万圣节前夜的谋杀18

Seventeen

“Excuse me, Ma’am, I wonder if I might speak to you a minute.”

Mrs. Oliver, who was standing on the verandah of her friend’s houselooking out to see if there were any signs of Hercule Poirot approaching—he had notified her by telephone that he would be coming round to seeher about now—looked round.

A neatly attired woman of middle age was standing, twisting her handsnervously in their neat cotton gloves.

“Yes?” said Mrs. Oliver, adding an interrogation point by her intonation.

“I’m sorry to trouble you, I’m sure, Madam, but I thought — well, Ithought….”

Mrs. Oliver listened but did not attempt to prompt her. She wonderedwhat was worrying the woman so much.

“I take it rightly as you’re the lady who writes stories, don’t I? Storiesabout crimes and murders and things of that kind.”

“Yes,” said Mrs. Oliver, “I’m the one.”

Her curiosity was now aroused. Was this a preface for a demand for anautograph or even a signed photograph? One never knew. The most un-likely things happened.

“I thought as you’d be the right one to tell me,” said the woman.

“You’d better sit down,” said Mrs. Oliver.

She foresaw that Mrs. Whoever-it-was—she was wearing a wedding ringso she was a Mrs.—was the type who takes some time in getting to thepoint. The woman sat down and went on twisting her hands in theirgloves.

“Something you’re worried about?” said Mrs. Oliver, doing her best tostart the flow.

“Well, I’d like advice, and it’s true. It’s about something that happened agood while ago and I wasn’t really worried at the time. But you know howit is. You think things over and you wish you knew someone you could goand ask about it.”

“I see,” said Mrs. Oliver, hoping to inspire confidence by this entirelymeretricious statement.

“Seeing the things what have happened lately, you never do know, doyou?”

“You mean—?”

“I mean what happened at the Hallowe’en party, or whatever theycalled it. I mean it shows you there’s people who aren’t dependable here,doesn’t it? And it shows you things before that weren’t as you thought theywere. I mean, they mightn’t have been what you thought they were, if youunderstand what I mean.”

“Yes?” said Mrs. Oliver, adding an even greater tinge of interrogation tothe monosyllable. “I don’t think I know your name,” she added.

“Leaman. Mrs. Leaman. I go out and do cleaning to oblige ladies here.

Ever since my husband died, and that was five years ago. I used to workfor Mrs. Llewellyn-Smythe, the lady who lived up at the Quarry House, be-fore Colonel and Mrs. Weston came. I don’t know if you ever knew her.”

“No,” said Mrs. Oliver, “I never knew her. This is the first time I havebeen down to Woodleigh Common.”

“I see. Well, you wouldn’t know much about what was going on perhapsat that time, and what was said at that time.”

“I’ve heard a certain amount about it since I’ve been down here thistime,” said Mrs. Oliver.

“You see, I don’t know anything about the law, and I’m worried alwayswhen it’s a question of law. Lawyers, I mean. They might tangle it up and Iwouldn’t like to go to the police. It wouldn’t be anything to do with the po-lice, being a legal matter, would it?”

“Perhaps not,” said Mrs. Oliver, cautiously.

“You know perhaps what they said at the time about the codi—I don’tknow, some word like codi. Like the fish I mean.”

“A codicil to the Will?” suggested Mrs. Oliver.

“Yes, that’s right. That’s what I’m meaning. Mrs. Llewellyn-Smythe, yousee, made one of these cod—codicils and she left all her money to the for-eign girl what looked after her. And it was a surprise, that, because she’dgot relations living here, and she’d come here anyway to live near them.

She was very devoted to them, Mr. Drake, in particular. And it struckpeople as pretty queer, really. And then the lawyers, you see, they begansaying things. They said as Mrs. Llewellyn-Smythe hadn’t written the codi-cil at all. That the foreign pair girl had done it, seeing as she got all themoney left to her. And they said as they were going to law about it. ThatMrs. Drake was going to counterset the Will—if that is the right word.”

“The lawyers were going to contest the Will. Yes, I believe I did hearsomething about that,” said Mrs. Oliver encouragingly. “And you knowsomething about it, perhaps?”

“I didn’t mean no harm,” said Mrs. Leaman. A slight whine came intoher voice, a whine with which Mrs. Oliver had been acquainted severaltimes in the past.

Mrs. Leaman, she thought, was presumably an unreliable woman insome ways, a snooper perhaps, a listener at doors.

“I didn’t say nothing at the time,” said Mrs. Leaman, “because you see Ididn’t rightly know. But you see I thought it was queer and I’ll admit to alady like you, who knows what these things are, that I did want to knowthe truth about it. I’d worked for Mrs. Llewellyn-Smythe for some time, Ihad, and one wants to know how things happened.”

“Quite,” said Mrs. Oliver.

“If I thought I’d done what I oughtn’t to have done, well, of course, I’dhave owned up to it. But I didn’t think as I’d done anything really wrong,you see. Not at the time, if you understand,” she added.

“Oh yes,” said Mrs. Oliver, “I’m sure I shall understand. Go on. It wasabout this codicil.”

“Yes, you see one day Mrs. Llewellyn-Smythe—she hadn’t felt too goodthat day and so she asked us to come in. Me that was, and young Jim whohelps down in the garden and brings the sticks in and the coals, and thingslike that. So we went into her room, where she was, and she’d got papersbefore her there on the desk. And she turns to this foreign girl—Miss Olgawe all called her—and said ‘You go out of the room now, dear, becauseyou mustn’t be mixed up in this part of it,’ or something like that. So MissOlga, she goes out of the room and Mrs. Llewellyn-Smythe, she tells us tocome close and she says ‘This is my Will, this is.’ She got a bit of blottingpaper over the top part of it but the bottom of it’s quite clear. She said ‘I’mwriting something here on this piece of paper and I want you to be a wit-ness of what I’ve written and of my signature at the end of it.’ So she startswriting along the page. Scratchy pen she always used, she wouldn’t useBiros or anything like that. And she writes two or three lines of writingand then she signed her name, and then she says to me, ‘Now, Mrs. Lea-man, you write your name there. Your name and your address’ and thenshe says to Jim ‘And now you write your name underneath there, andyour address too. There. That’ll do. Now you’ve seen me write that andyou’ve seen my signature and you’ve written your names, both of you, tosay that’s that.’ And then she says ‘That’s all. Thank you very much.’ So wegoes out of the room. Well, I didn’t think nothing more of it at the time,but I wondered a bit. And it happened as I turns my head just as I was go-ing out of the room. You see the door doesn’t always latch properly. Youhave to give it a pull, to make it click. And so I was doing that—I wasn’treally looking, if you know what I mean—”

“I know what you mean,” said Mrs. Oliver, in a noncommittal voice.

“And so I sees Mrs. Llewellyn-Smythe pull herself up from the chair—she’d got arthritis and had pain moving about sometimes—and go over tothe bookcase and she pulled out a book and she puts that piece of papershe’d just signed—in an envelope it was—in one of the books. A big tallbook it was in the bottom shelf. And she sticks it back in the bookcase.

Well, I never thought of it again, as you might say. No, really I didn’t. Butwhen all this fuss came up, well, of course I felt—at least, I—” She came toa stop.

Mrs. Oliver had one of her useful intuitions.

“But surely,” she said, “you didn’t wait as long as all that—”

“Well, I’ll tell you the truth, I will. I’ll admit I was curious. After all, Imean, you want to know when you’ve signed anything, what you’vesigned, don’t you? I mean, it’s only human nature.”

“Yes,” said Mrs. Oliver, “it’s only human nature.”

Curiosity, she thought, was a highly component part in Mrs. Leaman’shuman nature.

“So I will admit that next day, when Mrs. Llewellyn-Smythe had driveninto Medchester and I was doing her bedroom as usual—a bedsitting roomshe had because she had to rest a lot. And I thinks, ‘Well, one ought reallyto know when you’ve signed a thing, what it is you’ve signed.’ I mean theyalways say with these hire purchase things, you should read the smallprint.”

“Or in this case, the handwriting,” suggested Mrs. Oliver.

“So I thought, well, there’s no harm—it’s not as though I was taking any-thing. I mean to say I’d had to sign my name there, and I thought I reallyought to know what I’d signed. So I had a look along the bookshelves. Theyneeded dusting anyway. And I found the one. It was on the bottom shelf. Itwas an old book, a sort of Queen Victoria’s kind of book. And I found thisenvelope with a folded paper in it and the title of the book said EnquireWithin upon Everything. And it seemed then as though it was, sort ofmeant, if you know what I mean?”

“Yes,” said Mrs. Oliver. “It was clearly meant. And so you took out thepaper and looked at it.”

“That’s right, Madam. And whether I did wrong or not I don’t know. Butanyway, there it was. It was a legal document all right. On the last pagethere was the writing what she’d made the morning before. New writingwith a new scratchy pen she was using. It was clear enough to read,though, although she had a rather spiky handwriting.”

“And what did it say,” said Mrs. Oliver, her curiosity now having joineditself to that previously felt by Mrs. Leaman.

“Well, it said something like, as far as I remember—the exact words I’mnot quite sure of—something about a codicil and that after the legaciesmentioned in her Will, she bequeathed her entire fortune to Olga—I’m notsure of the surname, it began with an S. Seminoff, or something like that—in consideration of her great kindness and attention to her during her ill-ness. And there it was written down and she’d signed it and I’d signed it,and Jim had signed it. So I put it back where it was because I shouldn’t likeMrs. Llewellyn-Smythe to know that I’d been poking about in her things.

“But well, I said to myself, well, this is a surprise. And I thought, fancythat foreign girl getting all that money because we all know as Mrs.

Llewellyn-Smythe was very rich. Her husband had been in shipbuildingand he’d left her a big fortune, and I thought, well, some people have allthe luck. Mind you, I wasn’t particularly fond of Miss Olga myself. She hada sharp way with her sometimes and she had quite a bad temper. But Iwill say as she was always very attentive and polite and all that, to the oldlady. Looking out for herself, all right, she was, and she got away with it.

And I thought, well, leaving all that money away from her own family.

Then I thought, well, perhaps she’s had a tiff with them and likely as notthat will blow over, so maybe she’ll tear this up and make another Will orcodicil after all. But anyway, that was that, and I put it back and I forgotabout it, I suppose.

“But when all the fuss came up about the Will, and there was talk ofhow it had been forged and Mrs. Llewellyn-Smythe could never have writ-ten that codicil herself—for that’s what they were saying, mind you, as itwasn’t the old lady who had written that at all, it was somebody else—”

“I see,” said Mrs. Oliver. “And so, what did you do?”

“I didn’t do anything. And that’s what’s worrying me…I didn’t get thehang of things at once. And when I’d thought things over a bit I didn’tknow rightly what I ought to do and I thought, well, it was all talk becausethe lawyers were against the foreigner, like people always are. I’m notvery fond of foreigners myself, I’ll admit. At any rate, there it was, and theyoung lady herself was swanking about, giving herself airs, looking aspleased as Punch and I thought, well, maybe it’s all a legal thing of somekind and they’ll say she’s no right to the money because she wasn’t relatedto the old lady. So everything will be all right. And it was in a way because,you see, they gave up the idea of bringing the case. It didn’t come to courtat all and as far as anyone knew, Miss Olga ran away. Went off back to theContinent somewhere, where she came from. So it looks as though theremust have been some hocus-pocus of some kind on her part. Maybe shethreatened the old lady and made her do it. You never know, do you? Oneof my nephews who’s going to be a doctor, says you can do wonderfulthings with hypnotism. I thought perhaps she hypnotized the old lady.”

“This was how long ago?”

“Mrs. Llewellyn-Smythe’s been dead for—let me see, nearly two years.”

“And it didn’t worry you?”

“No, it didn’t worry me. Not at the time. Because you see, I didn’t rightlysee that it mattered. Everything was all right, there wasn’t any question ofthat Miss Olga getting away with the money, so I didn’t see as it was anycall for me—”

“But now you feel differently?”

“It’s that nasty death—the child that was pushed into a bucket of apples.

Saying things about a murder, saying she’d seen something or knownsomething about a murder. And I thought maybe as Miss Olga hadmurdered the old lady because she knew all this money was coming to herand then she got the wind up when there was a fuss and lawyers and thepolice, maybe, and so she ran away. So then I thought well, perhaps Iought to—well, I ought to tell someone, and I thought you’d be a lady ashas got friends in legal departments. Friends in the police perhaps, andyou’d explain to them that I was only dusting a bookshelf, and this paperwas there in a book and I put it back where it belonged. I didn’t take itaway or anything.”

“But that’s what happened, was it, on that occasion? You saw Mrs.

Llewellyn-Smythe write a codicil to her Will. You saw her write her nameand you yourself and this Jim someone were both there and you bothwrote your own names yourselves. That’s it, isn’t it?”

“That’s right.”

“So if you both saw Mrs. Llewellyn-Smythe write her name, then thatsignature couldn’t have been a forgery, could it? Not if you saw her writeit herself.”

“I saw her write it herself and that’s the absolute truth I’m speaking.

And Jim’d say so too only he’s gone to Australia, he has. Went over a yearago and I don’t know his address or anything. He didn’t come from theseparts, anyway.”

“And what do you want me to do?”

“Well, I want you to tell me if there’s anything I ought to say, or do—now. Nobody’s asked me, mind you. Nobody ever asked me if I knew any-thing about a Will.”

“Your name is Leaman. What Christian name?”

“Harriet.”

“Harriet Leaman. And Jim, what was his last name?”

“Well, now, what was it? Jenkins. That’s right. James Jenkins. I’d bemuch obliged if you could help me because it worries me, you see. All thistrouble coming along and if that Miss Olga did it, murdered Mrs.

Llewellyn-Smythe, I mean, and young Joyce saw her do it…She was ever socock-a-hoop about it all, Miss Olga was, I mean about hearing from thelawyers as she’d come into a lot of money. But it was different when thepolice came round asking questions, and she went off very sudden, shedid. Nobody asked me anything, they didn’t. But now I can’t help wonder-ing if I ought to have said something at the time.”

“I think,” said Mrs. Oliver, “that you will probably have to tell this storyof yours to whoever represented Mrs. Llewellyn-Smythe as a lawyer. I’msure a good lawyer will quite understand your feelings and your motive.”

“Well, I’m sure if you’d say a word for me and tell them, being a lady asknows what’s what, how it came about, and how I never meant to—well,not to do anything dishonest in any way. I mean, all I did—”

“All you did was to say nothing,” said Mrs. Oliver. “It seems quite a reas-onable explanation.”

“And if it could come from you—saying a word for me first, you know,to explain, I’d be ever so grateful.”

“I’ll do what I can,” said Mrs. Oliver.

Her eyes strayed to the garden path where she saw a neat figure ap-proaching.

“Well, thanks ever so much. They said as you were a very nice lady, andI’m sure I’m much obliged to you.”

She rose to her feet, replaced the cotton gloves which she had twistedentirely off in her anguish, made a kind of half nod or bob, and trotted off.

Mrs. Oliver waited until Poirot approached.

“Come here,” she said, “and sit down. What’s the matter with you? Youlook upset.”

“My feet are extremely painful,” said Hercule Poirot.

“It’s those awful tight patent leather shoes of yours,” said Mrs. Oliver.

“Sit down. Tell me what you came to tell me, and then I’ll tell you some-thing that you may be surprised to hear!”

 

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