appeared improbable, irresponsible, and wholly fortuitous. In actual fact, of course, they were nothing of the sort.
Assessed correctly, each had its particular place in a particular universe. Assembled in their proper place in their particular universe, they not only made sense, they made a picture. In other words, Hercule Poirot was doing a jigsaw puzzle.
He looked down at where a rectangle still showed improbably shaped gaps. It was an occupation he found soothing and pleasant. It brought disorder into order. It had, he reflected, a certain resemblance to his own profession. There, too, one was faced with various improbably shaped and unlikely facts which, though seeming to bear no relationship to each other, yet did each have its properly balanced part in assembling the whole. His fingers deftly picked up an improbable piece of dark grey and fitted it into a blue sky. It was, he now perceived, part of an aeroplane.
'Yes,' murmured Poirot to himself, 'that is what one must do. The unlikely piece here, the improbable piece there, the oh-so-rational piece that is not what it seems; all of these have their appointed place, and once they are fitted in, eh bien, there is an end of the business! All is clear. All is – as they say nowadays – in the picture.'
He fitted in, in rapid succession, a small piece of a minaret, another piece that looked as though it was part of a striped awning and was actually the backside of a cat, and a missing piece of sunset that had changed with Turneresque suddenness from orange to pink.
If one knew what to look for, it would be so easy, said Hercule Poirot to himself. But one does not know what to look for. And so one looks in the wrong places or for the wrong things. He sighed vexedly. His eyes strayed from the jigsaw puzzle in front of him to the chair on the other side of the fireplace. There, not half an hour ago, Inspector Bland had sat consuming tea and crumpets (square crumpets) and talking sadly. He had had to come to London on police business and that police business having been accomplished, he had come to call upon M. Poirot. He had wondered, he explained, whether M. Poirot had any ideas. He had then proceeded to explain his own ideas. On every point he outlined, Poirot had agreed with him. Inspector Bland, so Poirot thought, had made a very fair and unprejudiced survey of the case.
It was now a month, nearly five weeks, since the occurrences at Nasse House. It had been five weeks of stagnation and of negation. Lady Stubbs's body had not been recovered. Lady Stubbs, if living, had not been traced. The odds, Inspector Bland pointed out, were strongly against her being alive. Poirot agreed with him.
'Of course,' said Bland, 'the body might not have been washed up. There's no telling with a body once it's in the water. It may show up yet, though it will be pretty unrecognisable when it does.'
'There is a third possibility,' Poirot pointed out. Bland nodded.
'Yes,' he said,' I've thought of that. I keep thinking of that, in fact. You mean the body's there – at Nasse, hidden somewhere where we've never thought of looking. It could be, you know. It just could be. With an old house, and with grounds like that, there are places you'd never think of – that you'd never know were there.'
He paused a moment, ruminated, and then said;
'There's a house I was in only the other day. They'd built an air-raid shelter, you know, in the war. A flimsy sort of more or less home-made job in the garden, by the wall of the house, and had made a way from it into the house – into the cellar. Well, the war ended, the shelter tumbled down, they heaped it up in irregular mounds and made a kind of rockery of it. Walking through that garden now, you'd never think that the place had once been an air-raid shelter and that there was a chamber underneath. Looks as though it was always meant to be a rockery. And all the time, behind a wine bin in the cellar, there's a passage leading into it. That's what I mean. That kind of thing. Some sort of way into some kind of place that no outsider would know about. I don't suppose there's an actual Priest's Hole or anything of that kind?'
'Hardly – not at that period.'
'That's what Mr Weyman says – he says the house was built about 1790 or thereabouts. No reason for priests to hide themselves by that date. All the same, you know, there might be – somewhere, some alteration in the structure – something that one of the family might know about. What do you think, M. Poirot?'
'It is possible, yes,' said Poirot. 'Mais oui, decidedly it is an idea. If one accepts the possibility, then the next thing is – who would know about it? Anyone staying in the house might know, I suppose?'
'Yes. Of course it would let out De Sousa.' The inspector looked dissatisfied. De Sousa was still his preferred suspect. 'As you say, anyone who lived in the house, such as a servant or one of the family, might know about it. Someone just staying in the house would be less likely. People who only came in from outside, like the Legges, less likely still.'
'The person who would certainly know about such a thing, and who could tell you if you asked her, would be Mrs Folliat,' said Poirot.
Mrs Folliat, he thought, knew all there was to know about Nasse House. Mrs Folliat knew a great deal… Mrs Folliat had known straight away that Hattie Stubbs was dead. Mrs Folliat knew, before Marlene and Hattie Stubbs died, that it was a very wicked world and that there were very wicked people in it. Mrs Folliat, thought Poirot vexedly, was the key to the whole business. But Mrs Folliat, he reflected, was a key that would not easily turn in the lock.
'I've interviewed the lady several times,' said the inspector. 'Very nice, very pleasant she's been about everything, and seems very distressed that she can't suggest anything helpful.'
Can't or won't? thought Poirot. Bland was perhaps thinking the same.
'There's a type of lady,' he said, 'that you can't force. You can't frighten them, or persuade them, or diddle them.'
No, Poirot thought, you couldn't force or persuade or diddle Mrs Folliat.
The inspector had finished his tea, and sighed and gone, and Poirot had got out his jigsaw puzzle to alleviate his mounting exasperation. For he was exasperated. Both exasperated and humiliated. Mrs Oliver had summoned him, Hercule Poirot, to elucidate a mystery. She had felt that there was something wrong, and there had been something wrong. And she had looked confidently to Hercule Poirot, first to prevent it – and he had not prevented it – and, secondly, to discover the killer, and he had not discovered the killer. He was in a fog, in the type of fog where there is from time to time baffling gleams of light. Every now and then, or so it seemed to him, he had had one of those glimpses. And each time he had failed to penetrate farther. He had failed to assess the value of what he seemed, for one brief moment, to have seen.
Poirot got up, crossed to the other side of the hearth, rearranged the second square chair so that it was at a definite geometric angle, and sat down in it. He had passed from the jigsaw of painted wood and cardboard to the jigsaw of a murder problem. He took a notebook from his pocket and wrote in small neat characters:
'Etienne De Sousa, Amanda Brewis, Alec Legge, Sally Legge, Michael Weyman.'
It was physically impossible for Sir George or Jim Warburton to have killed Marlene Tucker. Since it was not physically impossible for Mrs Oliver to have done so, he added her name after a brief space. He also added the name of Mrs Masterton since he did not remember of his own knowledge having seen Mrs Masterton constantly on the lawn between four o'clock and quarter to five. He added the name of Henden, the butler; more, perhaps, because a sinister butler had figured in Mrs Oliver's Murder Hunt than because he had really any suspicions of the dark-haired artist with the gong stick. He also put down 'Boy in turtle shirt' with a query mark after it. Then he smiled, shook his head, took a pin from the lapel of his jacket, shut his eyes and stabbed with it. It was as good a way as any other, he thought.
He was justifiably annoyed when the pin proved to have transfixed the last entry.
'I am an imbecile,' said Hercule Poirot. 'What has a boy in a turtle shirt to do with this?'
But he also realised he must have had some reason for including this enigmatic character in his list. He recalled again the day he had sat in the Folly, and the surprise on the boy's face at seeing him there. Not a very pleasant face, despite the youthful good looks. An arrogant ruthless face. The young man had come there for some purpose. He had come to meet someone, and it followed that that someone was a person whom he could not meet, or did not wish to meet, in the ordinary way. It was a meeting, in fact, to which attention must not be called. A guilty meeting. Something to do with the murder?
Poirot pursued his reflections. A boy who was staying at the Youth Hostel – that is to say, a boy who would be in that neighbourhood for two nights at most. Had he come there casually? One of the many young students visiting Britain? Or had he come there for a special purpose, to meet some special person? There could have been what seemed a casual encounter on the day of the fete – possibly there had been.
I know a good deal, said Hercule Poirot to himself. I have in my hands many, many pieces of this jigsaw. I
