'A wig? How should I know?' she considered for a moment. 'She might, yes,' she admitted. 'It is useful for travelling. Also it is fashionable. I wear a wig myself sometimes. A green one! Or did.' She added again, 'I go now,' and went.
Chapter Sixteen
'TODAY I have much to do,' Hercule Poirot announced as he rose from the breakfast table next morning and joined Miss Lemon. 'Enquiries to make. You have made the necessary researches for me, the appointments, the necessary contacts?'
'Certainly,' said Miss Lemon. 'It is all here,' She handed him a small briefcase.
Poirot took a quick glance at its contents and nodded his head.
'I can always rely on you. Miss Lemon,' he said. 'C'est fantastique.'
'Really, Monsieur Poirot, I cannot see anything fantastic about it. You gave me instructions and I carried them out, naturally.'
'Pah, it is not so natural as that,' said Poirot. 'Do I not give instructions often to the gas men, the electricians, the man who comes to repair things, and do they always carry out my instructions? Very, very seldom.'
He went into the hall.
'My slightly heavier overcoat, Georges.
I think the autumn chill is setting in.' He popped his head back in his secretary's room. 'By the way, what did you think of that young woman who came yesterday?' Miss Lemon, arrested as she was about to plunge her fingers on the typewriter, said briefly, 'Foreign.'
'Yes, yes.'
'Obviously foreign.'
'You do not think anything more about her than that?' Miss Lemon considered. 'I had no means of judging her capability in any way.' She added rather doubtfully, 'She seemed upset about something.'
'Yes. She is suspected, you see, of stealing! Not money, but papers, from her employer.'
'Dear, dear,' said Miss Lemon. 'Important papers?'
'It seems highly probable. It is equally probable though, that he has not lost anything at all.'
'Oh well,' said Miss Lemon, giving her employer a special look that she always gave and which announced that she wished to get rid of him so that she could get on with proper fervour with her work. 'Well, I always say that it's better to know where you are when you are employing someone, and buy British.' Hercule Poirot went out. His first visit was to Borodene Mansions. He took a taxi.
Alighting at the courtyard he cast his eyes around. A uniformed porter was standing in one of the doorways, whistling a somewhat doleful melody. As Poirot advanced upon him, he said: 'Yes, sir?'
'I wondered,' said Poirot, 'if you can tell me anything about a very sad occurrence that took place here recently.'
'Sad occurrence?' said the porter. 'Nothing that I know of.'
'A lady who threw herself, or shall we say fell from one of the upper stories, and was killed.'
'Oh that. I don't know anything about that because I've only been here a week, you see. Hi, Joe.' A porter emerging from the opposite side of the block came over.
'You'd know about the lady as fell from the seventh. About a month ago, was it?'
'Not quite as much as that,' said Joe.
He was an elderly slow-speaking man.
'Nasty business it was.'
'She was killed instantly?'
'Yes.'
'What was her name? It may, you understand, have been a relative of mine,' Poirot explained. He was not a man who had any scruples about departing from the truth.
'Indeed, sir. Very sorry to hear it.
She was a Mrs. Charpentier.'
'She had been in the flat some time?'
'Well, let me see now. About a year - a year and a half perhaps. No, I think it must have been about two years. No. 76, seventh floor.'
'That is the top floor?'
'Yes, sir. A Mrs. Charpentier.' Poirot did not press for any other descriptive information since he might be presumed to know such things about his own relative. Instead he asked: 'Did it cause much excitement, much questioning? What time of day was it?'
'Five or six o'clock in the morning, I think. No warning or anything. Just down she came. In spite of being so early we got a crowd almost at once, pushing through the railing over there. You know what people are.'
'And the police, of course.'
'Oh yes, the police came quite quickly.
And a doctor and an ambulance. All the usual,' said the porter rather in the weary tone of one who had had people throwing themselves out of a seventh-storey window once or twice every month.
'And I suppose people came down from the flats when they heard what had happened.'
'Oh, there wasn't so many coming from the flats because for one thing with the noise of traffic and everything around here most of them didn't know about it.
Someone or other said she gave a bit of a scream as she came down, but not so that it caused any real commotion. It was only people in the street, passing by, who saw it happen. And then, of course, they craned their necks over the railings, and other people saw them craning, and joined them.
You know what an accident is!' Poirot assured him he knew what an accident was.
'She lived alone?' he said, making it only half a question.
'That's right.'
'But she had friends, I suppose, among the other flat dwellers?' Joe shrugged and shook his head. 'May have done. I couldn't say. Never saw her in the restaurant much with any of our lot.
She had outside friends to dinner here sometimes. No, I wouldn't say she was specially pally with anybody here. You'd do best,' said Joe, getting slightly restive, 'to go and have a chat with Mr. McFarlane who's in charge here if you want to know about her.'
'Ah, I thank you. Yes, that is what I mean to do.'
'His office is in that block over there, sir. On the ground floor. You'll see it marked up on the door.' Poirot went as directed. He detached from his brief-case the top letter with which Miss Lemon had supplied him, and which was marked 'Mr. McFarlane'.
Mr. McFarlane turned out to be a goodlooking, shrewd-looking man of about forty-five. Poirot handed him the letter.
He opened and read it.
'Ah yes,' he said, 'I see.' He laid it down on the desk and looked at Poirot.
'The owners have instructed me to give you all the help I can about the sad death of Mrs. Louise Charpentier. Now what do you want to know exactly. Monsieur' - he glanced at the letter again - 'Monsieur Poirot?'
'This is, of course, all quite confidential,' said Poirot. 'Her relatives have been communicated with by the police and by a solicitor, but they were anxious as I was coming to England, that I should get a few more personal facts, if you understand me. It is distressing when one can get only official reports.'
'Yes, quite so. Yes, I quite understand that it must be. Well, I'll tell you anything I can.'
'How long had she been here and how did she come to take the flat?'
'She'd been here - I can look it up exactly - about two years. There was a vacant tenancy and I imagine that the lady who was leaving, being an acquaintance of hers, told her in advance that she was giving it up. That was a Mrs. Wilder Worked for the B.B.C. Had been in London for some time, but was going to Canada. Very nice lady - I don't think she knew the deceased well at all. Just happened to mention she was giving up the flat. Mrs. Charpentier liked the flat.'
