Miss Brewis considered.
"No," she said, "I didn't meet anyone. I might have, of course, because the grounds are open to everyone this afternoon. But on the whole, people tend to stay round the lawn and the side shows and all that. They like to go round the kitchen gardens and the greenhouses, but they don't walk through the woodlands as much as I should have thought they would. People tend to herd together very much at these affairs, don't you think so, Inspector?"
The inspector said that that was probably so.
"Though, I think," said Miss Brewis, with sudden memory, "that there was someone in the Folly."
"The Folly?"
"Yes. A small white temple arrangement. It was put up just a year or two ago. It's to the right of the path as you go down to the boathouse. There was someone in there. A courting couple, I suspect. Someone was laughing and then someone said, 'Hush.'"
"You don't know who this courting couple was?"
"I've no idea. You can't see the front of the Folly from the path. The sides and back enclosed."
The inspector thought for a moment or two, but it did not seem likely to him that the couple - whoever they were - in the Folly were important. Better find out who they were, perhaps, because they in their turn might have seen someone coming up from or going down to the boathouse.
"And there was no one else on the path? No one at all?" he insisted.
"I see what you're driving at, of course," said Miss Brewis. "I can only assure you that I didn't meet anyone. But then, you see, I needn't have. I mean, if there had been anyone on the path who didn't want me to see them, it's the simplest thing in the world just to slip behind some of the rhododendron bushes. The path's bordered on both sides with shrubs and rhododendron bushes. If anyone who had no business to be there heard someone coming along the path, they could slip out of sight in a moment."
The inspector shifted on to another tack.
"Is there anything you know about this girl yourself, that could help us?" he asked.
"I really know nothing about her," said Miss Brewis. "I don't think I'd ever spoken to her until this affair. She's one of the girls I've seen about - I know her vaguely by sight, but that's all."
"And you know nothing about her - nothing that could be helpful?"
"I don't know of any reason why anyone should want to murder her," said Miss Brewis. "In fact it seems to me, if you know what I mean, quite impossible that such a thing should have happened. I can only think that to some unbalanced mind, the fact that she was to be the murdered victim might have induced the wish to make her a real victim. But even that sounds very far fetched and silly."
Bland sighed.
"Oh, well," he said, "I suppose I'd better see the mother now."
Mrs Tucker was a thin, hatchet-faced woman with stringy blonde hair and a sharp nose. Her eyes were reddened with crying, but she had herself in hand now, and was ready to answer the inspector's questions.
"Doesn't seem right that a thing like that should happen," she said. "You read of these things in the papers, but that it should happen to our Marlene -"
"I'm very, very sorry about it," said Inspector Bland gently. "What I want you to do is to think as hard as you can and tell me if there is anyone who could have had any reason to harm the girl?"
"I've been thinking about that already," said Mrs Tucker, with a sudden sniff. "Thought and thought, I have, but I can't get anywhere. Words with the teacher at school Marlene had now and again, and she'd have her quarrels now and again with one of the girls or boys, but nothing serious in any way. There's no one who had a real down on her, nobody who'd do her a mischief."
"She never talked to you about anyone who might have been an enemy of any kind?"
"She talked silly often, Marlene did, but nothing of that kind. It was all make-up and hair-dos, and what she'd like to do to her face and herself. You know what girls are. Far too young she was, to put on lipstick and all that muck, and her Dad told her so, and so did I. But that's what she'd do when she got hold of any money. Buy herself scent and lipsticks and hide them away."
Bland nodded. There was nothing here that could help him. An adolescent, rather silly girl, her head full of film stars and glamour - there were hundreds of Marlenes.
"What her Dad'll say, I don't know," said Mrs Tucker. "Coming here any minute he'll be, expecting to enjoy himself. He's a rare shot at the coconuts, he is."
She broke down suddenly and began to sob.
"If you ask me," she said, "it's one of them nasty foreigners up at the Hostel. You never know where you are with foreigners. Nice spoken as most of them are, some of the shirts they wear you wouldn't believe. Shirts with girls on them with these bikinis, as they call them. And all of them sunning themselves here and there with no shirts at all on - it all leads to trouble. That's what I say!"
Still weeping, Mrs Tucker was escorted from the room by Constable Hoskins. Bland reflected that the local verdict seemed to be the comfortable and probably age-long one of attributing every tragic occurrence to unspecified foreigners.
Chapter 8
"Got a sharp tongue, she has" Hoskins said when he returned. "Nags her husband and bullies her old father. I dare say she's spoke sharp to the girl once or twice and now she's feeling bad about it. Not that girls mind what their mothers say to them. Drops off 'em like water off a duck's back."
Inspector Bland cut short these general reflections and told Hoskins to fetch Mrs Oliver.
The inspector was slightly startled by the sight of Mrs Oliver. He had not expected anything so voluminous, so purple and in such a state of emotional disturbance.
"I feel awful," said Mrs Oliver, sinking down in the chair in front of him like a purple blancmange. "AWFUL," she added in what were clearly capital letters.
The inspector made a few ambiguous noises, and Mrs Oliver swept on.
"Because, you see, it's my murder. I did it!"
For a startled moment Inspector Bland thought that Mrs Oliver was accusing herself of the crime.
"Why I should ever have wanted the Yugoslavian wife of an Atom Scientist to be the victim, I can't imagine," said Mrs Oliver, sweeping her hands through her elaborate hair-do in a frenzied manner with the result that she looked slightly drunk. "Absolutely asinine of me. It might just as well have been the second gardener who wasn't what he seemed - and that wouldn't have mattered half as much because, after all, most men can look after themselves. If they can't look after themselves they ought to be able to look after themselves, and in that case I shouldn't have minded so much. Men get killed and nobody minds - I mean, nobody except their wives and sweethearts and children and things like that."
At this point the inspector entertained unworthy suspicions about Mrs Oliver. This was aided by the faint fragrance of brandy which was wafted towards him. On their return to the house Hercule Poirot had firmly administered to his friend this sovereign remedy for shocks.
"I'm not mad and I'm not drunk," said Mrs Oliver intuitively divining his thoughts, "though I dare say with that man about who thinks I drink like a fish and says everybody says so, you probably think so too."
"What man?" demanded the inspector, his mind switching from the unexpected introduction of the second gardener into the drama, to the further introduction of an unspecified man.
"Freckles and a Yorkshire accent," said Mrs Oliver. "But, as I say, I'm not drunk and I'm not mad. I'm just upset. Thoroughly UPSET," she repeated, once more resorting to capital letters.
"I'm sure, madam, it must have been most distressing," said the inspector.
"The awful thing is," said Mrs Oliver, "that she wanted to be a sex maniac's victim, and now I suppose she was - is - which should I mean?"
"There's no question of a sex maniac," said the inspector.
"Isn't there?" said Mrs Oliver. "Well, thank God for that. Or at least, I don't know. Perhaps she would rather have had it that way. But if he wasn't a sex maniac, why did anybody murder her, Inspector?"
"I was hoping," said the inspector, "that you could help me there."
Undoubtedly, he thought, Mrs Oliver had put her finger on the crucial point. Why should anyone murder Marlene?
"I can't help you," said Mrs Oliver. "I can't imagine who could have done it. At least, of course, I can, imagine - I can imagine anything! That's the trouble with me. I can imagine things now - this minute, I could even make them sound all right, but of course none of them would be true. I mean, she could have been murdered by someone who just likes murdering girls (but that's too easy) - and, anyway, too much of a coincidence that somebody should be at this fкte who> wanted to murder a girl. And how would he know that Marlene was in the boathouse? Or she might have known some secret about somebody's love affairs, or she may have seen someone bury a body at night, or she may have recognised somebody who was concealing his identity - or she may have known a secret about where some treasure was buried during the war. Or the man in the launch may have thrown somebody into the river and she saw it from the window of the boathouse - or she may even have got hold of some very important message in secret code and not known what it was herself."
"Please!" The inspector held up his hand. His head was whirling.
Mrs Oliver stopped obediently. It was clear that she could have gone on in this vein for some time, although it seemed to the inspector that she had already envisaged every possibility, likely or otherwise. Out of the richness of the material presented to him, he seized upon one phrase.
"What did you mean, Mrs Oliver, by the 'man in the launch'? Are you just imagining a man in a launch?"
"Somebody told me he'd come in a launch," said Mrs Oliver. "I can't remember who. The one we were talking about at breakfast, I mean," she added.
"Please." The inspector's tone was now pleading. He had had no idea before what the writers of detective stories were like. He knew that Mrs Oliver had written forty-odd books. It seemed to him astonishing at the moment that she had not written a hundred and forty. He rapped out a peremptory inquiry. "What is all this about a man at breakfast who came in a launch?"
"He didn't come in the launch at breakfast time," said Mrs Oliver, "it was a yacht. At least, I don't mean that exactly. It was a letter."
"Well, what was it?" demanded Bland. "A yacht or a letter?"
"It was a letter," said Mrs Oliver, "to Lady Stubbs. From a cousin in a yacht. And she was frightened," she ended.
"Frightened? What of?"
"Of him, I suppose," said Mrs Oliver. "Anybody could see it. She was terrified of him and she didn't want him to come, and I think that's why she's hiding now."
"Hiding?" said the inspector.
"Well, she isn't about anywhere," said Mrs Oliver. "Everyone's been looking for her. And I think she's hiding because she's afraid of him and doesn't want to meet him."
"Who is this man?" demanded the inspector.
"You'd better ask M. Poirot," said Mrs Oliver. "Because he spoke to him and I haven't. His name's Estaban - no, it isn't, that was in my plot. De Sousa, that's what his name is, Etienne de Sousa."
But another name had caught the inspector's attention.
"Who did you say?" he asked. "Mr Poirot?"
"Yes. Hercule Poirot. He was with me when we found the body."
"Hercule Poirot... I wonder now. Can it be the same man? A Belgian, a small man with a very big moustache."
"An enormous moustache," agreed Mrs Oliver. "Yes. Do you know him?"
"It's a good many years since I met him. I was a young sergeant at the time."
"You met him on a murder case?"
"Yes, I did. What's he doing down here?"
"He was to give away the prizes," said Mrs Oliver.
There was a momentary hesitation before she gave this answer, but it went unperceived by the inspector.
"And he was with you when you discovered the body," said Bland. "H'm, I'd like to talk to him."
"Shall I get him for you?" Mrs Oliver gathered up her purple draperies hopefully.
"There's nothing more that you can add, madam? Nothing more that you think could help us in any way?"
"I don't think so," said Mrs Oliver. "I don't know anything. As I say, I could imagine reasons -"
The inspector cut her short. He had no wish to hear any more of Mrs Oliver's imagined solutions. They were far too confusing.
"Thank you very much, madam," he said briskly. "If you'll ask M. Poirot to come and speak to me here I shall be very much obliged to you."
Mrs Oliver left the room. P.O. Hoskins inquired with interest:
"Who's this Monsieur Poirot, sir?"
"You'd describe him probably as a scream," said Inspector Bland. "Kind of music hall parody of a Frenchman, but actually he's a Belgian. But in spite of his absurdities, he's got brains. He must be a fair age now."
"What about this De Sousa?" asked the constable. "Think there's anything in that, sir?"
Inspector Bland did not hear the question. He was struck by a fact which, though he had been told it several times, was only now beginning to register.
First it had been Sir George, irritated and alarmed. "My wife seems to have disappeared. I can't think where she has got to." Then Miss Brewis, contemptuous: "Lady Stubbs was not to be found. She'd got bored with the show." And now Mrs Oliver with her theory that Lady Stubbs was hiding.
