五只小猪17
时间：2024-12-17 01:18:57
（单词翻译:单击）
BOOK THREE
One
CONCLUSIONS
Carla Lemarchant looked up. Her eyes were full of fatigue and pain. She pushed back the hair
from her forehead in a tired gesture.
She said:
“It’s so bewildering all this.” She touched the pile of manuscripts. “Because the angle’s
different every time! Everybody sees my mother differently. But the facts are the same. Everyone
agrees on the facts.”
“It has discouraged you, reading them?”
“Yes. Hasn’t it discouraged you?”
“No, I have found those documents very valuable—very informative.”
Poirot spoke slowly and reflectively.
Carla said:
“I wish I’d never read them!”
Poirot looked across at her.
“Ah—so it makes you feel that way?”
Carla said bitterly:
“They all think she did it—all of them except Aunt Angela and what she thinks doesn’t count.
She hasn’t got any reason for it. She’s just one of those loyal people who’ll stick to a thing through
thick and thin. She just goes on saying: “Caroline couldn’t have done it.”
“It strikes you like that?”
“How else should it strike me? I’ve realized, you know, that if my mother didn’t do it, then one
of these five people must have done it. I’ve even had theories as to why.”
“Ah! That is interesting. Tell me.”
“Oh, they were only theories. Philip Blake, for instance. He’s a stockbroker, he was my father’s
best friend—probably my father trusted him. And artists are usually careless about money matters.
Perhaps Philip Blake was in a jam and used my father’s money. He may have got my father to sign
something. Then the whole thing may have been on the point of coming out—and only my
father’s death could have saved him. That’s one of the things I thought of.”
“Not badly imagined at all. What else?”
“Well, there’s Elsa. Philip Blake says here she had her head screwed on too well to meddle with
poison, but I don’t think that’s true at all. Supposing my mother had gone to her and told her that
she wouldn’t divorce my father—that nothing would induce her to divorce him. You may say
what you like, but I think Elsa had a bourgeois mind—she wanted to be respectably married. I
think that then Elsa would have been perfectly capable of pinching the stuff—she had just as good
a chance that afternoon—and might have tried to get my mother out of the way by poisoning her. I
think that would be quite like Elsa. And then, possibly, by some awful accident, Amyas got the
stuff instead of Caroline.”
“Again it is not badly imagined. What else?”
Carla said slowly:
“Well, I thought—perhaps—Meredith!”
“Ah—Meredith Blake?”
“Yes. You see, he sounds to me just the sort of person who would do a murder. I mean, he was
the slow dithering one the others laughed at, and underneath, perhaps, he resented that. Then my
father married the girl he wanted to marry. And my father was successful and rich. And he did
make all those poisons! Perhaps he really made them because he liked the idea of being able to kill
someone one day. He had to call attention to the stuff being taken, so as to divert suspicion from
himself. But he himself was far the most likely person to have taken it. He might, even, have liked
getting Caroline hanged—because she turned him down long ago. I think, you know, it’s rather
fishy what he says in his account of it all—how people do things that aren’t characteristic of them.
Supposing he meant himself when he wrote that?”
Hercule Poirot said:
“You are at least right in this—not to take what has been written down as necessarily a true
narrative. What has been written may have been written deliberately to mislead.”
“Oh, I know. I’ve kept that in mind.”
“Any other ideas?”
Carla said slowly:
“I wondered—before I’d read this—about Miss Williams. She lost her job, you see, when
Angela went to school. And if Amyas had died suddenly, Angela probably wouldn’t have gone
after all. I mean if it passed off as a natural death—which it easily might have done, I suppose, if
Meredith hadn’t missed the coniine. I read up coniine, and it hasn’t got any distinctive postmortem
appearances. It might have been thought to be sunstroke. I know that just losing a job doesn’t
sound a very adequate motive for murder. But murders have been committed again and again for
what seem ridiculously inadequate motives. Tiny sums of money sometimes. And a middle-aged,
perhaps rather incompetent governess might have got the wind up and just seen no future ahead of
her.
“As I say, that’s what I thought before I read this. But Miss Williams doesn’t sound like that at
all. She doesn’t sound in the least incompetent—”
“Not at all. She is still a very efficient and intelligent woman.”
“I know. One can see that. And she sounds absolutely trustworthy too. That’s what has upset me
really. Oh, you know—you understand. You don’t mind, of course. All along you’ve made it clear
it was the truth you wanted. I suppose now we’ve got the truth! Miss Williams is quite right. One
must accept truth. It’s no good basing your life on a lie because it’s what you want to believe. All
right then—I can take it! My mother wasn’t innocent! She wrote me that letter because she was
weak and unhappy and wanted to spare me. I don’t judge her. Perhaps I should feel like that too. I
don’t know what prison does to you. And I don’t blame her either—if she felt so desperately about
my father, I suppose she couldn’t help herself. But I don’t blame my father altogether either. I
understand—just a little—how he felt. So alive—and so full of wanting everything…He couldn’t
help it—he was made that way. And he was a great painter. I think that excuses a lot.”
She turned her flushed excited face to Hecule Poirot with her chin raised defiantly.
Hercule Poirot said:
“So—you are satisfied?”
“Satisfied?” said Carla Lemarchant. Her voice broke on the word.
Poirot leant forward and patted her paternally on the shoulder.
“Listen,” he said. “You give up the fight at the moment when it is most worth fighting. At the
moment when I, Hercule Poirot, have a very good idea of what really happened.”
Carla stared at him. She said:
“Miss Williams loved my mother. She saw her—with her own eyes—faking that suicide
evidence. If you believe what she says—”
Hercule Poirot got up. He said:
“Mademoiselle, because Cecilia Williams says she saw your mother faking Amyas Crale’s
fingerprints on the beer bottle—on the beer bottle, mind—that is the only thing I need to tell me
definitely, once for all, that your mother did not kill your father.”
He nodded his head several times and went out of the room, leaving Carla staring after him.
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