long, exasperated sigh. 'But his wife did not die until eleven or twelve years after he'd left this country for South Africa, and his child could not have been concerned in the murder of her own mother at the age of five years old.'
'She could have given her mother the wrong medicine or perhaps Restarick just said that she died. After all, we don't know that she's dead.'
'I do,' said Hercule Poirot. 'I have made enquiries. The first Mrs. Restarick died on the 14th April 1963.'
'How can you know these things?'
'Because I have employed someone to check the facts. I beg of you, Madame, do not jump to impossible conclusions in this rash way.'
'I thought I was being rather clever,' said Mrs. Oliver obstinately. 'If I was making it happen in a book that's how I would arrange it. And I'd make the child have done it. Not meaning to, but just by her father telling her to give her mother a drink made of pounded up box hedge.'
'Nom d'un nom d'un nom !' said Poirot.
'All right,' said Mrs. Oliver. 'You tell it your way.'
'Alas, I have nothing to tell. I look for a murder and I do not find one.'
'Not after Mary Restarick is ill and goes to hospital and gets better and comes back and is ill again, and if they looked they'd probably find arsenic or something hidden away by Norma somewhere.'
'That is exactly what they did find.'
'Well, really, M. Poirot, what more do you want?'
'I want you to pay some attention to the meaning of language. That girl said to me the same thing as she had said to my manservant, Georges. She did not say on either occasion 'I have tried to kill someone', or 'I have tried to kill my stepmother'.
She spoke each time of a deed that had been done, something that had already happened. Definitely happened. In the past tense.'
'I give up,' said Mrs. Oliver. 'You just won't believe that Norma tried to kill her stepmother.'
'Yes, I believe it is perfectly possible that Norma may have tried to kill her stepmother. I think it is probably what happened - it is in accord psychologically.
With her distraught frame of mind. But it is not proved. Anyone, remember, could have hidden a preparation of arsenic amongst Norma's things. It could even have been put there by the husband.'
'You always seem to think that husbands are the ones who kill their wives,' said Mrs. Oliver.
'A husband is usually the most likely person,' said Hercule Poirot, 'so one considers him first. It could have been the girl, Norma, or it could have been one of the servants, or it could have been the au pair girl, or it could have been old Sir Roderick. Or it could have been Mrs. Restarick herself.'
'Nonsense. Why?'
'There could be reasons. Rather farfetched reasons, but not beyond the bounds of belief.'
'Really, Monsieur Poirot, you can't suspect everybody.'
'Mais oui, that is just what I can do. I suspect everybody. First I suspect, then I look for reasons.'
'And what reason would that poor foreign child have?'
'It might depend on what she is doing in that house, and what her reasons are for coming to England and a good deal more beside.'
'You're really crazy.'
'Or it could have been the boy David.
Your Peacock.'
'Much too far-fetched. David wasn't there. He's never been near the house.'
'Oh yes he has. He was wandering about its corridors the day I went there.'
'But not putting poison in Norma's room.'
'How do you know?'
'But she and that awful boy are in love with each other.'
'They appear to be so, I admit.'
'You always want to make everything difficult,' complained Mrs. Oliver.
'Not at all. Things have been made difficult for me. I need information and there is only one person who can give me information. And she has disappeared.'
'You mean Norma.'
'Yes, I mean Norma.'
'But she hasn't disappeared. We found her, you and I.'
'She walked out of that cafe and once more she has disappeared.'
'And you let her go?' Mrs. Oliver's voice quivered with reproach.
'Alas!'
' You let her go? You didn't even try to find her again?'
'I did not say I had not tried to find her.'
'But so far you have not succeeded.
M. Poirot, I really am disappointed with you.'
'There is a pattern,' said Hercule Poirot almost dreamily. 'Yes, there is a pattern. But because there is one factor missing, the pattern does not make sense.
You see that, don't you?'
'No,' said Mrs. Oliver, whose head was aching.
Poirot continued to talk more to himself than his listener. If Mrs. Oliver could be said to be listening. She was highly indignant with Poirot and she thought to herself that the Restarick girl had been quite right and that Poirot was too old!
There, she herself had found the girl for him, had telephoned him so that he might arrive in time, had gone off herself to shadow the other half of the couple. She had left the girl to Poirot, and what had Poirot done - lost her! In fact she could not really see that Poirot had done anything at all of any use at any time whatever.
She was disappointed in him. When he stopped talking she would tell him so again.
Poirot was quietly and methodically outlining what he called 'the pattern'.
'It interlocks. Yes it interlocks and that is why it is difficult. One thing relates to another and then you find that it relates to something else that seems outside the pattern. But it is not outside the pattern.
And so it brings more people again into a ring of suspicion. Suspicion of what?
There again one does not know. We have first the girl and through all the maze of conflicting patterns I have to search the answer to the most poignant of questions.
Is the girl a victim, is she in danger? Or is the girl very astute. Is the girl creating the impression she wants to create for her own purposes? It can be taken either way.
I need something still. Some one sure pointer, and it is there somewhere. I am sure it is there somewhere.' Mrs. Oliver was rummaging in her handbag.
'I can't think why I can never find my aspirin when I want it,' she said m a vexed voice.
'We have one set of relationships that hook up. The father, the daughter, the stepmother. Their lives are interrelated.
We have the elderly uncle, somewhat gaga, with whom they live. We have the girl Sonia. She is linked with the uncle. She works for him. She has pretty manners, pretty ways. He is delighted with her.
He is, shall we say, a little soft about her.
But what is her role in the household?'
'Wants to learn English, I suppose,' said Mrs. Oliver.
'She meets one of the members of the Hertzogovinian Embassy - in Kew Gardens. She meets him there, but she does not speak to him. She leaves behind her a book and he takes it away - '
'What is all this?' said Mrs. Oliver.
'Has this anything to do with the other pattern? We do not as yet know. It seems unlikely but it may not be unlikely. Had Mary Restarick unwittingly stumbled upon something which might be dangerous to the girl?'
'Don't tell me all this has something to do with espionage or something.'
'I am not telling you. I am wondering.'
'You said yourself that old Sir Roderick was gaga.'
