He looked interested.
'That's what you felt once, isn't it?' said Poirot, turning to him.
'In the case of Mrs. McGinty. Yes.'
'You weren't satisfied,' said Poirot, 'when that extremely difficult young man was arrested. He had every reason for doing it, he looked as though he had done it, everyone thought he had done it. But you knew he hadn't done it. You were so sure of it that you came to me and told me to go along to see what I could find out.'
'See if you could help-and you did help, didn't you?' said Spence.
Poirot sighed.
'Fortunately, yes. But what a tiresome young man he was.
If ever a young man deserved to be hung, not because he had done a murder but because he wouldn't help anyone to prove fhat he hadn't. Now we have the Ravenscroft case. You say, Superintendent Garroway, something was wrong?'
'Yes, I felt quite sure of it if you understand what I mean.'
'I do understand,' said Poirot. 'And so does Spence. One does come across these things sometimes. The proofs are there, the motive, the opportunity, the clues, the mise en scene, it's all there. A complete blueprint, as you might say.
But all the same, those whose profession it is, know. They know that it's all wrong, just like a critic in the artistic world knows when a picture is all wrong. Knows when it's a fake and not the real thing.'
'There wasn't anything I could do about it, either,' said Superintendent Garroway. 'I looked into it, around it, up above it and down below it, as you might say. I talked to the people. There was nothing there. It looked like a suicide pact, it had all the marks of the suicide pact. Alternatively, of course, it could be a husband who shot a wife and then himself, or a wife who shot her husband and then herself. All those three things happen. When one comes across them, one knows they have happened. But in most cases one has some idea of why.'
'There wasn't any real idea of why in this case, was that it?' said Poirot.
'Yes. That's it. You see, the moment you begin to inquire into a case, to inquire about people and things, you get a very good picture as a rule of what their lives have been like. This was a couple, aging, the husband with a good record, a wife affectionate, pleasant, on good terms together. That's a thing one soon finds out about. They were happy living together.
They went for walks, they played picquet, and poker patience with each other in the evenings. They had children who caused them no particular anxiety. A boy in school in England and a girl in a pensionnat in Switzerland. There was nothing wrong with their lives as far as one could tell. From such medical evidence as one could obtain, there was nothing definitely wrong with their health. The husband had suffered from high blood pressure at one time, but was in good condition by the taking of suitable medicaments which kept him on an even keel. His wife was slightly deaf and had had a little minor heart trouble, nothing to be worried about. Of course it could be, as does happen sometimes, that one or other of them had fears for their health. There are a lot of people who are in good health but are quite convinced they have cancer, are quite sure that they won't live another year. Sometimes that leads to their taking their own life. The Ravenscrofts didn't seem that kind of people. They seemed well balanced and placid.'
'So what did you really think?' said Poirot.
'The trouble is that I couldn't think. Looking back, I say to myself it was suicide. It could only have been suicide. For some reason or other they decided that life was unbearable to them. Not through financial trouble, not through health difficulties, not because of unhappiness. And there, you see, I came to a full stop. It had all the marks of suicide. I cannot see any other thing that could have happened except suicide.
They went for a walk. On that walk they took a revolver with them. The revolver lay between the two bodies. There were blurred fingerprints of both of them. Both of them in fact had handled it, but there was nothing to show who had fired it last. One tends to think the husband perhaps shot his wife and then himself. That is only because it seems more likely.
Well, why? A great many years have passed. When something reminds me now and again, something I read in the papers of bodies, a husband and wife's bodies somewhere, lying dead, having taken their own lives apparently, I think back and then I wonder again what happened in the Ravenscroft case.
Twelve years ago or fourteen and I still remember the Ravenscroft case and wonder-well, just the one word, I think. Why-why-why? Did the husband really hate his wife, and had hated her for a long time? Did the wife really hate her husband and want to get rid of him? Did they go on hating each other until they could bear it no longer?' Garroway broke off another piece of bread and chewed at it.
'You got some idea. Monsieur Poirot? Has somebody come to you and told you something that has awakened your interest particularly? Do you know something that might explain the 'Why'?'
'No. All the same,' said Poirot, 'you must have had a theory. Come now, you had a theory?'
'You're quite right, of course. One does have theories. One expects them all, or one of them at least, to work out, but they don't usually. I think that my theory was in the end that you couldn't look for the cause, because one didn't know enough.
What did I know about them? General Ravenscroft was close on sixty; his wife was thirty-five. All I knew of them, strictly speaking, was the last five or six years of their lives. The General had retired on a pension. They had come back to England from abroad and all the evidence that came to me, all the knowledge, was of a brief period during which they had first a house at Bournemouth and then moved to where they lived in the home where the tragedy took place. They had lived there peacefully, happily, their children came home there for school holidays. It was a peaceful period, I should say, at the end of what one presumed as a peaceful life. But then I thought, but how much did I know of that peaceful life? I knew of their life after retirement in England, of their family. There was no financial motive, no motive of hatred, no motive of sexual involvement, of intrusive love affairs. No.
But there was a period before that. What did I know about that? What I knew was a life spent mostly abroad with occasional visits home, a good record for the man, pleasant remembrances of her from friends of the wife's. There was no outstanding tragedy, dispute, nothing that one knew of. But then I mightn't have known. One doesn't know. There was a period of, say, twenty-thirty years, years from childhood to the time they married, the time they lived abroad in India and other places. Perhaps the root of the tragedy was there.
There is a proverb my grandmother used to repeat: Old sins have long shadows. Was the cause of death some long shadow, a shadow from the past? That's not an easy thing to find out about. You find out about a man's record, what friends or acquaintances say, but you don't know any inner details.
Well, I think little by little the theory grew up in my mind that that would have been the place to look, if I could have looked. Something that had happened then, in another country, perhaps. Something that had been thought to be forgotten, to have passed out of existence, but which still perhaps existed.
A grudge from the past, some happening that nobody knew about, that had happened elsewhere, not in their life in England, but which may have been there. If one had known where to look for it.'
'Not the sort of thing, you mean,' said Poirot, 'that anybody would remember. I mean, remember nowadays. Something that no friends of theirs in England, perhaps, would have known about.'
'Their friends in England seem to have been mostly made since retirement, though I suppose old friends did come and visit them or see them occasionally. But one doesn't hear about things that happened in the past. People forget.'
'Yes,' said Poirot thoughtfully. 'People forget.'
'They're not like elephants,' said Superintendent Garroway, giving a faint smile. 'Elephants, they always say, remember everything.'
'It is odd that you should say that,' said Poirot.
'That I should say about long sins?'
'Not so much that. It was your mention of elephants that interested me.' Superintendent Garroway looked at Poirot with some surprise. He seemed to be waiting for more. Spence also cast a quick glance at his old friend.
'Something that happened in India, perhaps,' he suggested.
'I mean-well, that's where elephants come from, isn't it? Or from Africa. Anyway, who's been talking to you about elephants?' he added.
'A friend of mine happened to mention them,' said Poirot. 'Someone you know,' he said to Superintendent Spence. 'Mrs. Oliver.'
'Oh, Mrs. Ariadne Oliver. Well!' He paused.
