It is not unusual, you know, for a man to marry again. Especially when he and his wife have been estranged for many years.
This wife he brought, was she the same lady he had wished to marry previously, when he asked your mother for a divorce?'
'Oh, no, this one is quite young. And she's very good-looking and she acts as though she just owns my father!' She went on after a pause-in a different rather childish voice. 'I thought perhaps when he came home this time he would be fond of me and take notice of me and - but she won't let him. She's against me. She's crowded me out.'
'But that does not matter at all at the age you are. It is a good thing. You do not need anyone to look after you now. You can stand on your own feet, you can enjoy life, you can choose your own friends -'
'You wouldn't think so, the way they go on at home! Well, I mean to choose my own friends.'
'Most girls nowadays have to endure criticism about their friends,' said Poirot.
'It was all so different,' said Norma. 'My father isn't at all like I remember him when I was five years old. He used to play with me, all the time, and be so gay.
He's not gay now. He's worried and rather fierce and - oh quite different.'
'That must be nearly fifteen years ago, I presume. People change.'
'But ought people to change so much?'
'Has he changed in appearance?'
'Oh no, no, not that. Oh no! If you look at his picture just over his chair, although it's of him when he was much younger, it's exactly like him now. But it isn't at all the way I remembered him.'
'But you know, my dear,' said Poirot gently, 'people are never like what you remember them. You make them as the years go by, more and more the way you wish them to be, and as you think you remember them. If you want to remember them as agreeable and gay and handsome, you make them far more so than they actually were.'
'Do you think so? Do you really think so?' She paused and then said abruptly, 'But why do you think I want to kill people?' The question came out quite naturally. It was there between them.
They had, Poirot felt, got at last to a crucial moment.
'That may be quite an interesting question,' said Poirot, 'and there may be quite an interesting reason. The person who can probably tell you the answer to that will be a doctor. The kind of doctor who knows.' She reacted quickly.
'I won't go to a doctor. I won't go near a doctor! They wanted to send me to a doctor, and then I'll be shut up in one of those loony places and they won't let me out again. I'm not going to do anything like that.' She was struggling now to rise to her feet.
'It is not I who can send you to one!
You need not be alarmed. You could go to a doctor entirely on your own behalf if you liked. You can go and say to him the things you have been saying to me, and you may ask him why, and he will perhaps tell you the cause.'
'That's what David says. That's what David says I should do but I don't think - I don't think he understands. I'd have to tell a doctor that I - I might have tried to do things…'
'What makes you think you have?'
'Because I don't always remember what I've done - or where I've been. I lose an hour of time - two hours - and I can't remember. I was in a corridor once - a corridor outside a door, her door. I'd something in my hand - I don't know how I got it. She came walking along towards me - But when she got near me, her face changed. It wasn't her at all.
She'd changed into somebody else.'
'You are remembering, perhaps, a nightmare. There people do change into somebody else.'
'It wasn't a nightmare. I picked up the revolver - It was lying there at my feet -'
'In a corridor?'
'No, in the courtyard. She came and took it away from me.'
'Who did?'
'Claudia. She took me upstairs and gave me some bitter stuff to drink.'
'Where was your stepmother then?'
'She was there, too- No, she wasn't.
She was at Crosshedges. Or in hospital.
That's where they found out she was being poisoned - and that it was me.'
'It need not have been you - It could have been someone else.'
'Who else could it have been?'
'Perhaps - her husband.'
'Father? Why on earth should Father want to poison Mary. He's devoted to her.
He's silly about her!'
'There are others in the house, are there not?'
'Old Uncle Roderick? Nonsense!'
'One does not know,' said Poirot, 'he might be mentally afflicted. He might think it was his duty to poison a woman who might be a beautiful spy. Something like that.'
'That would be very interesting,' said Norma, momentarily diverted, and speaking in a perfectly natural manner. 'Uncle Roderick was mixed up a good deal with spies and things in the last war. Who else is there? Sonia? I suppose she might be a beautiful spy, but she's not quite my idea of one.'
'No, and there does not seem very much reason why she should wish to poison your stepmother. I suppose there might be servants, gardeners?'
'No, they just come in for the day.
I don't think - well, they wouldn't be the kind of people to have any reason.'
'She might have done it herself.'
'Committed suicide, do you mean? Like the other one?'
'It is a possibility.'
'I can't imagine Mary committing suicide. She's far too sensible. And why should she want to?'
'Yes, you feel that if she did, she would put her head in the gas oven, or she would lie on a bed nicely arranged and take an overdose of sleeping draught. Is that right?'
'Well, it would have been more natural. So you see,' said Norma earnestly, 'it must have been me.'
'Aha,' said Poirot, 'that interests me.
You would almost, it would seem, prefer that it should be you. You are attracted to the idea that it was your hand who slipped the fatal dose of this, that or the other.
Yes, you like the idea.'
'How dare you say such a thing! How can you?'
'Because I think it is true,' said Poirot. 'Why does the thought that you may have committed murder excite you, please you?'
'It's not true.'
'I wonder,' said Poirot.
She scooped up her bag and began feeling in it with shaking fingers.
'I'm not going to stop here and have you say these things to me.' She signalled to the waitress who came, scribbled on a pad of paper, detached it and laid it down by Norma's plate.
'Permit me,' said Hercule Poirot.
He removed the slip of paper deftly, and prepared to draw his notecase from his pocket. The girl snatched it back again.
'No, I won't let you pay for me.'
'As you please,' said Poirot.
He had seen what he wanted to see.
The bill was for two. It would seem therefore that David of the fine feathers had no objection to having his bills paid by an infatuated girl.
'So it is you who entertain a friend to elevenses, I see.'
'How did you know that I was with anyone?'
