I will satisfy your curiosity. I found I was having less and less patience with parents. Their aims for their daughters are shortsighted and quite frankly stupid.' Miss Battersby was, as Poirot knew from looking up her qualifications, a very wellknown mathematician.
'Do not think that I lead an idle life,' said Miss Battersby. 'I lead a life where the work is far more congenial to me. I coach senior students. And now, please, may I know the reason for your interest in the girl, Norma Restarick?'
'There is some occasion for anxiety.
She has, to put it baldly, disappeared.' Miss Battersby continued to look quite unconcerned.
'Indeed? When you say 'disappeared', I presume you mean that she has left home without telling her parents where she was going. Oh, I believe her mother is dead, so without telling her father where she was going. That is really not at all uncommon nowadays, M. Poirot. Mr. Restarick has not consulted the police?'
'He is adamant on that subject. He refuses definitely.'
'I can assure you that I have no knowledge as to where the girl is. I have heard nothing from her. Indeed, I have had no news from her since she left Meadowfield. So I fear I cannot help you in any way.'
'It is not precisely that kind of information that I want. I want to know what kind of a girl she is - how you would describe her. Not her personal appearance. I do not mean that. I mean as to her personality and characteristics.'
'Norma, at school, was a perfectly ordinary girl. Not scholastically brilliant, but her work was adequate.'
'Not a neurotic type?' Miss Battersby considered. Then she said slowly: 'No, I would not say so.
Not more, that is, than might be expected considering her home circumstances.'
'You mean her invalid mother?'
'Yes. She came from a broken home.
The father, to whom I think she was very devoted, left home suddenly with another woman - a fact which her mother quite naturally resented. She probably upset the daughter more than she need have done by voicing her resentment without restraint.'
'Perhaps it may be more to the point if I ask you your opinion of the late Mrs. Restarick?'
'What you are asking for is my private opinion?'
'If you do not object?'
'No, I have no hesitation at all in answering your question. Home conditions are very important in a girl's life and I have always studied them as much as I can through the meagre information that comes to me. Mrs. Restarick was a worthy and upright woman, I should say. Selfrighteous, censorious and handicapped in life by being an extremely stupid one!'
'Ah,' said Poirot appreciatively.
'She was also, I would say, a malade iwaginaire. A type that would exaggerate her ailments. The type of woman who is always in and out of nursing homes. An unfortunate home background for a girl - especially a girl who has no very definite personality of her own. Norma had no marked intellectual ambitions, she had no confidence in herself, she was not a girl to whom I would recommend a career. A nice ordinary job followed by marriage and children was what I would have hoped for her.'
'You saw - forgive me for asking - no signs at any time of mental instability?'
'Mental instability?' said Miss Battersby. 'Rubbish!'
'So that is what you say. Rubbish!
And not neurotic?'
'Any girl, or almost any girl, can be neurotic, especially in adolescence, and in her first encounters with the world. She is still immature, and needs guidance in her first encounters with sex. Girls are frequently attracted to completely unsuitable, sometimes even dangerous young men. There are, it seems, no parents nowadays, or hardly any, with the strength of character to save them from this, so they often go through a time of hysterical misery, and perhaps make an unsuitable marriage which ends not long after in divorce.'
'But Norma showed no signs of mental instability?' Poirot persisted with the question.
'She is an emotional but normal girl,' said Miss Battersby. 'Mental instability! As I said before - rubbish! She's probably run away with some young man to get married, and there's nothing more normal than that!'
Chapter Twenty-One
POIROT sat in his big square armchair.
His hands rested on the arms, his eyes looked at the chimney-piece in front of him without seeing it. By his elbow was a small table and on it, neatly clipped together, were various documents.
Reports from Mr. Goby, information obtained from his friend. Chief Inspector Neele, a series of separate pages under the heading of 'Hearsay, gossip, rumour' and the sources from which it had been obtained.
At the moment he had no need to consult these documents. He had, in fact, read them through carefully and laid them there in case there was any particular point he wished to refer to once more. He wanted now to assemble together in his mind all that he knew and had learned because he was convinced that these things must form a pattern. There must be a pattern there. He was considering now, from what exact angle to approach it. He was not one to trust in enthusiasm for some particular intuition. He was not an intuitive person - but he did have feelings. The important thing was not the feelings themselves - but what might have caused them. It was the cause that was interesting, the cause was so often not what you thought it was.
You had often to work it out by logic, by sense and by knowledge.
What did he feel about this case - what kind of a case was it? Let him start from the general, then proceed to the particular.
What were the salient facts of this case?
Money was one of them, he thought, though he did not know how. Somehow or other, money… He also thought, increasingly so, that there was evil somewhere.
He knew evil. He had met it before. He knew the tang of it, the taste of it, the way it went. The trouble was that here he did not yet know exactly where it was. He had taken certain steps to combat evil. He hoped they would be sufficient. Something was happening, something was in progress, that was not yet accomplished. Someone, somewhere, was in danger.
The trouble was that the facts pointed both ways. If the person he thought was in danger was really in danger, there seemed so far as he could see no reason why. Why should that particular person be in danger?
There was no motive. If the person he thought was in danger was not in danger, then the whole approach might have to be completely reversed… Everything that pointed one way he must turn round and look at from the completely opposite point of view.
He left that for the moment in the balance, and he came from there to the personalities - to the people. What pattern did they make? What part were they playing?
First - Andrew Restarick. He had accumulated by now a fair amount of information about Andrew Restarick. A general picture of his life before and after going abroad. A restless man, never sticking to one place or purpose long, but generally liked. Nothing of the wastrel about him, nothing shoddy or tricky. Not, perhaps, a strong personality? Weak in many ways?
Poirot frowned, dissatisfied. That picture did not somehow fit the Andrew Restarick that he himself had met. Not weak surely, with that thrust-out chin, the steady eyes, the air of resolution. He had been a successful business man, too, apparently.
Good at his job in the earlier years, and he had put through good deals in South Africa and in South America. He had increased his holdings. It was a success story that he had brought home with him, not one of failure. How then could he be a weak personality? Weak, perhaps, only where women were concerned. He had made a mistake in his marriage-married the wrong woman… Pushed into it perhaps by his family? And then he had met the other woman. Just that one woman? Or had there been several women? It was hard to find a record of that kind after so many years. Certainly he had not been a notoriously unfaithful husband. He had had a normal home, he had been fond, by all accounts, of his small daughter. But then he had come across a woman whom he had cared for enough to leave his home and to leave his country. It had been a real love affair.
