山核桃大街谋杀案（8）
时间：2025-03-03 03:09:01
（单词翻译:单击）
Chapter Seven
Miss Lemon was seldom, if ever, unpunctual. Fog, storm, epidemic of flu, transport breakdowns—
none of these things seemed to affect that remarkable woman. But this morning Miss Lemon
arrived, breathless, at five minutes past ten instead of on the stroke of ten o’clock. She was
profusely apologetic and for her, quite ruffled.
“I’m extremely sorry, M. Poirot—really extremely sorry. I was just about to leave the flat when
my sister rang up.”
“Ah, she is in good health and spirits, I trust?”
“Well, frankly no.” Poirot looked inquiring. “In fact, she’s very distressed. One of the students
has committed suicide.”
Poirot stared at her. He muttered something softly under his breath.
“I beg your pardon, M. Poirot?”
“What is the name of the student?”
“A girl called Celia Austin.”
“How?”
“They think she took morphia.”
“Could it have been an accident?”
“Oh no. She left a note, it seems.”
Poirot said softly, “It was not this I expected, no, it was not this . . . and yet it is true, I expected
something.”
He looked up to find Miss Lemon at attention, waiting with pencil poised above her pad. He
sighed and shook his head.
“No, I will hand you here this morning’s mail. File them, please, and answer what you can. Me,
I shall go round to Hickory Road.”
Geronimo let Poirot in, and recognising him as the honoured guest of two nights before, became
at once voluble in a sibilant conspiratorial whisper.
“Ah, signor, it is you. We have here the trouble—the big trouble. The little signorina, she is
dead in her bed this morning. First the doctor come. He shake his head. Now comes an inspector
of the police. He is upstairs with the signora and the padrona. Why should she wish to kill herself,
the poverina? When last night is so gay and the betrothment is made?”
“Betrothment?”
“Si, si. To Mr. Colin—you know—big, dark, always smoke the pipe.”
“I know.”
Geronimo opened the door of the common room and introduced Poirot into it with a
redoublement of the conspiratorial manner.
“You stay here, yes? Presently, when the police go, I tell the signora you are here. That is good,
yes?”
Poirot said that it was good and Geronimo withdrew. Left to himself, Poirot, who had no
scruples of delicacy, made as minute an examination as possible of everything in the room with
special attention to everything belonging to the students. His rewards were mediocre. The students
kept most of their belongings and personal papers in their bedrooms.
Upstairs, Mrs. Hubbard was sitting facing Inspector Sharpe, who was asking questions in a soft
apologetic voice. He was a big comfortable looking man with a deceptively mild manner.
“It’s very awkward and distressing for you, I know,” he said soothingly. “But you see, as Dr.
Coles has already told you, there will have to be an inquest, and we have just to get the picture
right, so to speak. Now this girl had been distressed and unhappy lately, you say?”
“Yes.”
“Love affair?”
“Not exactly.” Mrs. Hubbard hesitated.
“You’d better tell me, you know,” said Inspector Sharpe, persuasively. “As I say, we’ve got to
get the picture. There was a reason, or she thought there was, for taking her own life? Any
possibility that she might have been pregnant?”
“It wasn’t that kind of thing at all. I hesitated, Inspector Sharpe, simply because the child had
done some very foolish things and I hoped it wouldn’t be necessary to bring them out in the open.”
Inspector Sharpe coughed.
“We have a good deal of discretion, and the coroner is a man of wide experience. But we have
to know.”
“Yes, of course. I was being foolish. The truth is that for some time past, three months or more,
things have been disappearing—small things, I mean—nothing very important.”
“Trinkets, you mean, finery, nylon stockings and all that? Money, too?”
“No money as far as I know.”
“Ah. And this girl was responsible?”
“Yes.”
“You’d caught her at it?”
“Not exactly. The night before last a—er—a friend of mine came to dine. A M. Hercule Poirot
—I don’t know if you know the name.”
Inspector Sharpe had looked up from his notebook. His eyes had opened rather wide. It
happened that he did know that name.
“M. Hercule Poirot?” he said. “Indeed? Now that’s very interesting.”
“He gave us a little talk after dinner and the subject of these thefts came up. He advised me, in
front of them all, to go to the police.”
“He did, did he?”
“Afterwards, Celia came along to my room and owned up. She was very distressed.”
“Any question of prosecution?”
“No. She was going to make good the losses, and everyone was very nice to her about it.”
“Had she been hard up?”
“No. She had an adequately paid job as a dispenser at St. Catherine’s Hospital and has a little
money of her own, I believe. She’s rather better off than most of our students.”
“So she’d no need to steal—but did,” said the inspector, writing it down.
“It’s kleptomania, I suppose,” said Mrs. Hubbard.
“That’s the label that’s used. I just mean one of the people that don’t need to take things, but
nevertheless do take them.”
“I wonder if you’re being a little unfair to her. You see, there was a young man.”
“And he ratted on her?”
“Oh no. Quite the reverse. He spoke very strongly in her defence and as a matter of fact, last
night, after supper, he announced that they’d become engaged.”
Inspector Sharpe’s eyebrows mounted his forehead in a surprised fashion.
“And then she goes to bed and takes morphia? That’s rather surprising, isn’t it?”
“It is. I can’t understand it.”
Mrs. Hubbard’s face was creased with perplexity and distress.
“And yet the facts are clear enough.” Sharpe nodded to the small torn piece of paper that lay on
the table between them.
Dear Mrs. Hubbard (it ran), I really am sorry and this is the best thing I can do.
“It’s not signed, but you’ve no doubt it’s her handwriting?”
“No.”
Mrs. Hubbard spoke rather uncertainly and frowned as she looked at the torn scrap of paper.
Why did she feel so strongly that there was something wrong about it—?
“There’s one clear fingerprint on it which is definitely hers,” said the inspector. “The morphia
was in a small bottle with the label of St. Catherine’s Hospital on it and you tell me that she works
as a dispenser in St. Catherine’s. She’d have access to the poison cupboard and that’s where she
probably got it. Presumably she brought it home with her yesterday with suicide in mind.”
“I really can’t believe it. It doesn’t seem right somehow. She was so happy last night.”
“Then we must suppose that a reaction set in when she went up to bed. Perhaps there’s more in
her past than you know about. Perhaps she was afraid of that coming out. You think she was very
much in love with this young man—what’s his name, by the way?”
“Colin McNabb. He’s doing a postgraduate course at St. Catherine’s.”
“A doctor? And at St. Catherine’s?”
“Celia was very much in love with him, more, I should say, than he with her. He’s a rather self-
centred young man.”
“Then that’s probably the explanation. She didn’t feel worthy of him, or hadn’t told him all she
ought to tell him. She was quite young, wasn’t she?”
“Twenty-three.”
“They’re idealistic at that age and they take love affairs hard. Yes, that’s it, I’m afraid. Pity.”
He rose to his feet. “I’m afraid the actual facts will have to come out, but we’ll do all we can to
gloss things over. Thank you, Mrs. Hubbard, I’ve got all the information I need now. Her mother
died two years ago and the only relative you know of is this elderly aunt in Yorkshire—we’ll
communicate with her.”
He picked up a small torn fragment with Celia’s agitated writing on it.
“There’s something wrong about that,” said Mrs. Hubbard suddenly.
“Wrong? In what way?”
“I don’t know—but I feel I ought to know. Oh dear.”
“You’re quite sure it’s her handwriting?”
“Oh yes. It’s not that.” Mrs. Hubbard pressed her hands to her eyeballs.
“I feel so dreadfully stupid this morning,” she said apologetically.
“It’s all been very trying for you, I know,” said the inspector with gentle sympathy. “I don’t
think we’ll need to trouble you further at the moment, Mrs. Hubbard.”
Inspector Sharpe opened the door and immediately fell over Geronimo, who was pressed
against the door outside.
“Hallo,” said Inspector Sharpe pleasantly. “Listening at doors, eh?”
“No, no,” Geronimo answered with an air of virtuous indignation. “I do not listen—never,
never! I am just coming in with message.”
“I see. What message?”
Geronimo said sulkily:
“Only that there is gentleman downstairs to see la Signora Hubbard.”
“All right. Go along in, sonny, and tell her.”
He walked past Geronimo down the passage and then, taking a leaf out of the Italian’s book,
turned sharply, and tiptoed noiselessly back. Might as well know if little monkey-face had been
telling the truth.
He arrived in time to hear Geronimo say:
“The gentleman who came to supper the other night, the gentleman with the moustaches, he is
downstairs waiting to see you.”
“Eh? What?” Mrs. Hubbard sounded abstracted. “Oh, thank you, Geronimo. I’ll be down in a
minute or two.”
“Gentleman with the moustaches, eh,” said Sharpe to himself, grinning. “I bet I know who that
is.”
He went downstairs and into the commom room.
“Hallo, M. Poirot,” he said. “It’s a long time since we met.”
Poirot rose without visible discomposure from a kneeling position by the bottom shelf near the
fireplace.
“Aha,” he said. “But surely—yes, it is Inspector Sharpe, is it not? But you were not formerly in
this division?”
“Transferred two years ago. Remember that business down at Crays Hill?”
“Ah yes. That is a long time ago now. You are still a young man, Inspector—”
“Getting on, getting on.”
“—and I am an old one. Alas!” Poirot sighed.
“But still active, eh, M. Poirot. Active in certain ways, shall we say?”
“Now what do you mean by that?”
“I mean that I’d like to know why you came along here the other night to give a talk on
criminology to students.”
Poirot smiled.
“But there is such a simple explanation. Mrs. Hubbard here is the sister of my much valued
secretary, Miss Lemon. So when she asked me—”
“When she asked you to look into what had been going on here, you came along. That’s it
really, isn’t it?”
“You are quite correct.”
“But why? That’s what I want to know. What was there in it for you?”
“To interest me, you mean?”
“That’s what I mean. Here’s a silly kid who’s been pinching a few things here and there.
Happens all the time. Rather small beer for you, M. Poirot, isn’t it?”
Poirot shook his head.
“It is not so simple as that.”
“Why not? What isn’t simple about it?”
Poirot sat down on a chair. With a slight frown he dusted the knees of his trousers.
“I wish I knew,” he said simply.
Sharpe frowned.
“I don’t understand,” he said.
“No, and I do not understand. The things that were taken—” He shook his head. “They did not
make a pattern—they did not make sense. It is like seeing a trail of footprints and they are not all
made by the same feet. There is, quite clearly, the print of what you have called ‘a silly kid’—but
there is more than that. Other things happened that were meant to fit in with the pattern of Celia
Austin—but they did not fit in. They were meaningless, apparently purposeless. There was
evidence, too, of malice. And Celia was not malicious.”
“She was a kleptomaniac?”
“I should very much doubt it.”
“Just an ordinary petty thief, then?”
“Not in the way you mean. I give it you as my opinion that all this pilfering of petty objects was
done to attract the attention of a certain young man.”
“Colin McNabb?”
“Yes. She was desperately in love with Colin McNabb. Colin never noticed her. Instead of a
nice, pretty, well-behaved young girl, she displayed herself as an interesting young criminal. The
result was successful. Colin McNabb immediately fell for her, as they say, in a big way.”
“He must be a complete fool, then.”
“Not at all. He is a keen psychologist.”
“Oh,” Inspector Sharpe groaned. “One of those! I understand now.” A faint grin showed on his
face. “Pretty smart of the girl.”
“Surprisingly so.”
Poirot repeated, musingly, “Yes, surprisingly so.”
Inspector Sharpe looked alert.
“Meaning by that, M. Poirot?”
“That I wondered—I still wonder—if the idea had been suggested to her by someone else?”
“For what reason?”
“How do I know? Altruism? Some ulterior motive? One is in the dark.”
“Any idea as to who it might have been who gave her the tip?”
“No—unless—but no—”
“All the same,” said Sharpe, pondering, “I don’t quite get it. If she’s been simply trying this
kleptomania business on, and it’s succeeded, why the hell go and commit suicide?”
“The answer is that she should not have committed suicide.”
The two men looked at each other.
Poirot murmured:
“You are quite sure that she did?”
“It’s clear as day, M. Poirot. There’s no reason to believe otherwise and—”
The door opened and Mrs. Hubbard came in. She looked flushed and triumphant. Her chin stuck
out aggressively.
“I’ve got it,” she said triumphantly. “Good morning, M. Poirot. I’ve got it, Inspector Sharpe. It
came to me quite suddenly. Why that suicide note looked wrong, I mean. Celia couldn’t possibly
have written it.”
“Why not, Mrs. Hubbard?”
“Because it’s written in ordinary blue black ink. And Celia filled her pen with green ink—that
ink over there,” Mrs. Hubbard nodded towards the shelf, “at breakfast time yesterday morning.”
Inspector Sharpe, a somewhat different Inspector Sharpe, came back into the room which he had
left abruptly after Mrs. Hubbard’s statement.
“Quite right,” he said. “I’ve checked up. The only pen in the girl’s room, the one that was by
her bed, has green ink in it. Now that green ink—”
Mrs. Hubbard held up the nearly empty bottle.
Then she explained, clearly and concisely, the scene at the breakfast table.
“I feel sure,” she ended, “that the scrap of paper was torn out of the letter she had written to me
yesterday—and which I never opened.”
“What did she do with it? Can you remember?”
Mrs. Hubbard shook her head.
“I left her alone in here and went to do my housekeeping. She must, I think, have left it lying
somewhere in here, and forgotten about it.”
“And somebody found it . . . and opened it . . . somebody—”
He broke off.
“You realise,” he said, “what this means? I haven’t been very happy about this torn bit of paper
all along. There was quite a pile of lecture notepaper in her room—much more natural to write a
suicide note on one of them. This means that somebody saw the possibility of using the opening
phrase of her letter to you—to suggest something very different. To suggest suicide—”
He paused and then said slowly:
“This means—”
“Murder,” said Hercule Poirot.
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