大象的证词5

Chapter 5

Old Sins Have Long Shadows

Hercule Poirot let the revolving door wind him round. Arresting the swingof it with one hand, he stepped forward into the small restaurant. Therewere not many people there. It was an unfashionable time of day, but hiseyes soon saw the man he had come to meet. The square, solid bulk of Su-perintendent Spence rose from the table in one corner.

‘Good,’ he said. ‘You have arrived here. You had no difficulty in findingit?’

‘None at all. Your instructions were most adequate.’

‘Let me introduce you now. This is Chief Superintendent Garroway.

Monsieur Hercule Poirot.’

Garroway was a tall, thin man with a lean, ascetic face, grey hair whichleft a small round spot like a tonsure, so that he had a faint resemblance toan ecclesiastic.

‘This is wonderful,’ said Poirot.

‘I am retired now, of course,’ said Garroway, ‘but one remembers. Yes,certain things one remembers, although they are past and gone, and thegeneral public probably remembers nothing about them. But yes.’

Hercule Poirot very nearly said ‘Elephants do remember,’ but checkedhimself in time. That phrase was so associated in his mind now with MrsAriadne Oliver that he found it difficult to restrain it from his tongue inmany clearly unsuitable categories.

‘I hope you have not been getting impatient,’ said SuperintendentSpence.

He pulled forward a chair, and the three men sat down. A menu wasbrought. Superintendent Spence, who was clearly addicted to this particu-lar restaurant, offered tentative words of advice. Garroway and Poirotmade their choice. Then, leaning back a little in their chairs and sippingglasses of sherry, they contemplated each other for some minutes in si-lence before speaking.

‘I must apologize to you,’ said Poirot, ‘I really must apologize to you forcoming to you with my demands about an affair which is over and donewith.’

‘What interests me,’ said Spence, ‘is what has interested you. I thoughtfirst that it was unlike you to have this wish to delve in the past. It is con-nected with something that has occurred nowadays, or is it sudden curios-ity about a rather inexplicable, perhaps, case? Do you agree with that?’

He looked across the table. ‘Inspector Garroway,’ he said, ‘as he was atthat time, was the officer in charge of the investigations into theRavenscroft shooting. He was an old friend of mine and so I had no diffi-culty in getting in touch with him.’

‘And he was kind enough to come here today,’ said Poirot, ‘simply be-cause I must admit to a curiosity which I am sure I have no right to feelabout an affair that is past and done with.’

‘Well, I wouldn’t say that,’ said Garroway. ‘We all have interests in cer-tain cases that are past. Did Lizzie Borden really kill her father andmother with an axe? There are people who still do not think so. Whokilled Charles Bravo and why? There are several different ideas, mostlynot very well founded. But still people try to find alternative explana-tions.’

His keen, shrewd eyes looked across at Poirot.

‘And Monsieur Poirot, if I am not mistaken, has occasionally shown aleaning towards looking into cases, going back, shall we say, for murder,back into the past, twice, perhaps three times.’

‘Three times, certainly,’ said Superintendent Spence.

‘Once, I think I am right, by request of a Canadian girl.’

‘That is so,’ said Poirot. ‘A Canadian girl, very vehement, very passion-ate, very forceful, who had come here to investigate a murder for whichher mother had been condemned to death, although she died before sen-tence was carried out. Her daughter was convinced that her mother hadbeen innocent.’

‘And you agreed?’ said Garroway.

‘I did not agree,’ said Poirot, ‘when she first told me of the matter. Butshe was very vehement and very sure.’

‘It was natural for a daughter to wish her mother to have been innocentand to try and prove against all appearances that she was innocent,’ saidSpence.

‘It was just a little more than that,’ said Poirot. ‘She convinced me of thetype of woman her mother was.’

‘A woman incapable of murder?’

‘No,’ said Poirot, ‘it would be very difficult, and I am sure both of youagree with me, to think there is anyone quite incapable of murder if oneknows what kind of person they are, what led up to it. But in that particu-lar case, the mother never protested her innocence. She appeared to bequite content to be sentenced. That was curious to begin with. Was she adefeatist? It did not seem so. When I began to enquire, it became clear thatshe was not a defeatist. She was, one would say, almost the opposite of it.’

Garroway looked interested. He leaned across thetable, twisting a bit ofbread off the roll on his plate.

‘And was she innocent?’

‘Yes,’ said Poirot. ‘She was innocent.’

‘And that surprised you?’

‘Not by the time I realized it,’ said Poirot. ‘There were one or two things– one thing in particular – that showed she could not have been guilty. Onefact that nobody had appreciated at the time. Knowing that one had onlyto look at what there was, shall we say, on the menu in the way of lookingelsewhere.’ 1

Grilled trout was put in front of them at this point.

‘There was another case, too, where you looked into the past, not quitein the same way,’ continued Spence. ‘A girl who said at a party that shehad once seen a murder committed.’ 2

‘There again one had to – how shall I put it? – step backwards instead offorward,’ said Poirot. ‘Yes, that is very true.’

‘And had the girl seen the murder committed?’

‘No,’ said Poirot, ‘because it was the wrong girl. This trout is delicious,’

he added, with appreciation.

‘They do all fish dishes very well here,’ said Superintendent Spence.

He helped himself from the sauce boat proffered to him.

‘A most delicious sauce,’ he added.

Silent appreciation of food filled the next three minutes.

‘When Spence came along to me,’ said Superintendent Garroway, ‘ask-ing if I remembered anything about the Ravenscroft case, I was intriguedand delighted at once.’

‘You haven’t forgotten all about it?’

‘Not the Ravenscroft case. It wasn’t an easy case to forget about.’

‘You agree,’ said Poirot, ‘that there were discrepancies about it? Lack ofproof, alternative solutions?’

‘No,’ said Garroway, ‘nothing of that kind. All the evidence recorded thevisible facts. Deaths of which there were several former examples, yes, allplain sailing. And yet –’

‘Well?’ said Poirot.

‘And yet it was all wrong,’ said Garroway. ‘Ah,’ said Spence. He lookedinterested. ‘That’s what you felt once, isn’t it?’ said Poirot, turning to him.

‘In the case of Mrs McGinty. Yes.’ 3

‘You weren’t satisfied,’ said Poirot, ‘when that extremely difficult youngman was arrested. He had every reason for doing it, he looked as thoughhe had done it, everyone thought he had done it. But you knew he hadn’tdone it. You were so sure of it that you came to me and told me to go alongto seewhat I could find out.’

‘See if you could help – and you did help, didn’tyou?’ said Spence.

Poirot sighed.

‘Fortunately, yes. But what a tiresome young man he was. If ever ayoung man deserved to be hanged, not because he had done a murder butbecause he wouldn’t help anyone to prove that he hadn’t. Now we havethe Ravenscroft case. You say, Superintendent Garroway, something waswrong?’

‘Yes, I felt quite sure of it if you understand what I mean.’

‘I do understand,’ said Poirot. ‘And so does Spence. One does comeacross these things sometimes. The proofs are there, the motive, the op-portunity, the clues, the mise-en-scène, it’s all there. A complete blueprint,as you might say. But all the same, those whose profession it is, know. Theyknow that it’s all wrong, just like a critic in the artistic world knows whena picture is all wrong. Knows when it’s a fake and not the real thing.’

‘There wasn’t anything I could do about it, either,’ said SuperintendentGarroway. ‘I looked into it, around it, up above it and down below it, asyou might say. I talked to the people. There was nothing there. It lookedlike a suicide pact, it had all the marks of the suicide pact. Alternatively, ofcourse, it could be a husband who shot a wife and then himself, or a wifewho shot her husband and then herself. All those three things happen.

When one comes across them, one knows they have happened. But inmost cases one has some idea of why.’

‘There wasn’t any real idea of why in this case, was that it?’ said Poirot.

‘Yes. That’s it. You see, the moment you begin to enquire into a case, toenquire about people and things, you get a very good picture as a rule ofwhat their lives have been like. This was a couple, ageing, the husbandwith a good record, a wife affectionate, pleasant, on good terms together.

That’s a thing one soon finds out about. They were happy living together.

They went for walks, they played picquet, and poker patience with eachother in the evenings, they had children who caused them no particularanxiety. A boy in school in England and a girl in a pensionnat in Switzer-land. There was nothing wrong with their lives as far as one could tell.

From such medical evidence as one could obtain, there was nothing defin-itely wrong with their health. The husband had suffered from high bloodpressure at one time, but was in good condition by the taking of suitablemedicaments which kept him on an even keel. His wife was slightly deafand had had a little minor heart trouble, nothing to be worried about. Ofcourse it could be, as does happen sometimes, that one or other of themhad fears for their health. There are a lot of people who are in good healthbut are quite convinced they have cancer, are quite sure that they won’tlive another year. Sometimes that leads to their taking their own life. TheRavenscrofts didn’t seem that kind of person. They seemed well balancedand placid.’

‘So what did you really think?’ said Poirot. ‘The trouble is that I couldn’tthink. Looking back, I said to myself it was suicide. It could only have beensuicide. For some reason or other they decided that life was unbearable tothem. Not through financial trouble, not through health difficulties, notbecause of unhappiness. And there, you see, I came to a full stop. It had allthe marks of suicide. I cannot see any other thing that could havehappened except suicide. They went for a walk. In that walk they took arevolver with them. The revolver lay between the two bodies. There wereblurred fingerprints of both of them. Both of them in fact had handled it,but there was nothing to show who had fired it last. One tends to think thehusband perhaps shot his wife and then himself. That is only because itseems more likely. Well, why? A great many years have passed. Whensomething reminds me now and again, something I read in the papers ofbodies, a husband’s and wife’s bodies somewhere, lying dead, havingtaken their own lives apparently, I think back and then I wonder againwhat happened in the Ravenscroft case. Twelve years ago or fourteen andI still remember the Ravenscroft case and wonder – well, just the oneword, I think. Why – why – why? Did the wife really hate her husband andwant to get rid of him? Did they go on hating each other until they couldbear it no longer?’

Garroway broke off another piece of bread and chewed at it.

‘You got some idea, Monsieur Poirot? Has somebody come to you andtold you something that has awakened your interest particularly? Do youknow something that might explain the “Why”?’

‘No. All the same,’ said Poirot, ‘you must have had a theory. Come now,you had a theory?’

‘You’re quite right, of course. One does have theories. One expects themall, or one of them at least, to work out, but they don’t usually. I think thatmy theory was in the end that you couldn’t look for the cause, because onedidn’t know enough. What did I know about them? General Ravenscroftwas close on sixty, his wife was thirty-five. All I knew of them, strictlyspeaking, was the last five or six years of their lives. The General had re-tired on a pension. They had come back to England from abroad and allthe evidence that came to me, all the knowledge, was of a brief period dur-ing which they had first a house at Bournemouth and then moved towhere they lived in the home where the tragedy took place. They hadlived there peacefully, happily, their children came home there for schoolholidays. It was a peaceful period, I should say, at the end of what one pre-sumed was a peaceful life. I knew of their life after retirement in England,of their family. There was no financial motive, no motive of hatred, nomotive of sexual involvement, of intrusive love-affairs. No. But there was aperiod before that. What did I know about that? What I knew was a lifespent mostly abroad with occasional visits home, a good record for theman, pleasant remembrances of her from friends of the wife’s. There wasno outstanding tragedy, dispute, nothing that one knew of. But then Imightn’t have known. One doesn’t know. There was a period of, say,twenty-thirty years, years from childhood to the time they married, thetime they lived abroad in Malaya and other places. Perhaps the root of thetragedy was there. There is a proverb my grandmother used to repeat: Oldsins have long shadows. Was the cause of death some long shadow, ashadow from the past? That’s not an easy thing to find out about. You findout about a man’s record, what friends or acquaintances say, but youdon’t know any inner details. Well, I think little by little the theory grewup in my mind that that would have been the place to look, if I could havelooked. Something that had happened then, in another country, perhaps.

Something that had been thought to be forgotten, to have passed out of ex-istence, but which still perhaps existed. A grudge from the past, some hap-pening that nobody knew about, that had happened elsewhere, not intheir life in England, but which may have been there. If one had knownwhere to look for it.’

‘Not the sort of thing, you mean,’ said Poirot, ‘that anybody would re-member. I mean, remember nowadays. Something that no friends oftheirs in England, perhaps, would have known about.’

‘Their friends in England seem to have been mostly made since retire-ment, though I suppose old friends did come and visit them or see themoccasionally. But one doesn’t hear about things that happened in the past.

People forget.’

‘Yes,’ said Poirot, thoughtfully. ‘People forget.’

‘They’re not like elephants,’ said Superintendent Garroway, giving afaint smile. ‘Elephants, they always say, remember everything.’

‘It is odd that you should say that,’ said Poirot. ‘That I should say thatabout long sins?’

‘Not so much that. It was your mention of elephants that interested me.’

Superintendent Garroway looked at Poirot with some surprise. Heseemed to be waiting for more. Spence also cast a quick glance at his oldfriend.

‘Something that happened out East, perhaps,’ he suggested. ‘I mean –well, that’s where elephants come from, isn’t it? Or from Africa. Anyway,who’s been talking to you about elephants?’ he added.

‘A friend of mine happened to mention them,’ said Poirot. ‘Someone youknow,’ he said to Superintendent Spence. ‘Mrs Oliver.’

‘Oh, Mrs Ariadne Oliver. Well!’ He paused.

‘Well what?’ said Poirot. ‘Well, does she know something, then?’ heasked. ‘I do not think so as yet,’ said Poirot, ‘but she might know some-thing before very long.’ He added thoughtfully, ‘She’s that kind of person.

She gets around, if you know what I mean.’

‘Yes’,’ said Spence. ‘Yes. Has she got any ideas?’ he asked.

‘Do you mean Mrs Ariadne Oliver, the writer?’ asked Garroway withsome interest.

‘That’s the one,’ said Spence. ‘Does she know a good deal about crime? Iknow she writes crime stories. I’ve never known where she got her ideasfrom or her facts.’

‘Her ideas,’ said Poirot, ‘come out of her head. Her facts – well, that’smore difficult.’ He paused for a moment.

‘What are you thinking of, Poirot, something in particular?’

‘Yes,’ said Poirot. ‘I ruined one of her stories once, or so she tells me. Shehad just had a very good idea about a fact, something that had to do with along-sleeved woollen vest. I asked her something over the telephone and itput the idea for the story out of her head. She reproaches me at intervals.’

‘Dear, dear,’ said Spence. ‘Sounds rather like that parsley that sank intothe butter on a hot day. You know. Sherlock Holmes and the dog who didnothing in the night time.’

‘Did they have a dog?’ asked Poirot.

‘I beg your pardon?’

‘I said did they have a dog? General and Lady Ravenscroft. Did they takea dog for that walk with them on the day they were shot? TheRavenscrofts.’

‘They had a dog – yes,’ said Garroway. ‘I suppose, I suppose they did takehim for a walk most days.’

‘If it had been one of Mrs Oliver’s stories,’ said Spence, ‘you ought tohave found the dog howling over the two dead bodies. But that didn’t hap-pen.’

Garroway shook his head.

‘I wonder where the dog is now?’ said Poirot.

‘Buried in somebody’s garden, I expect,’ said Garroway. ‘It’s fourteenyears ago.’

‘So we can’t go and ask the dog, can we?’ said Poirot. He added thought-fully, ‘A pity. It’s astonishing, you know, what dogs can know. Who wasthere exactly in the house? I mean on the day when the crime happened?’

‘I brought you a list,’ said Superintendent Garroway, ‘in case you like toconsult it. Mrs Whittaker, the elderly cook-housekeeper. It was her dayout so we couldn’t get much from her that was helpful. A visitor was stay-ing there who had been governess to the Ravenscroft children once, I be-lieve. Mrs Whittaker was rather deaf and slightly blind. She couldn’t tellus anything of interest, except that recently Lady Ravenscroft had been inhospital or in a nursing home – for nerves but not illness, apparently.

There was a gardener, too.’

‘But a stranger might have come from outside. A stranger from the past.

That’s your idea, Superintendent Garroway?’

‘Not so much an idea as just a theory.’

Poirot was silent, he was thinking of a time when he had asked to goback into the past, had studied five people out of the past who had re-minded him of the nursery rhyme ‘Five little pigs.’ Interesting it had been,and in the end rewarding, because he had found out the truth.

 

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