Curtain: Poirot's Last Case (10 page)

I didn’t contradict him. I waited, allowing him to talk. Then I went firmly round the corner of the house again.

The two of them had disappeared now, but I had a shrewd idea of where they might be. There was a summer-house concealed in a grove of lilac trees not far away.

I went towards it. I think Norton was still with me, but I’m not sure.

As I got nearer I heard voices and stopped. It was Allerton’s voice I heard.

‘Well, then, my dear girl, that’s settled. Don’t make any more objections. You go up to town tomorrow. I’ll say I’m running over to Ipswich to stay with a pal for a night or two. You wire from London that you can’t get back. And who’s to know of that charming little dinner at my flat? You won’t regret it, I can promise you.’

I felt Norton tugging at me, and suddenly, meekly, I turned. I almost laughed at the sight of his worried anxious face. I let him drag me back to the house. I pretended to give in because I knew, at that moment, exactly what I was going to do . . .

I said to him clearly and distinctly: ‘Don’t worry, old chap. It’s all no good – I see that now. You can’t control your children’s lives. I’m through.’

He was ridiculously relieved.

Shortly afterwards, I told him I was going to bed early. I’d got a bit of a headache, I said.

He had no suspicions at all of what I was going to do.

V

I paused for a moment in the corridor. It was quite quiet. There was no one about. The beds had been all turned down ready for the night. Norton, who had a room on this side, I had left downstairs. Elizabeth Cole was playing bridge. Curtiss, I knew, would be downstairs having his supper. I had the place to myself.

I flatter myself that I have not worked with Poirot for so many years in vain. I knew just what precautions to take.

Allerton was
not
going to meet Judith in London tomorrow.

Allerton was not going anywhere tomorrow . . . The whole thing was really so ridiculously simple.

I went to my own room and picked up my bottle of aspirins. Then I went into Allerton’s room and into the bathroom. The tablets of Slumberyl were in the cupboard. Eight, I considered, ought to do the trick. One or two was the stated dose. Eight, therefore, ought to be ample. Allerton himself had said the toxic dose was not high. I read the label. ‘It is dangerous to exceed the prescribed dose.’

I smiled to myself.

I wrapped a silk handkerchief round my hand and unscrewed the bottle carefully. There must be no fingerprints on it.

I emptied out the tablets. Yes, they were almost exactly the same size as the aspirins. I put eight aspirins in the bottle, then filled up with the Slumberyls, leaving out eight of them. The bottle now looked exactly as it had before. Allerton would notice no difference.

I went back to my room. I had a bottle of whisky there – most of us had at Styles. I got out two glasses and a syphon. I’d never known Allerton refuse a drink yet. When he came up I’d ask him in for a nightcap.

I tried the tablets in a little of the spirit. They dissolved easily enough. I tasted the mixture gingerly. A shade bitter perhaps but hardly noticeable. I had my plan. I should be just pouring myself out a drink when Allerton came up. I would hand that to him and pour myself out another. All quite easy and natural.

He could have no idea of my feelings – unless of course Judith had told him. I considered this for a moment, but decided that I was quite safe here. Judith never told anyone anything.

He would probably believe me to be quite unsuspicious of their plan.

I had nothing to do but to wait. It would be a long time, probably an hour or two, before Allerton came up to bed. He was always a late bird.

I sat there quietly waiting.

A sudden knock on the door made me start. It was only Curtiss, however. Poirot was asking for me.

I came to myself with a shock. Poirot! I had never once thought of him all evening. He must have wondered what had become of me. It worried me a little. First of all because I was ashamed of never having been near him, and secondly I did not want him to suspect that anything out of the way had happened.

I followed Curtiss across the passage.

‘
Eh bien!
’ exclaimed Poirot. ‘So you desert me,
hein
?’

I forced a yawn and an apologetic smile. ‘Awfully sorry, old boy,’ I said. ‘But to tell the truth I’ve got such a blinding headache I can hardly see out of my eyes. It’s the thunder in the air, I suppose. I really have been feeling quite muzzy with it – in fact, so much so I entirely forgot I hadn’t been in to say good night to you.’

As I had hoped, Poirot was immediately solicitous. He offered remedies. He fussed. He accused me of having sat about in the open air in a draught. (On the hottest day of the summer!) I refused aspirin on the grounds that I had already taken some, but I was not able to avoid being given a cup of sweet and wholly disgusting chocolate!

‘It nourishes the nerves, you comprehend,’ Poirot explained.

I drank it to avoid argument and then, with Poirot’s anxious and affectionate exclamations still ringing in my ears, I bade him good night.

I returned to my own room, and shut the door ostentatiously. Later, I opened it a crack with the utmost caution. I could not fail now to hear Allerton when he came. But it would be some time yet.

I sat there waiting. I thought of my dead wife. Once, under my breath, I murmured: ‘You understand, darling, I’m going to save her.’

She had left Judith in my care, I was not going to fail her.

In the quiet and the stillness I suddenly felt that Cinders was very near to me.

I felt almost as though she were in the room. And still I sat on grimly, waiting.

I

There is something about writing down an anti-climax in cold blood that is somewhat shattering to one’s self-esteem.

For the truth of the matter is, you see, that I sat there waiting for Allerton and that I fell asleep!

Not so surprising really, I suppose. I had slept very badly the night before. I had been out in the air the whole day. I was worn out with worry and the strain of nerving myself for doing what I had decided to do. On top of all that was the heavy thundery weather. Possibly even the fierce effort of concentration I was making helped.

Anyway, it happened. I fell asleep there in my chair, and when I woke birds were twittering outside, the sun was up and there was I, cramped and uncomfortable, slipped down in my chair in my evening dress, with a foul taste in the mouth and a splitting head.

I was bewildered, incredulous, disgusted, and finally immeasurably and overwhelmingly relieved.

Who was it who wrote, ‘The darkest day, lived till tomorrow, will have passed away’? And how true it is. I saw now, clearly and sanely, how overwrought and wrong-headed I had been. Melodramatic, lost to all sense of proportion. I had actually made up my mind to kill another human being.

At this moment my eyes fell on the glass of whisky in front of me. With a shudder I got up, drew the curtains and poured it out of the window. I must have been mad last night!

I shaved, had a bath and dressed. Then, feeling very much better, I went across to Poirot. He always woke very early, I knew. I sat down and made a clean breast of the whole thing to him.

I may say it was a great relief.

He shook his head gently at me. ‘Ah, but what follies it is you contemplate. I am glad you came to confess your sins to me. But why, my dear friend, did you not come to me last night and tell me what was in your mind?’

I said shame-facedly: ‘I was afraid, I suppose, that you would have tried to stop me.’

‘Assuredly I would have stopped you. Ah that, certainly. Do you think I want to see you hanged by the neck, all on account of a very unpleasant scoundrel called Major Allerton?’

‘I shouldn’t have been caught,’ I said. ‘I’d taken every precaution.’

‘That is what all murderers think. You had the true mentality! But let me tell you,
mon ami
, you were not as clever as you thought yourself.’

‘I took every precaution. I wiped my fingerprints off the bottle.’

‘Exactly. You also wiped Allerton’s fingerprints off. And when he is found dead, what happens? They perform the autopsy and it is established that he died of an overdose of Slumberyl. Did he take it by accident or intention?
Tiens
, his fingerprints are not on the bottle. But why not? Whether accident or suicide he would have no reason to wipe them off. And then they analyse the remaining tablets and find nearly half of them have been replaced by aspirin.’

‘Well, practically everyone has aspirin tablets,’ I murmured weakly.

‘Yes, but it is not everyone who has a daughter whom Allerton is pursuing with dishonourable intentions – to use an old-fashioned dramatic phrase. And you have had a quarrel with your daughter on the subject the day before. Two people, Boyd Carrington and Norton, can swear to your violent feeling against the man. No, Hastings, it would not have looked too good. Attention would immediately have been focused upon you, and by that time you would probably have been in such a state of fear – or even remorse – that some good solid inspector of police would have made up his mind quite definitely that you were the guilty party. It is quite possible, even, that someone may have seen you tampering with the tablets.’

‘They couldn’t. There was no one about.’

‘There is a balcony outside the window. Somebody might have been there, peeping in. Or, who knows, someone might have been looking through the keyhole.’

‘You’ve got keyholes on the brain, Poirot. People don’t really spend their time looking through keyholes as much as you seem to think.’

Poirot half closed his eyes and remarked that I had always had too trusting a nature.

‘And let me tell you, very funny things happen with keys in this house. Me, I like to feel that my door is locked on the inside, even if the good Curtiss is in the adjoining room. Soon after I am here, my key disappears – but entirely! I have to have another one made.’

‘Well, anyway,’ I said with a deep breath of relief, my mind still laden with my own troubles, ‘it didn’t come off. It’s awful to think one can get worked up like that.’ I lowered my voice. ‘Poirot, you don’t think that because – because of that murder long ago there’s a sort of infection in the air?’

‘A virus of murder, you mean? Well, it is an interesting suggestion.’

‘Houses do have an atmosphere,’ I said thoughtfully. ‘This house has a bad history.’

Poirot nodded. ‘Yes. There have been people here – several of them – who desired deeply that someone else should die. That is true enough.’

‘I believe it gets hold of one in some way. But now, Poirot, tell me, what am I to do about all this – Judith and Allerton, I mean. It’s got to be stopped somehow. What do you think I’d better do?’

‘Do nothing,’ said Poirot with emphasis.

‘Oh, but –’

‘Believe me, you will do least harm by not interfering.’

‘If I were to tackle Allerton –’

‘What can you say or do? Judith is twenty-one and her own mistress.’

‘But I feel I ought to be able –’

Poirot interrupted me. ‘No, Hastings. Do not imagine that you are clever enough, forceful enough, or even cunning enough to impose your personality on either of those two people. Allerton is accustomed to dealing with angry and impotent fathers and probably enjoys it as a good joke. Judith is not the sort of creature who can be browbeaten. I would advise you – if I advised you at all – to do something very different. I would trust her if I were you.’

I stared at him.

‘Judith,’ said Hercule Poirot, ‘is made of very fine stuff. I admire her very much.’

I said, my voice unsteady: ‘I admire her, too. But I’m afraid for her.’

Poirot nodded his head with sudden energy. ‘I, too, am afraid for her,’ he said. ‘But not in the way you are. I am terribly afraid. And I am powerless – or nearly so. And the days go by. There is danger, Hastings, and it is very close.’

II

I knew as well as Poirot that the danger was very close. I had more reason to know it than he had, because of what I had actually overheard the previous night.

Nevertheless I pondered on that phrase of Poirot’s as I went down to breakfast. ‘I would trust her if I were you.’

It had come unexpectedly, but it had given me an odd sense of comfort. And almost immediately, the truth of it was justified. For Judith had obviously changed her mind about going up to London that day.

Instead she went off with Franklin to the lab as usual directly after breakfast, and it was clear that they were to have an arduous and busy day there.

A feeling of intense thanksgiving rushed over me. How mad, how despairing I had been last night. I had assumed – assumed quite certainly – that Judith had yielded to Allerton’s specious proposals. But it was true, I reflected now, that I had never heard her actually assent. No, she was too fine, too essentially good and true, to give in. She had refused the rendezvous.

Allerton had breakfasted early, I found, and gone off to Ipswich. He, then, had kept to the plan and must assume that Judith was going up to London as arranged.

‘Well,’ I thought grimly, ‘he will get a disappointment.’

Boyd Carrington came along and remarked rather grumpily that I looked very cheerful this morning.

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I’ve had some good news.’

He said that it was more than he had. He’d had a tiresome telephone call from the architect, some building difficulty – a local surveyor cutting up rough. Also worrying letters. And he was afraid he’d let Mrs Franklin overdo herself the day before.

Mrs Franklin was certainly making up for her recent bout of good health and spirits. She was, so I gathered from Nurse Craven, making herself quite impossible.

Nurse Craven had had to give up her day off which had been promised her to go and meet some friends,

and she was decidedly sour about it. Since early morning Mrs Franklin had been calling for sal volatile, hot-water bottles, various patent food and drinks, and was unwilling to let Nurse leave the room. She had neuralgia, a pain round the heart, cramps in her feet and legs, cold shivers and I don’t know what else.

I may say here and now that neither I, nor anyone else, was inclined to be really alarmed. We all put it down as part of Mrs Franklin’s hypochondriacal tendencies.

This was true of Nurse Craven and Dr Franklin as well.

The latter was fetched from the laboratory; he listened to his wife’s complaints, asked her if she would like the local doctor called in (violently negatived by Mrs Franklin); he then mixed her a sedative, soothed her as best he could and went off back to work again.

Nurse Craven said to me: ‘He knows, of course, she’s just playing up.’

‘You don’t really think there’s anything much the matter?’

‘Her temperature is normal, and her pulse is perfectly good. Just fuss, if you ask me.’

She was annoyed and spoke out more imprudently than usual.

‘She likes to interfere with anyone else enjoying themselves. She’d like her husband all worked up, and me running round after her, and even Sir William has got to be made to feel like a brute because he “overtired her yesterday”. She’s one of that kind.’

Nurse Craven was clearly finding her patient almost impossible today. I gathered that Mrs Franklin had been really extremely rude to her. She was the kind of woman whom nurses and servants instinctively disliked, not only because of the trouble she gave, but because of her manner of doing so.

So, as I say, none of us took her indisposition seriously.

The only exception was Boyd Carrington, who wandered round looking rather pathetically like a small boy who has been scolded.

How many times since then have I not gone over and over the events of that day, trying to remember something so far unheeded – some tiny forgotten incident, striving to remember exactly the manner of everybody. How far they were normal, or showed excitement.

Let me, once more, put down exactly what I remember of everybody.

Boyd Carrington, as I have said, looked uncomfortable and rather guilty. He seemed to think that he had been rather over-exuberant the day before and had been selfish in not thinking more of the frail health of his companion. He had been up once or twice to enquire about Barbara Franklin, and Nurse Craven, herself not in the best of tempers, had been tart and snappish with him. He had even been to the village and purchased a box of chocolates. This had been sent down. ‘Mrs Franklin couldn’t bear chocolates.’

Rather disconsolately, he opened the box in the smoking-room and Norton and I and he all solemnly helped ourselves.

Norton, I now think, had definitely something on his mind that morning. He was abstracted, once or twice his brows drew together as though he were puzzling over something.

He was fond of chocolates, and ate a good many in an abstracted fashion.

Outside, the weather had broken. Since ten o’clock the rain had been pouring down.

It had not the melancholy that sometimes accompanies a wet day. Actually it was a relief to us all.

Poirot had been brought down by Curtiss about midday and ensconced in the drawing-room. Here Elizabeth Cole had joined him and was playing the piano to him. She had a pleasant touch, and played Bach and Mozart, both favourite composers of my friend’s.

Franklin and Judith came up from the garden about a quarter to one. Judith looked white and strained. She was very silent, looked vaguely about her as though lost in a dream and then went away. Franklin sat down with us. He, too, looked tired and absorbed, and he had, too, the air of a man very much on edge.

I said, I remember, something about the rain being a relief, and he said quickly: ‘Yes. There are times when
something’s
got to break . . .’

And somehow I got the impression that it was not merely of the weather that he spoke. Awkward as always in his movements, he jerked against the table and upset half the chocolates. With his usual startled air, he apologized – apparently to the box.

‘Oh, sorry.’

It ought to have been funny, but somehow it wasn’t. He bent quickly and picked up the spilt chocolates.

Norton asked him if he had had a tiring morning. His smile flashed out then – eager, boyish, very much alive.

‘No – no – just realized, suddenly, I’ve been on the wrong track. Much simpler process altogether is what’s needed. Can take a short cut now.’

He stood swaying slightly to and fro on his feet, his eyes absent yet resolved.

‘Yes, short cut. Much the best way.’

III

If we were all nervy and aimless in the morning, the afternoon was unexpectedly pleasant. The sun came out, the temperature was cool and fresh. Mrs Luttrell was brought down and sat on the veranda. She was in excellent form – exercising her charm and manner with less gush than usual, and with no latent hint of vinegar in reserve. She chaffed her husband, but gently and with a kind of affection, and he beamed at her. It was really delightful to see them on such good terms.

Poirot permitted himself to be wheeled out also, and he was in good spirits too. I think he liked seeing the Luttrells on such a friendly footing with each other. The Colonel was looking years younger. His manner seemed less vacillating, he tugged less at his moustache. He even suggested that there might be some bridge that evening.

‘Daisy here misses her bridge.’

‘Indeed I do,’ said Mrs Luttrell.

Norton suggested it would be tiring for her.

‘I’ll play one rubber,’ said Mrs Luttrell, and added with a twinkle: ‘And I’ll behave myself and not bite poor George’s head off.’

‘My dear,’ protested her husband, ‘I know I’m a shocking player.’

‘And what of that?’ said Mrs Luttrell. ‘Doesn’t it give me grand pleasure badgering and bullying you about it?’