Third Girl (7 page)

“Very interesting,” thought Mrs. Oliver. “Here I am actually
trailing
someone! Just like in my books. And, what's more, I must be doing it very well because she hasn't the least idea.”

Claudia Reece-Holland, indeed, looked very much absorbed in her own thoughts. “That's a very capable looking girl,” thought Mrs. Oliver, as indeed she had thought before. “If I was thinking of having a go at guessing a murderer, a good capable murderer, I'd choose someone very like her.”

Unfortunately, nobody had been murdered yet, that is to say, unless the girl Norma had been entirely right in her assumption that she herself had committed a murder.

This part of London seemed to have suffered or profited from a large amount of building in the recent years. Enormous skyscrapers, most of which Mrs. Oliver thought very hideous, mounted to the sky with a square matchbox-like air.

Claudia turned into a building. “Now I shall find out exactly,” thought Mrs. Oliver and turned into it after her. Four lifts appeared to be all going up and down with frantic haste. This, Mrs. Oliver thought, was going to be more difficult. However, they were of a very large size and by getting into Claudia's one at the last minute Mrs. Oliver was able to interpose large masses of tall men between herself and the figure she was following. Claudia's destination turned out to be the fourth floor. She went along a corridor and Mrs. Oliver, lingering behind two of her tall men, noted the door where she went in. Three doors from the end of the corridor. Mrs. Oliver arrived at the same door in due course and was able
to read the legend on it. “Joshua Restarick Ltd.” was the legend it bore.

Having got as far as that Mrs. Oliver felt as though she did not quite know what to do next. She had found Norma's father's place of business and the place where Claudia worked, but now, slightly disabused, she felt that this was not as much of a discovery as it might have been. Frankly, did it help? Probably it didn't.

She waited around a few moments, walking from one end to the other of the corridor looking to see if anybody else interesting went in at the door of Restarick Enterprises. Two or three girls did but they did not look particularly interesting. Mrs. Oliver went down again in the lift and walked rather disconsolately out of the building. She couldn't quite think what to do next. She took a walk round the adjacent streets, she meditated a visit to St. Paul's.

“I might go up in the Whispering Gallery and whisper,” thought Mrs. Oliver. “I wonder now how the Whispering Gallery would do for the scene of a murder?

“No,” she decided, “too profane, I'm afraid. No, I don't think that would be quite nice.” She walked thoughtfully towards the Mermaid Theatre. That, she thought, had far more possibilities.

She walked back in the direction of the various new buildings. Then, feeling the lack of a more substantial breakfast than she had had, she turned into a local café. It was moderately well filled with people having extra late breakfast or else early “elevenses.” Mrs. Oliver, looking round vaguely for a suitable table, gave a gasp. At a table near the wall the girl Norma was sitting, and opposite her was sitting a young man with lavish chestnut hair curled on his shoulders, wearing a red velvet waistcoat and a very fancy jacket.

“David,” said Mrs. Oliver under her breath. “It must be David.” He and the girl Norma were talking excitedly together.

Mrs. Oliver considered a plan of campaign, made up her mind, and nodding her head in satisfaction, crossed the floor of the café to a discreet door marked “Ladies.”

Mrs. Oliver was not quite sure whether Norma was likely to recognise her or not. It was not always the vaguest looking people who proved the vaguest in fact. At the moment Norma did not look as though she was likely to look at anybody but David, but who knows?

“I expect I can
do
something to myself anyway,” thought Mrs. Oliver. She looked at herself in a small flyblown mirror provided by the café's management, studying particularly what she considered to be the focal point of a woman's appearance, her hair. No one knew this better than Mrs. Oliver, owing to the innumerable times that she had changed her mode of hairdressing, and had failed to be recognised by her friends in consequence. Giving her head an appraising eye she started work. Out came the pins, she took off several coils of hair, wrapped them up in her handkerchief and stuffed them into her handbag, parted her hair in the middle, combed it sternly back from her face and rolled it up into a modest bun at the back of her neck. She also took out a pair of spectacles and put them on her nose. There was a really earnest look about her now! “Almost intellectual,” Mrs. Oliver thought approvingly. She altered the shape of her mouth by an application of lipstick, and emerged once more into the café; moving carefully since the spectacles were only for reading and in consequence the landscape was blurred. She crossed the café, and made her way to an empty table next to that occupied by Norma and David. She sat down so that
she was facing David. Norma, on the near side, sat with her back to her. Norma, therefore, would not see her unless she turned her head right round. The waitress drifted up. Mrs. Oliver ordered a cup of coffee and a Bath bun and settled down to be inconspicuous.

Norma and David did not even notice her. They were deeply in the middle of a passionate discussion. It took Mrs. Oliver just a minute or two to tune into them.

“…But you only fancy these things,” David was saying. “You
imagine
them. They're all utter, utter nonsense, my dear girl.”

“I don't know. I can't tell.” Norma's voice had a queer lack of resonance in it.

Mrs. Oliver could not hear her as well as she heard David, since Norma's back was turned to her, but the dullness of the girl's tone struck her disagreeably. There was something wrong here, she thought. Very wrong. She remembered the story as Poirot had first told it to her. “
She thinks she may have committed a murder.
” What
was
the matter with the girl? Hallucinations? Was her mind really slightly affected, or was it no more and no less than truth, and in consequence the girl had suffered a bad shock?

“If you ask me, it's all fuss on Mary's part! She's a thoroughly stupid woman anyway, and she imagines she has illnesses and all that sort of thing.”

“She
was
ill.”

“All right then, she
was
ill. Any sensible woman would get the doctor to give her some antibiotic or other, and not get het up.”

“She thought
I
did it to her. My father thinks so too.”

“I tell you, Norma, you imagine all these things.”

“You just say that to me, David. You say it to me to cheer me up. Supposing I
did
give her the stuff?”

“What do you mean, suppose? You must
know
whether you did or you didn't. You can't be so idiotic, Norma.”

“I
don't
know.”

“You keep saying that. You keep coming back to that, and saying it again and again. ‘I don't know.' ‘I don't know.'”

“You don't understand. You don't understand in the least what hate is. I hated her from the first moment I saw her.”

“I know. You told me that.”

“That's the queer part of it. I told you that, and yet I don't even
remember
telling you that. D'you see? Every now and then I—I tell people things. I tell people things that I want to do, or that I have done, or that I'm going to do. But I don't even remember telling them the things. It's as though I was
thinking
all these things in my mind, and sometimes they come out in the open and I say them to people. I did say them to you, didn't I?”

“Well—I mean—look here, don't let's harp back to that.”

“But I did say it to you? Didn't I?”

“All right, all right! One says things like that. ‘I hate her and I'd like to kill her. I think I'll poison her!' But that's only kid stuff, if you know what I mean, as though you weren't quite grown-up. It's a very natural thing. Children say it a lot. ‘I hate so and so. I'll cut off his head!' Kids say it at school. About some master they particularly dislike.”

“You think it was just that? But—that sounds as though
I
wasn't grown-up.”

“Well, you're not in some ways. If you'd just pull yourself together, realise how silly it all is. What can it matter if you do hate her? You've got away from home and don't have to live with her.”

“Why shouldn't I live in my own home—with my own father?”
said Norma. “It's not fair. It's not fair. First he went away and left my mother, and now, just when he's coming back to me, he goes and marries Mary. Of course I hate her and she hates me too. I used to think about killing her, used to think of ways of doing it. I used to enjoy thinking like that. But then—when she
really
got ill….”

David said uneasily:

“You don't think you're a witch or anything, do you? You don't make figures in wax and stick pins into them or do that sort of thing?”

“Oh no. That would be silly. What I did was real. Quite real.”

“Look here, Norma, what do you mean when you say it was real?”

“The bottle was there, in my drawer. Yes, I opened the drawer and found it.”

“What bottle?”

“
The Dragon Exterminator. Selective weed killer.
That's what it was labelled. Stuff in a dark green bottle and you were supposed to spray it on things. And it had labels with
Caution
and
Poison,
too.”

“Did you buy it? Or did you just find it?”

“I don't know where I got it, but it was there, in my drawer, and it was half empty.”

“And then you—you—remembered—”

“Yes,” said Norma. “Yes…” Her voice was vague, almost dreamy. “Yes…I think it was then it all came back to me. You think so too, don't you, David?”

“I don't know what to make of you, Norma. I really don't. I think in a way, you're making it all up, you're telling it to
yourself.
”

“But she went to hospital, for observation. They said they were puzzled. Then they said they couldn't find anything wrong so she
came home—and then she got ill again, and I began to be frightened. My father began looking at me in a queer sort of way, and then the doctor came and they talked together, shut up in Father's study. I went round outside, and crept up to the window and I tried to listen. I wanted to hear what they were saying. They were planning together—to send me away to a place where I'd be shut up! A place where I'd have a ‘course of treatment'—or something. They thought, you see, that I was crazy, and I was frightened…Because—because I wasn't sure what I'd done or what I hadn't done.”

“Is that when you ran away?”

“No—that was later—”

“Tell me.”

“I don't want to talk about it anymore.”

“You'll have to let them know sooner or later where you are—”

“I won't! I hate them. I hate my father as much as I hate Mary. I wish they were dead. I wish they were both dead. Then—then I think I'd be happy again.”

“Don't get all het up! Look here, Norma—” He paused in an embarrassed manner—“I'm not very set on marriage and all that rubbish…I mean I didn't think I'd ever do anything of that kind…oh well, not for years. One doesn't want to tie oneself up—but I think it's the best thing we could do, you know. Get married. At a registry office or something. You'll have to say you're over twenty-one. Roll up your hair, put on some spectacles or something. Make you look a bit older. Once we're married, your father can't do a thing! He can't send you away to what you call a ‘place.' He'll be powerless.”

“I hate him.”

“You seem to hate everybody.”

“Only my father and Mary.”

“Well, after all, it's quite natural for a man to marry again.”

“Look what he did to my mother.”

“All that must have been a long time ago.”

“Yes. I was only a child, but I remember. He went away and left us. He sent me presents at Christmas—but he never came himself. I wouldn't even have known him if I'd met him in the street by the time he did come back. He didn't mean anything to me by then. I think he got my mother shut up, too. She used to go away when she was ill. I don't know where. I don't know what was the matter with her. Sometimes I wonder…I wonder, David. I think, you know, there's something wrong in my head, and someday it will make me do something really bad. Like the knife.”

“What knife?”

“It doesn't matter. Just a knife.”

“Well, can't you tell me what you're talking about?”

“I think it had bloodstains on it—it was hidden there…under my stockings.”

“Do you remember hiding a knife there?”

“I think so. But I can't remember what I'd done with it
before
that. I can't remember where I'd
been
…There is a whole hour gone out of that evening. A whole hour I didn't know where I'd been. I'd been somewhere and done something.”

“Hush!” He hissed it quickly as the waitress approached their table. “You'll be all right. I'll look after you. Let's have something more,” he said to the waitress in a loud voice, picking up the menu—“Two baked beans on toast.”

I

H
ercule Poirot was dictating to his secretary, Miss Lemon.

“
And while I much appreciate the honour you have done me, I must regretfully inform you that…
”

The telephone rang. Miss Lemon stretched out a hand for it. “Yes? Who did you say?” She put her hand over the receiver and said to Poirot, “Mrs. Oliver.”

“Ah…Mrs. Oliver,” said Poirot. He did not particularly want to be interrupted at this moment, but he took the receiver from Miss Lemon. “'Allo,” he said, “Hercule Poirot speaks.”

“Oh, M. Poirot, I'm so glad I got you! I've found her for you!”

“I beg your pardon?”

“
I've found her for you.
Your girl! You know, the one who's committed a murder or thinks she has. She's talking about it too, a great deal. I think she is off her head. But never mind that now. Do you want to come and get her?”

“Where are you,
chère
Madame?”

“Somewhere between St. Paul's and the Mermaid Theatre and all that. Calthorpe Street,” said Mrs. Oliver, suddenly looking out of the telephone box in which she was standing. “Do you think you can get here quickly? They're in a restaurant.”

“They?”

“Oh, she and what I suppose is the unsuitable boyfriend. He is rather nice really, and he seems very fond of her. I can't think why. People are odd. Well, I don't want to talk because I want to get back again. I followed them, you see. I came into the restaurant and saw them there.”

“Aha? You have been very clever, Madame.”

“No, I haven't really. It was a pure accident. I mean, I walked into a small café place and there the girl was, just sitting there.”

“Ah. You had the good fortune then. That is just as important.”

“And I've been sitting at the next table to them, only she's got her back to me. And anyway I don't suppose she'd recognise me. I've done things to my hair. Anway, they've been talking as though they were alone in the world, and when they ordered another course—baked beans—(I can't bear baked beans, it always seems to me so funny that people should)—”

“Never mind the baked beans. Go on. You left them and came out to telephone. Is that right?”

“Yes. Because the baked beans gave me time. And I shall go back now. Or I might hang about outside. Anway, try and get here quickly.”

“What is the name of this café?”

“The Merry Shamrock—but it doesn't look very merry. In fact, it looks rather sordid, but the coffee is quite good.”

“Say no more. Go back. In due course, I will arrive.”

“Splendid,” said Mrs. Oliver, and rang off.

II

Miss Lemon, always efficient, had preceded him to the street, and was waiting by a taxi. She asked no questions and displayed no curiosity. She did not tell Poirot how she would occupy her time whilst he was away. She did not need to tell him. She always knew what she was going to do and she was always right in what she did.

Poirot duly arrived at the corner of Calthorpe Street. He descended, paid the taxi, and looked around him. He saw The Merry Shamrock but he saw no one in its vicinity who looked at all like Mrs. Oliver, however well disguised. He walked to the end of the street and back. No Mrs. Oliver. So either the couple in which they were interested had left the café and Mrs. Oliver had gone on a shadowing expedition, or else—To answer “or else” he went to the café door. One could not see the inside very well from the outside, on account of steam, so he pushed the door gently open and entered. His eyes swept round it.

He saw at once the girl who had come to visit him at the breakfast table. She was sitting by herself at a table against the wall. She was smoking a cigarette and staring in front of her. She seemed to be lost in thought. No, Poirot thought, hardly that. There did not seem to be any thought there. She was lost in a kind of oblivion. She was somewhere else.

He crossed the room quietly and sat down in the chair opposite her. She looked up then, and he was at least gratified to see that he was recognised.

“So we meet again, Mademoiselle,” he said pleasantly. “I see you recognise me.”

“Yes. Yes, I do.”

“It is always gratifying to be recognised by a young lady one has only met once and for a very short time.”

She continued to look at him without speaking.

“And how did you know me, may I ask? What made you recognise me?”

“Your moustache,” said Norma immediately. “It couldn't be anyone else.”

He was gratified by that observation and stroked it with the pride and vanity that he was apt to display on these occasions.

“Ah yes, very true. Yes, there are not many moustaches such as mine. It is a fine one, hein?”

“Yes—well, yes—I suppose it is.”

“Ah, you are perhaps not a connoisseur of moustaches, but I can tell you, Miss Restarick—Miss Norma Restarick, is it not?—that it is a very fine moustache.”

He had dwelt deliberately upon her name. She had at first looked so oblivious to everything around her, so far away, that he wondered if she would notice. She did. It startled her.

“How did you know my name?” she said.

“True, you did not give your name to my servant when you came to see me that morning.”

“How did you know it? How did you get to know it? Who told you?”

He saw the alarm, the fear.

“A friend told me,” he said. “One's friends can be very useful.”

“Who was it?”

“Mademoiselle, you like keeping your little secrets from me. I, too, have a preference for keeping my little secrets from you.”

“I don't see
how
you could know who I was.”

“I am Hercule Poirot,” said Poirot, with his usual magnificence. Then he left the initiative to her, merely sitting there smiling gently at her.

“I—” she began, then stopped. “—Would—” Again she stopped.

“We did not get very far that morning, I know,” said Hercule Poirot. “Only so far as your telling me that you had committed a murder.”

“Oh
that!
”

“Yes, Mademoiselle,
that.
”

“But—I didn't mean it of course. I didn't mean anything like that. I mean, it was just a joke.”

“
Vraiment?
You came to see me rather early in the morning, at breakfast time. You said it was urgent. The urgency was because you might have committed a murder. That is your idea of a joke, eh?”

A waitress who had been hovering, looking at Poirot with a fixed attention, suddenly came up to him and proffered him what appeared to be a paper boat such as is made for children to sail in a bath.

“This for you?” she said. “Mr. Porritt? A lady left it.”

“Ah yes,” said Poirot. “And how did you know who I was?”

“The lady said I'd know by your moustache. Said I wouldn't have seen a moustache like that before. And it's true enough,” she added, gazing at it.

“Well, thank you very much.”

Poirot took the boat from her, untwisted it and smoothed it out; he read some hastily pencilled words: “He's just going. She's staying behind, so I'm going to leave her for you, and follow him.” It was signed Ariadne.

“Ah yes,” said Hercule Poirot, folding it and slipping it into his pocket. “What were we talking about? Your sense of humour, I think, Miss Restarick.”

“Do you know just my name or—or do you know everything about me?”

“I know a few things about you. You are Miss Norma Restarick, your address in London is 67 Borodene Mansions. Your home address is Crosshedges, Long Basing. You live there with a father, a stepmother, a great-uncle and—ah yes, an
au pair
girl. You see, I am quite well informed.”

“You've been having me followed.”

“No, no,” said Poirot. “Not at all. As to that, I give you my word of honour.”

“But you are not police, are you? You didn't say you were.”

“I am not police, no.”

Her suspicion and defiance broke down.

“I don't know what to do,” she said.

“I am not urging you to employ me,” said Poirot. “For that you have said already that I am too old. Possibly you are right. But since I know who you are and something about you, there is no reason we should not discuss together in a friendly fashion the troubles that afflict you. The old, you must remember, though considered incapable of action, have nevertheless a good fund of experience on which to draw.”

Norma continued to look at him doubtfully, that wide-eyed stare that had disquieted Poirot before. But she was in a sense trapped, and she had at this particular moment, or so Poirot judged, a wish to talk about things. For some reason, Poirot had always been a person it was easy to talk to.

“They think I'm crazy,” she said bluntly. “And—and I rather think I'm crazy, too. Mad.”

“That is most interesting,” said Hercule Poirot, cheerfully. “There are many different names for these things. Very grand names. Names rolled out happily by psychiatrists, psychologists and others. But when you say crazy, that describes very well what the general appearance may be to ordinary, everyday people.
Eh bien,
then, you are crazy, or you appear crazy or you think you are crazy, and possibly you
may
be crazy. But all the same that is not to say the condition is serious. It is a thing that people suffer from a good deal, and it is usually easily cured with the proper treatment. It comes about because people have had too much mental strain, too much worry, have studied too much for examinations, have dwelled too much perhaps on their emotions, have too much religion or have a lamentable lack of religion, or have good reasons for hating their fathers or their mothers! Or, of course, it can be as simple as having an unfortunate love affair.”

“I've got a stepmother. I hate her and I rather think I hate my father too. That seems rather a lot, doesn't it?”

“It is more usual to hate one or the other,” said Poirot. “You were, I suppose, very fond of your own mother. Is she divorced or dead?”

“Dead. She died two or three years ago.”

“And you cared for her very much?”

“Yes. I suppose I did. I mean of course I did. She was an invalid, you know, and she had to go to nursing homes a good deal.”

“And your father?”

“Father had gone abroad a long time before that. He went to South Africa when I was about five or six. I think he wanted Mother to divorce him but she wouldn't. He went to South Africa and was mixed up with mines or something like that. Anyway, he used to write to me at Christmas, and send me a Christmas present or arrange for one to come to me. That was about all. So he didn't really seem very real to me. He came home about a year ago because he had to wind up my uncle's affairs and all that sort of financial thing. And when he came home he—he brought this new wife with him.”

“And you resented the fact?”

“Yes, I did.”

“But your mother was dead by then. It is not unusual, you know, for a man to marry again. Especially when he and his wife have been estranged for many years. This wife he brought, was she the same lady he had wished to marry previously, when he asked your mother for a divorce?”

“Oh, no, this one is quite young. And she's very good-looking and she acts as though she just owns my father!”

She went on after a pause—in a different, rather childish voice. “I thought perhaps when he came home this time he would be fond of
me
and take notice of
me
and—but she won't let him. She's
against
me. She's crowded me out.”

“But that does not matter at all at the age you are. It is a good thing. You do not need anyone to look after you now. You can
stand on your own feet, you can enjoy life, you can choose your own friends—”

“You wouldn't think so, the way they go on at home! Well, I mean to choose my own friends.”

“Most girls nowadays have to endure criticism about their friends,” said Poirot.

“It was all so different,” said Norma. “My father isn't at all like I remember him when I was five years old. He used to play with me, all the time, and be so gay. He's not gay now. He's worried and rather fierce and—oh quite different.”

“That must be nearly fifteen years ago, I presume. People change.”

“But ought people to change so much?”

“Has he changed in appearance?”

“Oh no, no, not that. Oh no! If you look at his picture just over his chair, although it's of him when he was much younger, it's exactly like him now. But it isn't at all the way I remember him.”

“But you know, my dear,” said Poirot gently, “people are never like what you remember them. You make them, as the years go by, more and more the way you
wish
them to be, and as you
think
you remember them. If you want to remember them as agreeable and gay and handsome, you make them far more so than they actually were.”

“Do you think so? Do you really think so?” She paused and then said abruptly, “But why do you think I want to kill people?” The question came out quite naturally. It was there between them. They had, Poirot felt, got at last to a crucial moment.

“That may be quite an interesting question,” said Poirot, “and there may be quite an interesting reason. The person who can
probably tell you the answer to that will be a doctor. The kind of doctor who
knows.
”

She reacted quickly.

“I won't go to a doctor. I won't go
near
a doctor! They wanted to send me to a doctor, and then I'll be shut up in one of those loony places and they won't let me out again. I'm not going to do anything like that.” She was struggling now to rise to her feet.