towards the Mermaid Theatre. That, she thought, had far more possibilities.
She walked back in the direction of the various new buildings. Then, feeling the lack of a more substantial breakfast than she had had, she turned into a local cafe.
It was moderately well filled with people having extra late breakfast or else early 'elevenses'. Mrs. Oliver, looking round vaguely for a suitable table, gave a gasp.
At a table near the wall the girl Norma was sitting, and opposite her was sitting a young man with lavish chestnut hair curled on his shoulders, wearing a red velvet waistcoat and a very fancy jacket.
'David,' said Mrs. Oliver under her breath. 'It must be David.' He and the girl Norma were talking excitedly together.
Mrs. Oliver considered a plan of campaign, made up her mind, and nodding her head in satisfaction, crossed the floor of the cafe to a discreet door marked 'Ladies'.
Mrs. Oliver was not quite sure whether Norma was likely to recognise her or not. It was not always the vaguest looking people who proved the vaguest in fact. At the moment Norma did not look as though she was likely to look at anybody but David, but who knows?
'I expect I can do something to myself anyway,' thought Mrs. Oliver. She looked at herself in a small fly-blown mirror provided by the cafe's management, studying particularly what she considered to be the focal point of a woman's appearance, her hair. No one knew this better than Mrs. Oliver, owing to the innumerable times that she had changed her mode of hairdressing, and had failed to be recognised by her friends in consequence. Giving her head an appraising eye she started work.
Out came the pins, she took off several coils of hair, wrapped them up in her handkerchief and stuffed them into her handbag, parted her hair in the middle, combed it sternly back from her face and rolled it up into a modest bun at the back of her neck. She also took out a pair of spectacles and put them on her nose. There was a really earnest look about her now!
'Almost intellectual,' Mrs. Oliver thought approvingly. She altered the shape of her mouth by an application of lipstick, and emerged once more into the cafe, moving carefully since the spectacles were only for reading and in consequence that landscape was blurred. She crossed the cafe, and made her way to an empty table next to that occupied by Norma and David. She sat down so that she was facing David.
Norma, on the near side, sat with her back to her. Norma, therefore, would not see her unless she turned her head right round. The waitress drifted up. Mrs. Oliver ordered coffee and a Bath bun and settled down to be inconspicuous.
Norma and David did not even notice her. They were deeply in the middle of a passionate discussion. It took Mrs. Oliver just a minute or two to tune in to them.
'… But you only fancy these things,' David was saying. 'You imagine them.
They're all utter, utter nonsense, my dear girl.'
'I don't know. I can't tell.' Norma's voice had a queer lack of resonance in it.
Mrs. Oliver could not hear her as well as she heard David, since Norma's back was turned to her, but the dullness of the girl's tone struck her disagreeably. There was something wrong here, she thought.
Very wrong. She remembered the story as Poirot had first told it to her. 'She thinks she may have committed a murder.' What was the matter with the girl. Hallucinations? Was her mind really slightly affected, or was it no more and no less than truth, and in consequence the girl had suffered a bad shock?
'If you ask me, it's all fuss on Mary's part! She's a thoroughly stupid woman anyway, and she imagines she has illnesses and all that sort of thing.'
'She was ill.'
'All right then, she was ill. Any sensible woman would get the doctor to give her some antibiotic or other, and not get het up.'
'She thought I did it to her. My father thinks so too.'
'I tell you, Norma, you imagine all these things.'
'You just say that to me, David. You say it to me to cheer me up. Supposing I did give her the stuff?'
'What do you mean, suppose? You must know whether you did or you didn't.
You can't be so idiotic, Norma.'
'I don't know.'
'You keep saying that. You keep coming back to that, and saying it again and again. 'I don't know. I don't know.' '
'You don't understand. You don't understand in the least what hate is. I hated her from the first moment I saw her.'
'I know. You told me that.'
'That's the queer part of it. I told you that, and yet I don't even remember telling you that. D'you see? Every now and then I - I tell people things. I tell people things that I want to do, or that I have done, or that I'm going to do. But I don't even remember telling them the things.
It's as though I was thinking all these things in my mind, and sometimes they come out in the open and I say them to people. I did say them to you, didn't I?'
'Well - I mean - look here, don't let's harp back to that.'
'But I did say it to you? Didn't I?'
'All right, all right! One says things like that. 'I hate her and I'd like to kill her. I think I'll poison her!' But that's only kid stuff, if you know what I mean, as though you weren't quite grown up. It's a very natural thing. Children say it a lot. 'I hate so and so. I'll cut off his head!' Kids say it at school. About some master they particularly dislike.'
'You think it was just that? But- that sounds as though I wasn't grown up.'
'Well, you're not in some ways. If you'd just pull yourself together, realise how silly it all is. What can it matter if you do hate her? You've got away from home and don't have to live with her.'
'Why shouldn't I live in my own home -with my own father?' said Norma. 'It's not fair. It's not fair. First he went away and left my mother, and now, just when he's coming back to me, he goes and marries Mary. Of course I hate her and she hates me too. I used to think about killing her, used to think of ways of doing it. I used to enjoy thinking like that. But then - when she really got ill…' David said uneasily: 'You don't think you're a witch or anything, do you? You don't make figures in wax and stick pins into them or do that sort of thing?'
'Oh no. That would be silly. What I did was real. Quite real.'
'Look here, Norma, what do you mean when you say it was real?'
'The bottle was there, in my drawer.
Yes, I opened the drawer and found it.'
'What bottle?'
'The Dragon Exterminator. Selective weed killer. That's what it was labelled.
Stuff in a dark green bottle and you were supposed to spray it on things. And it had labels with Caution and Poison, too.'
'Did you buy it? Or did you just find it?'
'I don't know where I got it, but it was there, in my drawer, and it was half empty.'
'And then you - you - remembered - '
'Yes,' said Norma. 'Yes…' Her voice was vague, almost dreamy. 'Yes… I think it was then it all came back to me. You think so too, don't you, David?'
'I don't know what to make of you, Norma. I really don't. I think in a way, you're making it all up, you're telling it to yourself.'
'But she went to hospital, for observation, they said, they were puzzled. Then they said they couldn't find anything wrong so she came home - and then she got ill again, and I began to be frightened.
My father began looking at me in a queer sort of way, and then the doctor came and they talked together, shut up in father's study. I went round outside, and crept up to the window and I tried to listen. I wanted to hear what they were saying.
They were planning together-to send me away to a place where I'd be shut up!
A place where I'd have a 'course of treatment' - or something. They thought, you see, that I was crazy, and I was frightened… Because-because I wasn't sure what I'd done or what I hadn't done.'
'Is that when you ran away?'
