, sideburns, a beard, some greasepaint effects.
Most of the boys were probably known to the girls already and one or two strangers might have been included. Anyway, there was a lot of quite happy giggling,' said Miss Whittaker, showing for a moment or two a kind of academic contempt for this kind of fun.
'After that there was an obstacle race and then there was flour packed into a glass tumbler and reversed, sixpence laid on top and everyone took a slice off. When the flour collapsed that person was out of the competition and the others remained until the last one claimed the sixpence. After that there was dancing, and then there was supper.
After that, as a final climax, came the Snapdragon.'
'When did you yourself see the girl Joyce last?'
'I've no idea,' said Elizabeth Whittaker. 'I don't know her very well. She's not in my class. She wasn't a very interesting girl so I wouldn't have been watching her. I do remember I saw her cutting the flour because she was so clumsy that she capsized it almost at once.
So-she was alive then but that was quite early on.'
'You did not see her go into the library with anyone?'
'Certainly not. I should have mentioned it before if I had. That at least might have been significant and important.'
'And now,' said Poirot, 'for my second question or questions. How long have you been at the school here?'
'Six years this next autumn.'
'And you teach?'
'Mathematics and Latin.'
'Do you remember a girl who was teaching here two years ago Janet White by name?'
Elizabeth Whittaker stiffened. She half rose from her chair, then sat down again.
'But that but that has nothing to do with all this, surely?'
'It could have,' said Poirot.
'But how? In what way?'
Scholastic circles were less well informed than village gossip, Poirot thought.
'Joyce claimed before witnesses to have seen a murder done some years ago. Could that possibly have been the murder of Janet White, do you think? How did Janet White die?'
'She was strangled, walking home from the school one night.'
'Alone?'
'Probably not alone.'
'But not with Nora Ambrose?'
'What do you know about Nora Ambrose?'
'Nothing as yet,' said Poirot, 'but I should like to. What were they like, Janet White and Nora Ambrose?'
'Over-sexed,' said Elizabeth Whittaker, 'but in different ways. How could Joyce have seen anything of the kind or know anything about it?
It took place in a lane near the Quarry Wood. She wouldn't have been more than ten or eleven years old.'
'Which one had the boy friend?' asked Poirot. 'Nora or Janet?'
'All this is past history.'
'Old sins have long shadows,' quoted Poirot. 'As we advance through life, we learn the truth of that saying. Where is Nora Ambrose now?'
'She left the school and took another post in the north of England she was, naturally, very upset. They were great friends.'
'The police never solved the case?'
Miss Whittaker shook her head. She got up and looked at her watch.
'I must go now.'
'Thank you for what you have told me.'
ERCULE POIROT looked up at the facade of Quarry House. A solid, well-built example of mid Victorian architecture. He had a vision of its interior a heavy mahogany sideboard, a central rectangular table also of heavy mahogany, a billiard room, perhaps, a large kitchen with adjacent scullery, stone flags on the floor, a massive coal range now no doubt replaced by electricity or gas.
He noted that most of the upper windows were still curtained. He rang the front- door bell. It was answered by a thin, grey-haired woman who told him that Colonel and Mrs. Weston were away in London and would not be back until next week.
He asked about the Quarry Woods and was told that they were open to the public without charge. The entrance was about five minutes' walk along the road. He would see a notice-board on an iron gate.
He found his way there easily enough, and passing through the gate began to descend a path that led downwards through trees and shrubs.
Presently he came to a halt and stood there lost in thought. His mind was not only on what he saw, on what lay around him. Instead he was conning over one or two sentences, and reflecting over one or two facts that had given him at the time, as he expressed it to himself, furiously to think. A forged Will, a forged Will and a girl. A girl who had disappeared, the girl in whose favour the Will had been forged.
A young artist who had come here professionally to make out of an abandoned quarry of rough stone a garden, a sunk garden. Here again, Poirot looked round him and nodded his head with approval of the phrase. A Quarry Garden was an ugly term. It suggested the noise of blasting rock, the carrying away by lorries of vast masses of stone for road making. It had behind it industrial demand. But a Sunk Garden-that was different. It brought with it vague remembrances in his own mind. So Mrs. Llewellyn-Smythe had gone on a National Trust tour of gardens in Ireland. He himself, he remembered, had been in Ireland five or six years ago. He had gone there to investigate a robbery of old family silver. There had been some interesting points about the case which had aroused his curiosity, and having (as usual)-Poirot added this bracket to his thoughts -solved his mission with full success, he had put in a few days travelling around and seeing the sights.
He could not remember now the particular garden he had been to see.
Somewhere, he thought, not very far from Cork. Killarney? No, not Killarney. Somewhere not far from Bantry Bay. And he remembered it because it had been a garden quite different from the gardens which he had so far acclaimed as the great successes of this age, the gardens of the Chateaux in France, the formal beauty of Versailles. Here, he remembered, he had started with a little group of people in a boat. A boat
