Third Girl (22 page)

F
our people sat in Poirot's room. Poirot in his square chair was drinking a glass of
sirop de cassis.
Norma and Mrs. Oliver sat on the sofa. Mrs. Oliver was looking particularly festive in unbecoming apple green brocade, surmounted by one of her more painstaking coiffures. Dr. Stillingfleet was sprawled out in a chair with his long legs stretched out, so that they seemed to reach half across the room.

“Now then, there are lots of things I want to know,” said Mrs. Oliver. Her voice was accusatory.

Poirot hastened to pour oil on troubled waters.

“But,
chère
Madame, consider. What I owe to you I can hardly express. All, but
all
my good ideas were suggested to me by you.”

Mrs. Oliver looked at him doubtfully.

“Was it not you who introduced to me the phrase ‘Third Girl?' It is there that I started—and there, too, that I ended—at the third girl of three living in a flat. Norma was always technically, I sup
pose, the Third Girl—but when I looked at things
the right way round
it all fell into place. The missing answer, the lost piece of the puzzle, every time it was the same—the third girl.

“It was always, if you comprehend me,
the person who was not there.
She was a name to me, no more.”

“I wonder I never connected her with Mary Restarick,” said Mrs. Oliver. “I'd seen Mary Restarick at Crosshedges, talked to her. Of course the first time I saw Frances Cary, she had black hair hanging all over her face. That would have put anyone off!”

“Again it was you, Madame, who drew my attention to how easily a woman's appearance is altered by the way she arranges her hair. Frances Cary, remember, had had dramatic training. She knew all about the art of swift makeup. She could alter her voice at need. As Frances, she had long black hair, framing her face and half hiding it, heavy dead white
maquillage,
dark pencilled eyebrows and mascara, with a drawling husky voice. Mary Restarick, with her wig of formally arranged golden hair with crimped waves, her conventional clothes, her slight Colonial accent, her brisk way of talking, presented a complete contrast. Yet one felt, from the beginning, that she was not quite
real.
What kind of a woman
was
she? I did not know.

“I was not clever about her—No—I, Hercule Poirot, was not clever at all.”

“Hear, hear,” said Dr. Stillingfleet. “First time I've ever heard
you
say that, Poirot! Wonders will never cease!”

“I don't really see why she wanted two personalities,” said Mrs. Oliver. “It seems unnecessarily confusing.”

“No. It was very valuable to her. It gave her, you see, a perpetual alibi whenever she wanted it. To think that it was there,
all the time, before my eyes, and I did not see it! There was the wig—I kept being subconsciously worried by it, but not seeing
why
I was worried. Two women—never, at any time, seen together. Their lives so arranged that no one noticed the large gaps in their time schedules when they were unaccounted for. Mary goes often to London, to shop, to visit house agents, to depart with a sheaf of orders to view, supposedly to spend her time that way. Frances goes to Birmingham, to Manchester, even flies abroad, frequents Chelsea with her special coterie of arty young men whom she employs in various capacities which would not be looked on with approval by the law. Special picture frames were designed for the Wedderburn Gallery. Rising young artists had ‘shows' there—their pictures sold quite well, and were shipped abroad or sent on exhibition with their frames stuffed with secret packets of heroin—Art rackets—skilful forgeries of the more obscure Old Masters—She arranged and organised all these things. David Baker was one of the artists she employed. He had the gift of being a marvellous copyist.”

Norma murmured: “Poor David. When I first met him I thought he was wonderful.”

“That picture,” said Poirot dreamily. “Always, always, I came back to that in my mind. Why had Restarick brought it up to his office? What special significance did it have for him?
Enfin,
I do not admire myself for being so dense.”

“I don't understand about the pictures.”

“It was a very clever idea. It served as a kind of certificate of identity. A pair of portraits, husband and wife, by a celebrated and fashionable portrait painter of his day. David Baker, when they come out of store, replaces Restarick's portrait with one of Orwell, making him about twenty years younger in appearance. Nobody
would have dreamed that the portrait was a fake; the style, the brush strokes, the canvas, it was a splendidly convincing bit of work. Restarick hung it over his desk. Anyone who knew Restarick years ago, might say: ‘I'd hardly have known you!' Or ‘You've changed quite a lot,' would look up at the portrait, but would only think he himself had really forgotten what the other man had looked like!”

“It was a great risk for Restarick—or rather Orwell—to take,” said Mrs. Oliver thoughtfully.

“Less than you might think. He was never a
claimant,
you see, in the Tichborne sense. He was only a member of a well-known City firm, returning home after his brother's death to settle up his brother's affairs after having spent some years abroad. He brought with him a young wife recently acquired abroad, and took up residence with an elderly, half blind but extremely distinguished uncle by marriage who had never known him well after his schoolboy days, and who accepted him without question. He had no other near relations, except for the daughter whom he had last seen when she was a child of five. When he originally left for South Africa, the office staff had had two very elderly clerks, since deceased. Junior staff never remains anywhere long nowadays. The family lawyer is also dead. You may be sure that the whole position was studied very carefully on the spot by Frances after they had decided on their coup.

“She had met him, it seems, in Kenya about two years ago. They were both crooks, though with entirely different interests. He went in for various shoddy deals as a prospector—Restarick and Orwell went together to prospect for mineral deposits in somewhat wild country. There was a rumour of Restarick's death (probably true) which was later contradicted.”

“A lot of money in the gamble, I suspect?” said Stillingfleet.

“An enormous amount of money was involved. A terrific gamble—for a terrific stake. It came off. Andrew Restarick was a very rich man himself and he was his brother's heir. Nobody questioned his identity. And then—things went wrong. Out of the blue, he got a letter from a woman who, if she ever came face to face with him, would know at once that he wasn't Andrew Restarick. And a second piece of bad fortune occurred—David Baker started to blackmail him.”

“That might have been expected, I suppose,” said Stillingfleet thoughtfully.

“They didn't expect it,” said Poirot. “David had never blackmailed before. It was the enormous wealth of this man that went to his head, I expect. The sum he had been paid for faking the portrait seemed to him grossly inadequate. He wanted more. So Restarick wrote him large cheques, and pretended that it was on account of his daughter—to prevent her from making an undesirable marriage. Whether he really wanted to marry her, I do not know—he may have done. But to blackmail two people like Orwell and Frances Cary was a dangerous thing to do.”

“You mean those two just cold-bloodedly planned to kill two people—quite calmly—just like that?” demanded Mrs. Oliver.

She looked rather sick.

“They might have added you to their list, Madame,” said Poirot.

“Me? Do you mean that it was one of
them
who hit me on the head? Frances, I suppose?
Not
the poor Peacock?”

“I do not think it was the Peacock. But you had been already to Borodene Mansions. Now you perhaps follow Frances to Chelsea,
or so she thinks, with a rather dubious story to account for yourself. So she slips out and gives you a nice little tap on the head to put paid to your curiosity for a while. You would not listen when I warned you there was danger about.”

“I can hardly believe it of her! Lying about in attitudes of a Burne-Jones heroine in that dirty studio that day. But why—” She looked at Norma—then back at Poirot. “They used
her
—deliberately—worked upon her, drugged her, made her believe that she had murdered two people. Why?”

“They wanted a
victim
…” said Poirot.

He rose from his chair and went to Norma.

“
Mon enfant,
you have been through a terrible ordeal. It is a thing that need never happen to you again. Remember that now, you can have confidence in yourself always. To have known, at close quarters, what absolute evil means, is to be armoured against what life can do to you.”

“I suppose you are right,” said Norma. “To think you are mad—really to
believe
it, is a frightening thing…” She shivered. “I don't see, even now,
why
I escaped—why
anyone
managed to believe that I hadn't killed David—not when even
I
believed I had killed him?”

“Blood was wrong,” said Dr. Stillingfleet in a matter-of-fact tone. “Starting to coagulate. Shirt was ‘stiff with it,' as Miss Jacobs said, not
wet.
You were supposed to have killed him not more than about five minutes before Frances's screaming act.”

“How did she—” Mrs. Oliver began to work things out. “She had been to Manchester—”

“She came home by an earlier train, changed into her Mary wig and makeup on the train. Walked into Borodene Mansions
and went up in the lift as an unknown blonde. Went into the flat where David was waiting for her, as she had told him to do. He was quite unsuspecting, and she stabbed him. Then she went out again, and kept watch until she saw Norma coming. She slipped into a public cloakroom, changed her appearance, and joined a friend at the end of the road and walked with her, said good-bye to her at Borodene Mansions and went up herself and did her stuff—quite enjoying doing it, I expect. By the time the police had been called and got there, she didn't think anyone would suspect the time lag. I must say, Norma, you gave us all a hell of a time that day. Insisting on having killed everyone the way you did!”

“I wanted to confess and get it all over…Did you—did
you
think I might
really
have done it, then?”

“Me? What do you take me for? I know what my patients will do or won't do. But I thought you were going to make things damned difficult. I didn't know how far Neele was sticking his neck out. Didn't seem proper police procedure to me. Look at the way he gave Poirot here his head.”

Poirot smiled.

“Chief Inspector Neele and I have known each other for many years. Besides, he had been making inquiries about certain matters already. You were never really outside Louise's door. Frances changed the numbers. She reversed the 6 and the 7 on your own door. Those numbers were loose, stuck on with spikes. Claudia was away that night. Frances drugged you so that the whole thing was a nightmare dream to you.

“I saw the truth suddenly. The only other person who could have killed Louise was the real ‘third girl,' Frances Cary.”

“You kept half recognising her, you know,” said Stillingfleet, “when you described to me how one person seemed to turn into another.”

Norma looked at him thoughtfully.

“You were very rude to people,” she said to Stillingfleet. He looked slightly taken aback.

“Rude?”

“The things you said to everyone. The way you shouted at them.”

“Oh well, yes, perhaps I was…I've got in the way of it. People are so damned irritating.”

He grinned suddenly at Poirot.

“She's quite a girl, isn't she?”

Mrs. Oliver rose to her feet with a sigh.

“I must go home.” She looked at the two men and then at Norma. “What are we going to do with
her?
” she asked.

They both looked startled.

“I know she's staying with me at the moment,” she went on. “And she says she's quite happy. But I mean there it is, quite a problem. Lots and lots of money because your father—the real one, I mean—left it all to you. And that will cause complications, and begging letters and all that. She
could
go and live with old Sir Roderick, but that wouldn't be fun for a girl—he's pretty deaf already as well as blind—and completely selfish. By the way, what about his missing papers, and the girl, and Kew Gardens?”

“They turned up where he thought he'd already looked—Sonia found them,” said Norma, and added, “Uncle Roddy and Sonia are getting married—next week—”

“No fool like an old fool,” said Stillingfleet.

“Aha!” said Poirot. “So the young lady prefers life in England to being embroiled in
la politique.
She is perhaps wise, that little one.”

“So that's that,” said Mrs. Oliver with finality. “But to go on about Norma, one has to be
practical.
One's got to make
plans.
The girl can't know what she wants to do all by
herself.
She's waiting for someone to
tell
her.”

She looked at them severely.

Poirot said nothing. He smiled.

“Oh, her?” said Dr. Stillingfleet. “Well, I'll tell you, Norma. I'm flying to Australia Tuesday week. I want to look around first—see if what's been fixed up for me is going to work, and all that. Then I'll cable you and you can join me. Then we get married. You'll have to take my word for it that it's not your money I want. I'm not one of those doctors who want to endow whacking great research establishments and all that. I'm just interested in
people.
I think, too, that you'd be able to manage
me
all right. All that about my being rude to people—I hadn't noticed it myself. It's odd, really, when you think of all the mess you've been in—helpless as a fly in treacle—yet it's not going to be
me
running
you,
it's going to be
you
running
me.
”