Something about a murder that took place in the original quarry years ago? Blood had stained the rock there, and afterwards, death had been forgotten, all had been covered over, Michael Garfield had come, had planned and had created a garden of great beauty, and an elderly woman who had not many more years to live had paid out money for it.
He saw now it was a young man who stood on the other side of the hollow, framed by golden red leaves, and a young man, so Poirot now recognised, of an unusual beauty. One didn't think of young men that way nowadays. You said of a young man that he was sexy or madly attractive, and these evidences of praise are often quite justly made.
A man with a craggy face, a man with wild greasy hair and whose features were far from regular.
You didn't say a young man was beautiful.
If you did say it, you said it apologetically as though you were praising some quality that had been long dead. The sexy girls didn't want Orpheus with his lute, they wanted a pop singer with a raucous voice, expressive eyes and large masses of unruly hair.
Poirot got up and walked round the path. As he got to the other side of the steep descent, the young man came out from the trees to meet him. His youth seemed the most characteristic thing about him, yet, as Poirot saw, he was not really young. He was past thirty, perhaps nearer forty. The smile on his face was very, very faint. It was not quite a welcoming smile, it was just a smile of quiet recognition.
He was tall, slender, with features of great perfection such as a classical sculptor might have produced. His eyes were dark, his hair was black and fitted him as a woven chain mail helmet or cap might have done. For a moment Poirot wondered whether he and this young man might not be meeting in the course of some pageant that was being rehearsed.
If so, thought Poirot, looking down at his galoshes, I, alas, shall have to go to the wardrobe mistress to get myself better equipped. He said:
'I am perhaps trepassing here. If so, I must apologise. I am a stranger in this part of the world. I only arrived yesterday.'
'I don't think one could call it trespassing.'
The voice was very quiet; it was polite yet in a curious way uninterested, as if this man's thoughts were really somewhere quite far away.
'It's not exactly open to the public, but people do walk round here.
Old Colonel Weston and his wife don't mind. They would mind if there was any damage done, but that's not really very likely.'
'No vandalism,' said Poirot, looking round him. 'No litter that is noticeable.
Not even a little basket. That is very unusual, is it not? And it seems deserted strange. Here you would think,' he went on, 'there would be lovers walking.'
'Lovers don't come here,' said the young man. 'It's supposed to be unlucky for some reason.'
'Are you, I wonder, the architect? But perhaps I'm guessing wrong.'
'My name is Michael Garfield,' said the young man.
'I thought it might be,' said Poirot. He gesticulated with a hand around him. 'You made this?'
'Yes,' said Michael Garfield.
'It is very beautiful,' said Poirot. 'Somehow one feels it is always rather unusual when something beautiful is made in well, frankly, what is a dull part of the English landscape. I congratulate you,' he said. 'You must be satisfied with what you have done here.'
'Is one ever satisfied? I wonder.'
'You made it, I think, for a Mrs. Llewellyn-Smythe. No longer alive, I believe. There is a Colonel and Mrs. Weston, I believe? Do they own it now?'
'Yes. They got it cheap. It's a big, ungainly house not easy to run not what most people want. She left it in her Will to me.'
'And you sold it.'
'I sold the house.'
'And not the Quarry Garden?'
'Oh yes. The Quarry Garden went with it, practically thrown in, as one might say.'
'Now why?' said Poirot. 'It is interesting, that. You do not mind if I am perhaps a little curious?'
'Your questions are not quite the usual ones,' said Michael Garfield.
'I ask not so much for facts as for reasons. Why did A do so and so? Why did B do something else? Why was C's behaviour quite different from that of A and B?'
'You should be talking to a scientist,' said Michael. 'It is a matter or so we are told nowadays of genes or chromosomes. The arrangement, the pattern, and so on.'
'You said just now you were not entirely satisfied because no-one ever was.
Was your employer, your patron, whatever you like to call her was she satisfied? With this thing of beauty?'
'Up to a point,' said Michael. 'I saw to that. She was easy to satisfy.'
'That seems most unlikely,' said Hercule Poirot. 'She was, I have learned, over sixty. Sixty-five at least. Are people of that age often satisfied?'
'She was assured by me that what I had carried out was the exact carrying out of her instructions and imagination and ideas.'
'And was it?'
'Do you ask me that seriously?'
'No,' said Poirot. 'No. Frankly I do not.'
'For success in life,' said Michael Garfield, 'one has to pursue the career one wants, one has to satisfy such artistic leanings as one has got, but one has as well to be a tradesman. You have to sell your wares. Otherwise you are tied to carrying out other people's ideas in a way which will not accord with one's own. I carried out mainly my own ideas and I sold them, marketed them perhaps is a better word, to the client who employed me, as a direct carrying out of her plans and schemes. It is not a very difficult art to learn. There is no more to it than selling a child brown eggs rather than white ones. The customer has to be assured they are the best ones, the right ones. The essence of the countryside.
Shall we say, the hen's own preference?
Brown, farm, country eggs. One does not sell them if one says They are just eggs. There is only one difference in eggs. They are new laid or they are not?'
'You are an unusual young man,' said Poirot. 'Arrogant,' he said thoughtfully.
'Perhaps.'
'You have made here something very beautiful. You have added vision and planning to the rough material of stone hollowed out in the pursuit of industry, with no thought of beauty in that hacking out. You have added imagination, a result seen in the mind's eye, that you have managed to raise the money to fulfill. I congratulate you. I pay my tribute. The tribute of an old man who is approaching a time when the end of his own work is come.'
'But at the moment you are still carrying it on?'
'You know who I am, then?'
Poirot was pleased indubitably. He liked people to know who he was.
Nowadays, he feared, most people did not.
'You follow the trail of blood? It is already known here. It is a small community, news travels. Another public success brought you here.'
'Ah, you mean Mrs. Oliver.'
'Ariadne Oliver. A best seller. People wish to interview her, to know what she thinks about such subjects as student unrest, socialism, girls' clothing, should sex be permissive, and many other
