Curtain: Poirot's Last Case (2 page)

Nothing is so sad, in my opinion, as the devastation wrought by age.

My poor friend. I have described him many times. Now to convey to you the difference. Crippled with arthritis, he propelled himself about in a wheeled chair. His once plump frame had fallen in. He was a thin little man now. His face was lined and wrinkled. His moustache and hair, it is true, were still of a jet black colour, but candidly, though I would not for the world have hurt his feelings by saying so to him, this was a mistake. There comes a moment when hair dye is only too painfully obvious. There had been a time when I had been surprised to learn that the blackness of Poirot’s hair came out of a bottle. But now the theatricality was apparent and merely created the impression that he wore a wig and had adorned his upper lip to amuse the children!

Only his eyes were the same as ever, shrewd and twinkling, and now – yes, undoubtedly – softened with emotion.

‘Ah,
mon ami
Hastings –
mon ami
Hastings . . .’

I bent my head and, as was his custom, he embraced me warmly.

‘
Mon ami
Hastings!’

He leaned back, surveying me with his head a little to one side.

‘Yes, just the same – the straight back, the broad shoulders, the grey of the hair –
très distingué
. You know, my friend, you have worn well.
Les femmes
, they still take an interest in you? Yes?’

‘Really, Poirot,’ I protested. ‘Must you –’

‘But I assure you, my friend, it is a test – it is the test. When the very young girls come and talk to you kindly, oh so kindly – it is the end! “The poor old man,” they say, “we must be nice to him. It must be so awful to be like that.” But you, Hastings –
vous êtes encore jeune
. For you there are still possibilities. That is right, twist your moustache, hunch your shoulders – I see it is as I say – you would not look so self-conscious otherwise.’

I burst out laughing. ‘You really are the limit, Poirot. And how are you yourself ?’

‘Me,’ said Poirot with a grimace. ‘I am a wreck. I am a ruin. I cannot walk. I am crippled and twisted. Mercifully I can still feed myself, but otherwise I have to be attended to like a baby. Put to bed, washed and dressed.
Enfin
, it is not amusing that. Mercifully, though the outside decays, the core is still sound.’

‘Yes, indeed. The best heart in the world.’

‘The heart? Perhaps. I was not referring to the heart. The brain,
mon cher
, is what I mean by the core. My brain, it still functions magnificently.’

I could at least perceive clearly that no deterioration of the brain in the direction of modesty had taken place.

‘And you like it here?’ I asked.

Poirot shrugged his shoulders. ‘It suffices. It is not, you comprehend, the Ritz. No, indeed. The room I was in when I first came here was both small and inadequately furnished. I moved to this one with no increase of price. Then, the cooking, it is English at its worst. Those Brussels sprouts so enormous, so hard, that the English like so much. The potatoes boiled and either hard or falling to pieces. The vegetables that taste of water, water, and again water. The complete absence of the salt and pepper in any dish –’ he paused expressively.

‘It sounds terrible,’ I said.

‘I do not complain,’ said Poirot, and proceeded to do so. ‘And there is also the modernization, so called. The bathrooms, the taps everywhere and what comes out of them? Lukewarm water,
mon ami
, at most hours of the day. And the towels, so thin, so meagre!’

‘There is something to be said for the old days,’ I said thoughtfully. I remembered the clouds of steam which had gushed from the hot tap of the one bathroom Styles had originally possessed, one of those bathrooms in which an immense bath with mahogany sides had reposed proudly in the middle of the bathroom floor. Remembered, too, the immense bath towels, and the frequent shining brass cans of boiling hot water that stood in one’s old-fashioned basin.

‘But one must not complain,’ said Poirot again. ‘I am content to suffer – for a good cause.’

A sudden thought struck me.

‘I say, Poirot, you’re not – er – hard up, are you? I know the war hit investments very badly –’

Poirot reassured me quickly.

‘No, no, my friend. I am in most comfortable circumstances. Indeed, I am rich. It is not the economy that brings me here.’

‘Then that’s all right,’ I said. I went on: ‘I think I can understand your feeling. As one gets on, one tends more and more to revert to the old days. One tries to recapture old emotions. I find it painful to be here, in a way, and yet it brings back to me a hundred old thoughts and emotions that I’d quite forgotten I ever felt. I dare say you feel the same.’

‘Not in the least. I do not feel like that at all.’

‘They were good days,’ I said sadly.

‘You may speak for yourself, Hastings. For me, my arrival at Styles St Mary was a sad and painful time. I was a refugee, wounded, exiled from home and country, existing by charity in a foreign land. No, it was not gay. I did not know then that England would come to be my home and that I should find happiness here.’

‘I had forgotten that,’ I admitted.

‘Precisely. You attribute always to others the sentiments that you yourself experience. Hastings was happy – everybody was happy!’

‘No, no,’ I protested, laughing.

‘And in any case it is not true,’ continued Poirot. ‘You look back, you say, the tears rising in your eyes, “Oh, the happy days. Then I was young.” But indeed, my friend, you were not so happy as you think. You had recently been severely wounded, you were fretting at being no longer fit for active service, you had just been depressed beyond words by your sojourn in a dreary convalescent home and, as far as I remember, you proceeded to complicate matters by falling in love with two women at the same time.’

I laughed and flushed.

‘What a memory you have, Poirot.’

‘Ta ta ta – I remember now the melancholy sigh you heaved as you murmured fatuities about two lovely women.’

‘Do you remember what you said? You said, “And neither of them for you! But
courage, mon ami
. We may hunt together again and then perhaps –”’

I stopped. For Poirot and I had gone hunting again to France and it was there that I had met the one woman . . .

Gently my friend patted my arm.

‘I know, Hastings, I know. The wound is still fresh. But do not dwell on it, do not look back. Instead look forward.’

I made a gesture of disgust.

‘Look forward? What is there to look forward to?’

‘
Eh bien
, my friend, there is work to be done.’

‘Work? Where?’

‘Here.’

I stared at him.

‘Just now,’ said Poirot, ‘you asked me why I had come here. You may not have observed that I gave you no answer. I will give the answer now. I am here to hunt down a murderer.’

I stared at him with even more astonishment. For a moment I thought he was rambling.

‘You really mean that?’

‘But certainly I mean it. For what other reason did I urge you to join me? My limbs, they are no longer active, but my brain, as I told you, is unimpaired. My rule, remember, has been always the same – sit back and think. That I still can do – in fact it is the only thing possible for me. For the more active side of the campaign I shall have with me my invaluable Hastings.’

‘You really mean it?’ I gasped.

‘Of course I mean it. You and I, Hastings,
are going hunting once again
.’

It took some minutes to grasp that Poirot was really in earnest.

Fantastic though his statement sounded, I had no reason to doubt his judgement.

With a slight smile he said, ‘At last you are convinced. At first you imagined, did you not, that I had the softening of the brain?’

‘No, no,’ I said hastily. ‘Only this seems such an unlikely place.’

‘Ah, you think so?’

‘Of course I haven’t seen all the people yet –’

‘Whom have you seen?’

‘Just the Luttrells, and a man called Norton, seems an inoffensive chap, and Boyd Carrington – I must say I took the greatest fancy to him.’

Poirot nodded. ‘Well, Hastings, I will tell you this, when you have seen the rest of the household, my statement will seem to you just as improbable as it is now.’

‘Who else is there?’

‘The Franklins – Doctor and Mrs, the hospital nurse who attends to Mrs Franklin, your daughter Judith. Then there is a man called Allerton, something of a lady-killer, and a Miss Cole, a woman in her thirties. They are all, let me tell you, very nice people.’

‘And one of them is a murderer?’

‘And one of them is a murderer.’

‘But why – how – why should you think –?’

I found it hard to frame my questions, they tumbled over each other.

‘Calm yourself, Hastings. Let us begin from the beginning. Reach me, I pray you, that small box from the bureau.
Bien
. And now the key – so –’

Unlocking the despatch case, he took from it a mass of typescript and newspaper clippings.

‘You can study these at your leisure, Hastings. For the moment I should not bother with the newspaper cuttings. They are merely the press accounts of various tragedies, occasionally inaccurate, sometimes suggestive. To give you an idea of the cases I suggest that you should read through the précis I have made.’

Deeply interested, I started reading.

I read carefully, but with a growing bewilderment. Finally I put the paper down and looked enquiringly at Poirot.

‘Well,
mon ami
?’

‘I remember the Bradley case,’ I said slowly, ‘I read about it at the time. She was a very good-looking woman.’

Poirot nodded.

‘But you must enlighten me. What is all this about?’

‘Tell me first what it amounts to in your eyes.’

I was rather puzzled.

‘What you gave me was an account of five different murders. They all occurred in different places and amongst different classes of people. Moreover there seems no superficial resemblance between them. That is to say, one was a case of jealousy, one was an unhappy wife seeking to get rid of her husband, another had money for a motive, another was, you might say, unselfish in aim since the murderer did not try to escape punishment, and the fifth was frankly brutal, probably committed under the influence of drink.’ I paused and said doubtfully: ‘Is there something in common between them all that I have missed?’

‘No, no, you have been very accurate in your summing up. The only point that you might have mentioned, but did not, was the fact that in none of those cases did any real
doubt
exist.’

‘I don’t think I understand.’

‘Mrs Etherington, for instance, was acquitted. But everybody, nevertheless, was quite certain that she did it. Freda Clay was not openly accused, but no one thought of any alternative solution to the crime. Riggs stated that he did not remember killing his wife and her lover, but there was never any question of anybody else having done so. Margaret Litchfield confessed. In each case, you see, Hastings, there was one clear suspect and no other.’