Henrietta got up. She said and once more it was her dry voice:
"No, I wasn't content. After all, one is human..."
Poirot waited a minute, then he said:
"Then why, Mademoiselle -"
"Why?" she whirled round on him. "I wanted John to be satisfied, I wanted John to have what he wanted. I wanted him to be able to go on with the thing he cared about - his work. If he didn't want to be hurt - to be vulnerable again - why - why, then, that was all right by me!"
Poirot rubbed his nose.
"Just now, Miss Savernake, you mentioned Veronica Cray. Was she also a friend of John Christow's?"
"Until last Saturday night, he hadn't seen her for fifteen years."
"He knew her fifteen years ago?"
"They were engaged to be married." Henrietta came back and sat down. "I see I've got to make it all clearer. John loved Veronica desperately. Veronica was, and is, a bitch of the first water. She's the supreme egoist. Her terms were that John was to chuck everything he cared about and become Miss Veronica Cray's little tame husband. John broke up the whole thing - quite rightly. But he suffered like hell. His one idea was to marry someone as unlike Veronica as possible. He married Gerda whom you might describe inelegantly as a first class chump. That was all very nice and safe, but, as anyone could have told him, the day came when being married to a chump irritated him. He had various affairs - none of them important. Gerda, of course, never knew about them. But I think, myself, that for fifteen years there has been something wrong with John - something connected with Veronica. He never really got over her. And then last Saturday he met her again - "
After a long pause, Poirot recited dreamily:
"He went out with her that night to see her home and returned to The Hollow at 3:00 a.m."
"How do you know?"
"A housemaid had the toothache."
Henrietta said irrelevantly, "Lucy has far too many servants."
"But you yourself knew that, Mademoiselle."
"Yes."
"How did you know?"
Again there was an infinitesimal pause. Then Henrietta replied slowly:
"I was looking out of my window and saw him come back to the house."
"The toothache, Mademoiselle?"
She smiled at him.
"Quite another kind of ache, M. Poirot."
She got up and moved towards the door and Poirot said:
"I will walk back with you, Mademoiselle."
They crossed the lane and went through the gate into the chestnut plantation.
Henrietta said:
"We need not go past the pool. We can go up to the left and along the top path to the flower walk."
A track led steeply uphill towards the woods. After a while they came to a broader path at right angles across the hillside above the chestnut trees. Presently they came to a bench and Henrietta sat down, Poirot beside her. The woods were above and behind them and below were the closely planted chestnut groves. Just in front of the seat a curving path led downwards, to where just a glimmer of blue water could be seen.
Poirot watched Henrietta without speaking. Her face had relaxed, the tension had gone. It looked rounder and younger. He realized what she must have looked like as a young girl.
He said very gently at last:
"Of what are you thinking, Mademoiselle?"
"Of Ainswick..."
"What is Ainswick?"
"Ainswick? It's a place." Almost dreamily, she described Ainswick to him. The white graceful house - the big magnolia - growing up it - the whole set in an amphitheatre of wooded hills.
"It was your home?"
"Not really. I lived in Ireland. It was where we came all of us, for holidays. Edward and Midge and myself. It was Lucy's home actually. It belonged to her father. After his death it came to Edward."
"Not to Sir Henry? But it is he who has the title."
"Oh, that's a K.C.B.," she explained. "Henry was only a distant cousin."
"And after Edward Angkatell, to whom does it go, this Ainswick?"
"How odd. I've never really thought. If Edward doesn't marry -" She paused. A shadow passed over her face.
Hercule Poirot wondered exactly what thought was passing through her mind.
"I suppose," said Henrietta slowly, "it will go to David. So that's why -"
"Why what?"
"Why Lucy asked him here... David and Ainswick?"
She shook her head. "They don't fit somehow."
Poirot pointed to the path in front of them.
"It is by that path, Mademoiselle, that you went down to the swimming pool yesterday?"
She gave a quick shiver.
"No, by the one nearer the house. It was Edward who came this way." She turned on him suddenly. "Must we talk about it any more? I hate the swimming pool... I even hate The Hollow."
"I hate the dreadful Hollow behind the little wood.
Its lips in the field above are dabbled with blood-red heath;
The red-ribb'd ledges drip with a silent horror of blood,
And Echo there, whatever is ask'd her, answers 'Death.'"
Henrietta turned an astonished face on him.
"Tennyson," said Hercule Poirot, nodding his head proudly. "The poetry of your Lord Tennyson."
Henrietta was repeating.
"And Echo there, whatever is ask'd her..." She went on, almost to herself. "But, of course - I see - that's what it is - Echo!"
"How do you mean, Echo?"
"This place - The Hollow itself! I almost saw it before - on Saturday when Edward and I walked up to the ridge. An echo of Ainswick... And that's what we are, we Angkatells. Echoes! We're not real - not real as John was real." She turned to Poirot. "I wish you had known him, M. Poirot. We're all shadows compared with John. John was really alive."
"I knew that even when he was dying, Mademoiselle."
"I know. One felt it... And John is dead, and we, the echoes, are alive... It's like, you know, a very bad joke..."
The youth had gone from her face again. Her lips were twisted, bitter with sudden pain.
When Poirot spoke, asking a question, she did not, for a moment, take in what he was saying.
"I am sorry. What did you say, M. Poirot?"
"I was asking whether your aunt, Lady Angkatell, liked Dr. Christow."
"Lucy? She is a cousin, by the way, not an aunt. Yes, she liked him very much."
"And your - also a cousin? - Mr. Edward Angkatell - did he like Dr. Christow?"
Her voice was, he thought, a little constrained, as she replied:
"Not particularly - but then he hardly knew him."
"And your - yet another cousin? - Mr. David Angkatell?"
Henrietta smiled.
"David I think hates all of us. He spends his time immured in the library reading the Encyclopaedia Britannica."
"Ah, a serious temperament."
"I am sorry for David. He has had a difficult home life - his mother was unbalanced - an invalid. Now his only way of protecting himself is to try to feel superior to everyone. It's all right as long as it works, but now and then it breaks down and the vulnerable David peeps through."
"Did he feel himself superior to Dr. Christow?"
"He tried to - but I don't think it came off. I suspect that Christow was just the kind of man that David would like to be - He disliked John in consequence."
Poirot nodded his head thoughtfully.
"Yes - self-assurance, confidence, virility - all the intensive male qualities. It is interesting - very interesting."
Henrietta did not answer.
Through the chestnuts, down by the pool, Hercule Poirot saw a man stooping, searching for something, or so it seemed.
He murmured, "I wonder -"
"I beg your pardon?"
Poirot said, "That is one of Inspector Grange's men. He seems to be looking for something."
"Clues, I suppose. Don't policemen look for clues? Cigarette ash, footprints, burnt matches?"
Her voice held a kind of bitter mockery. Poirot answered seriously:
"Yes, they look for these things - and sometimes they find them. But the real clues, Miss Savernake, in a case like this, usually lie in the personal relationships of the people concerned."
"I don't think I understand you."
"Little things," said Poirot, his head thrown back, his eyes half closed. "Not cigarette ash, or a rubber heel mark - but a gesture, a look, an unexpected action..."
Henrietta turned her head sharply to look at him. He felt her eyes but he did not turn his head. She said:
"Are you thinking of - anything in particular?"
"I was thinking of how you stepped forward and took the revolver out of Mrs. Christow's hand and then dropped it in the pool."
He felt the slight start she gave. But her voice was quite normal and calm.
"Gerda, M. Poirot, is rather a clumsy person. In the shock of the moment, and if the revolver had had another cartridge in it, she might have fired it and - and hurt someone."
"But it was rather clumsy of you, was it not, to drop it in the pool?"
"Well - I had had a shock, too." She paused. "What are you suggesting, M. Poirot?"
Poirot sat up, turned his head, and spoke in a brisk matter-of-fact way:
"If there were fingerprints on that revolver, that is to say, fingerprints made before Mrs. Christow handled it, it would be interesting to know whose they were - and that we shall never know now."
Henrietta said quietly, but steadily:
"Meaning that you think they were mine... You are suggesting that I shot John and then left the revolver beside him so that Gerda could come along and pick it up and be left holding the baby -(that is what you are suggesting, isn't it?) But surely, if I did that, you will give me credit for enough intelligence to have wiped off my own fingerprints first!"
"But surely you are intelligent enough to see, Mademoiselle, that if you had done so and if the revolver had had no fingerprints on it but Mrs. Christow's, that would have been very remarkable! For you were all shooting with that revolver the day before. Gerda Christow would hardly have wiped the revolver clean of fingerprints before using it - why should she?"
Henrietta said slowly:
"So you think I killed John?"
"When Dr. Christow was dying, he said, 'Henrietta.'"
"And you think that that was an accusation? It was not."
"What was it then?"
Henrietta stretched out her foot and traced a pattern with the toe. She said in a low voice:
"Aren't you forgetting - what I told you not very long ago? I mean - the terms we were on?"
"Ah, yes - he was your lover - and so, as he is dying, he says Henrietta. That is very touching."
She turned blazing eyes upon him.
"Must you sneer?"
"I am not sneering: But I do not like being lied to - and that, I think, is what you are trying to do."
Henrietta said quietly:
"I have told you that I am not very truthful - but when John said 'Henrietta,' he was not accusing me of having murdered him. Can't you understand that people of my kind, who make things, are quite incapable of taking life? I don't kill people, M. Poirot. I couldn't kill anyone. That's the plain stark truth. You suspect me simply because my name was murmured by a dying man who hardly knew what he was saying."
"Dr. Christow knew perfectly what he was saying. His voice was as alive and conscious as that of a doctor doing a vital operation who says sharply and urgently, 'Nurse, the forceps, please.'"
"But -" She seemed at a loss, taken aback. Hercule Poirot went on rapidly:
"And it is not just on account of what Dr. Christow said when he was dying. I do not believe for one moment that you are capable of premeditated murder - that, no. But you might have fired that shot in a sudden moment of fierce resentment - and if so - if so, Mademoiselle, you have the creative imagination and ability to cover your tracks."
Henrietta got up. She stood for a moment, pale and shaken, looking at him. She said with a sudden rueful smile:
"And I thought you liked me."
Hercule Poirot sighed. He said sadly:
"That is what is so unfortunate for me. I do."
Chapter 19
When Henrietta had left him, Poirot sat on until he saw below him Inspector Grange walk past the pool with a resolute easy stride and take the path on past the pavilion.
The Inspector was walking in a purposeful way.
He must be going, therefore, either to Resthaven or to Dovecotes. Poirot wondered which.
He got up and retraced his steps along the way he had come. If Inspector Grange was coming to see him, he was interested to hear what the Inspector had to say.
But when he got back to Resthaven there was no sign of a visitor. Poirot looked thoughtfully up the lane in the direction of Dovecotes. Veronica Cray had not, he knew, gone back to London.
He found his curiosity rising about Veronica Cray. The pale, shining fox furs, the heaped boxes of matches, that sudden imperfectly explained invasion on the Saturday night, and, finally, Henrietta Savernake's revelations about John Christow and Veronica.
It was, he thought, an interesting pattern... Yes, that was how he saw it: a pattern.
A design of intermingled emotions and the clash of personalities. A strange involved design, with dark threads of hate and desire running through it.
Had Gerda Christow shot her husband? Or was it not quite so simple as that?
He thought of his conversation with Henrietta and decided that it was not so simple.
Henrietta had jumped to the conclusion that he suspected her of the murder, but actually he had not gone nearly as far as that in his mind. No further indeed than the belief that Henrietta knew something. Knew something or was concealing something - which?
He shook his head, dissatisfied.
The scene by the pool. A set scene. A stage scene.
Staged by whom?
Staged for whom?
The answer to the second question was, he strongly suspected, Hercule Poirot. He had thought so at the time. But he had thought then that it was an impertinence - a joke.
It was still an impertinence - but not a joke.
And the answer to the first question?
