“Captain England and his wife were out to dinner.”
Poirot shook his head.
“That is not the kind of thing I mean. I will try the other hotel; the Mitre, is it not?”
“Oh, the Mitre,” said Miss Langdon. “Of course, anyone might have gone out walking from there.”
The disparagement of her tone, though vague, was evident, and Poirot beat a tactful retreat.
Ten minutes later he was repeating the scene, this time with Miss Cole, the brusque manageress of the Mitre, a less pretentious hotel with lower prices, situated close to the station.
“There was one gentleman out late that night, came in about half-past twelve, as far as I can remember. Quite a habit of his it was, to go out for a walk at that time of the evening. He had done it once or twice before. Let me see now, what was his name? Just for the moment I can’t remember it.”
She pulled a large ledger toward her and began turning over the pages.
“Nineteenth, twentieth, twenty-first, twenty-second. Ah, here we are. Naylor, Captain Humphrey Naylor.”
“He had stayed here before? You know him well?”
“Once before,” said Miss Cole, “about a fortnight earlier. He went out then in the evening, I remember.”
“He came to play golf, eh?”
“I suppose so,” said Miss Cole; “that’s what most of the gentlemen come for.”
“Very true,” said Poirot. “Well, Mademoiselle, I thank you infinitely, and I wish you good day.”
He went back to Mon Repos with a very thoughtful face. Once or twice he drew something from his pocket and looked at it.
“It must be done,” he murmured to himself, “and soon, as soon as I can make the opportunity.”
His first proceeding on re-entering the house was to ask Parsons where Miss Margrave might be found. He was told that she was in the small study dealing with Lady Astwell’s correspondence, and the information seemed to afford Poirot satisfaction.
He found the little study without difficulty. Lily Margrave was seated at a desk by the window, writing. But for her the room was empty. Poirot carefully shut the door behind him and came toward the girl.
“I may have a little minute of your time, Mademoiselle, you will be so kind?”
“Certainly.”
Lily Margrave put the papers aside and turned toward him.
“What can I do for you?”
“On the evening of the tragedy, Mademoiselle, I understand that when Lady Astwell went to her husband you went straight up to bed. Is that so?”
Lily Margrave nodded.
“You did not come down again, by any chance?”
The girl shook her head.
“I think you said, Mademoiselle, that you had not at any time that evening been in the Tower room?”
“I don’t remember saying so, but as a matter of fact that is quite true. I was not in the Tower room that evening.”
Poirot raised his eyebrows.
“Curious,” he murmured.
“What do you mean?”
“Very curious,” murmured Hercule Poirot again. “How do you account, then, for this?”
He drew from his pocket a little scrap of stained green chiffon and held it up for the girl’s inspection.
Her expression did not change, but he felt rather than heard the sharp intake of breath.
“I don’t understand, M. Poirot.”
“You wore, I understand, a green chiffon dress that evening, Mademoiselle. This” — he tapped the scrap in his fingers — “was torn from it.”
“And you found it in the Tower room?” asked the girl sharply. “Whereabouts?”
Hercule Poirot looked at the ceiling.
“For the moment shall we just say — in the Tower room?”
For the first time, a look of fear sprang into the girl’s eyes. She began to speak, then checked herself. Poirot watched her small white hands clenching themselves on the edge of the desk.
“I wonder if I did go into the Tower room that evening?” she mused. “Before dinner, I mean. I don’t think so. I am almost sure I didn’t. If that scrap has been in the Tower room all this time, it seems to me a very extraordinary thing the police did not find it right away.”
“The police,” said the little man, “do not think of the things that Hercule Poirot thinks of.”
“I may have run in there for a minute just before dinner,” mused Lily Margrave, “or it may have been the night before. I wore the same dress then. Yes, I am almost sure it was the night before.”
“I think not,” said Poirot evenly.
“Why?”
He only shook his head slowly from side to side.
“What do you mean?” whispered the girl.
She was leaning forward, staring at him, all the color ebbing out of her face.
“You do not notice, Mademoiselle, that this fragment is stained? There is no doubt about it, that stain is human blood.”
“You mean—?”
“I mean, Mademoiselle, that you were in the Tower room after the crime was committed, not before. I think you will do well to tell me the whole truth, lest worse should befall you.”
He stood up now, a stern little figure of a man, his forefinger pointed accusingly at the girl.
“How did you find out?” gasped Lily.
“No matter, Mademoiselle. I tell you Hercule Poirot knows. I know all about Captain Humphrey Naylor, and that you went down to meet him that night.”
(to be concluded next month)
What a Life!
by J. B. Priestley[6]
Writing in the “New Statesman and Nation,” of May 7, 1949,]. B. Priestley tells of a short visit he made to Stratford-on-Avon. First, he rhapsodizes on the landscape — “I never saw the countryside looking better... bright with Japanese flowering cherry trees... the balanced green and brown masses and the melting blue distances of the old water-colours... the Cotswold stone soaked in sunlight... Shallow’s orchard, with Cousin Silence invisible beneath the fleecy branches. By Heaven — what a country!... It was the journey, not the end of it, that was Shakespearean. We might have been looking over his shoulder.”
Now, what do you think Shakespeare Town suggested to so eminent a playwright and novelist as Mr. Priestley? An historical drama? A sonnet sequence? It was Mr. Priestley’s first visit to Stratford in “at least ten years,” yet to his creative mind came, of all things — but let the author of THE GOOD COMPANIONS and LABURNUM GROVE speak for himself:
“A good detective story might be written about a scholar, deep in Elizabethan research, who is mysteriously murdered. After the police retire from the case, baffled, the eccentric private detective proves that the murderer was an emissary of the Stratford Town Council, whose spies had learned that the scholar was about to prove once and for all that Shakespeare had not written the plays attributed to him.”
Ah, what a spur to the creative impulses is the theme of detection! Indeed, if Shakespeare were alive today, it is more than probable that even he, the greatest of them all, would still be preoccupied with the enduring verities — madness and murder. And inspired by sciences which were not yet born in his time, would not the good Will have followed through? For in real life today {and surely Will would have remained a realist) is not dementia dogged by diagnosis? And hard on the heels of homicide do we not have the modern manhunter? And so in literature...
It was one of those hotels that are called “quiet hotels for gentle-folk.” Apparently, gentlefolk have a passion for an atmosphere of dinginess and slight decay. This hotel, like many of its kind, had two lounges: one at the front, in which people merely waited for one another and for the telephone, and one at the back, the “Brown Lounge,” in which a number of large pieces of furniture and some gigantic steel engravings waited for the Day of Judgment. It has been often suggested that there should be public lethal chambers for those unfortunates who are bent on suicide. This “Brown Lounge” would make an excellent lethal chamber, for, even as it is, once inside it your thoughts turn naturally to the end of this life. Only young and bold spirits could withstand its insidious melancholy. There are two of them in there now.