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Eleven
I
Hercule Poirot flicked a last speck of dust from his shoes. He had dressed carefully for his
luncheon party and he was satisfied with the result.
He knew well enough the kind of clothes that were worn in the country on a Sunday in England,
but he did not choose to conform to English ideas. He preferred his own standards of urban
smartness. He was not an English country gentleman. He was Hercule Poirot!
He did not, he confessed it to himself, really like the country. The weekend cottage—so many
of his friends had extolled it—he had allowed himself to succumb, and had purchased Resthaven,
though the only thing he had liked about it was its shape, which was quite square like a box. The
surrounding landscape he did not care for though it was, he knew, supposed to be a beauty spot. It
was, however, too wildly asymmetrical to appeal to him. He did not care much for trees at any
time — they had that untidy habit of shedding their leaves. He could endure poplars and he
approved of a monkey puzzle—but this riot of beech and oak left him unmoved. Such a landscape
was best enjoyed from a car on a fine afternoon. You exclaimed, “Quel beau paysage!” and drove
back to a good hotel.
The best thing about Resthaven, he considered, was the small vegetable garden neatly laid out
in rows by his Belgian gardener Victor. Meanwhile Françoise, Victor’s wife, devoted herself with
tenderness to the care of her employer’s stomach.
Hercule Poirot passed through the gate, sighed, glanced down once more at his shining black
shoes, adjusted his pale grey Homburg hat, and looked up and down the road.
He shivered slightly at the aspect of Dovecotes. Dovecotes and Resthaven had been erected by
rival builders, both of whom had acquired a small piece of land. Further enterprise on their part
had been swiftly curtailed by a National Trust for preserving the beauties of the countryside. The
two houses remained representative of two schools of thought. Resthaven was a box with a roof,
severely modern and a little dull. Dovecotes was a riot of half-timbering and Olde Worlde packed
into as small a space as possible.
Hercule Poirot debated within himself as to how he should approach The Hollow. There was, he
knew, a little higher up the lane, a small gate and a path. This, the unofficial way, would save a
half-mile détour by the road. Nevertheless Hercule Poirot, a stickler for etiquette, decided to take
the longer way round and approach the house correctly by the front entrance.
This was his first visit to Sir Henry and Lady Angkatell. One should not, he considered, take
shortcuts uninvited, especially when one was the guest of people of social importance. He was, it
must be admitted, pleased by their invitation.
“Je suis un peu snob,” he murmured to himself.
He had retained an agreeable impression of the Angkatells from the time in Baghdad,
particularly of Lady Angkatell. “Une originale!” he thought to himself.
His estimation of the time required for walking to The Hollow by road was accurate. It was
exactly one minute to one when he rang the front doorbell. He was glad to have arrived and felt
slightly tired. He was not fond of walking.
The door was opened by the magnificent Gudgeon, of whom Poirot approved. His reception,
however, was not quite as he had hoped. “Her ladyship is in the pavilion by the swimming pool,
sir. Will you come this way?”
The passion of the English for sitting out of doors irritated Hercule Poirot. Though one had to
put up with this whimsy in the height of summer, surely, Poirot thought, one should be safe from it
by the end of September! The day was mild, certainly, but it had, as autumn days always had, a
certain dampness. How infinitely pleasanter to have been ushered into a comfortable drawing
room with, perhaps, a small fire in the grate. But no, here he was being led out through french
windows across a slope of lawn, past a rockery and then through a small gate and along a narrow
track between closely planted young chestnuts.
It was the habit of the Angkatells to invite guests for one o’clock, and on fine days they had
cocktails and sherry in the small pavilion by the swimming pool. Lunch itself was scheduled for
one thirty, by which time the most unpunctual of guests should have managed to arrive, which
permitted Lady Angkatell’s excellent cook to embark on soufflés and such accurately timed
delicacies without too much trepidation.
To Hercule Poirot, the plan did not commend itself.
“In a little minute,” he thought, “I shall be almost back where I started.”
With an increasing awareness of his feet in his shoes, he followed Gudgeon’s tall figure.
It was at that moment from just ahead of him that he heard a little cry. It increased, somehow,
his dissatisfaction. It was incongruous, in some way unfitting. He did not classify it, nor indeed
think about it. When he thought about it afterwards he was hard put to it to remember just what
emotions it had seemed to convey. Dismay? Surprise? Horror? He could only say that it suggested,
very definitely, the unexpected.
Gudgeon stepped out from the chestnuts. He was moving to one side, deferentially, to allow
Poirot to pass and at the same time clearing his throat preparatory to murmuring, “M. Poirot, my
lady” in the proper subdued and respectful tones when his suppleness became suddenly rigid. He
gasped. It was an unbutlerlike noise.
Hercule Poirot stepped out on to the open space surrounding the swimming pool, and
immediately he, too, stiffened, but with annoyance.
It was too much — it was really too much! He had not suspected such cheapness of the
Angkatells. The long walk by the road, the disappointment at the house—and now this! The
misplaced sense of humour of the English!
He was annoyed and he was bored—oh, how he was bored. Death was not, to him, amusing.
And here they had arranged for him, by way of a joke, a set piece.
For what he was looking at was a highly artificial murder scene. By the side of the pool was the
body, artistically arranged with an outflung arm and even some red paint dripping gently over the
edge of the concrete into the pool. It was a spectacular body, that of a handsome fair-haired man.
Standing over the body, revolver in hand, was a woman, a short, powerfully built, middle-aged
woman with a curiously blank expression.
And there were three other actors. On the far side of the pool was a tall young woman whose
hair matched the autumn leaves in its rich brown; she had a basket in her hand full of dahlia heads.
A little farther off was a man, a tall, inconspicuous man in a shooting coat, carrying a gun. And
immediately on his left, with a basket of eggs in her hand, was his hostess, Lady Angkatell.
It was clear to Hercule Poirot that several different paths converged here at the swimming pool
and that these people had each arrived by a different path.
It was all very mathematical and artificial.
He sighed. Enfin, what did they expect him to do? Was he to pretend to believe in this “crime?”
Was he to register dismay—alarm? Or was he to bow, to congratulate his hostess: “Ah, but it is
very charming, what you arrange for me here?”
Really, the whole thing was very stupid—not spirituel at all! Was it not Queen Victoria who
had said: “We are not amused?” He felt very inclined to say the same: “I, Hercule Poirot, am not
amused.”
Lady Angkatell had walked towards the body. He followed, conscious of Gudgeon, still
breathing hard, behind him. “He is not in the secret, that one,” Hercule Poirot thought to himself.
From the other side of the pool, the other two people joined them. They were all quite close now,
looking down on that spectacular sprawling figure by the pool’s edge.
And suddenly, with a terrific shock, with that feeling as of blurring on a cinematograph screen
before the picture comes into focus, Hercule Poirot realized that this artificially set scene had a
point of reality.
For what he was looking down at was, if not a dead, at least a dying man.
It was not red paint dripping off the edge of the concrete, it was blood. This man had been shot,
and shot a very short time ago.
He darted a quick glance at the woman who stood there, revolver in hand. Her face was quite
blank, without feeling of any kind. She looked dazed and rather stupid.
“Curious,” he thought.
Had she, he wondered, drained herself of all emotion, all feeling, in the firing of the shot? Was
she now all passion spent, nothing but an exhausted shell? It might be so, he thought.
Then he looked down on the shot man, and he started. For the dying man’s eyes were open.
They were intensely blue eyes and they held an expression that Poirot could not read but which he
described to himself as a kind of intense awareness.
And suddenly, or so it felt to Poirot, there seemed to be in all this group of people only one
person who was really alive—the man who was at the point of death.
Poirot had never received so strong an impression of vivid and intense vitality. The others were
pale shadowy figures, actors in a remote drama, but this man was real.
John Christow opened his mouth and spoke. His voice was strong, unsurprised and urgent.
“Henrietta—” he said.
Then his eyelids dropped, his head jerked sideways.
Hercule Poirot knelt down, made sure, then rose to his feet, mechanically dusting the knees of
his trousers.
“Yes,” he said. “He is dead.”
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