Four

Mrs. Oliver put down the glass and wiped her lips.

“You were right,” she said. “That—that helped. I was getting hysterical.”

“You have had a great shock, I see now. When did this happen?”

“Last night. Was it only last night? Yes, yes, of course.”

“And you came to me.”

It was not quite a question, but it displayed a desire for more informa-tion than Poirot had yet had.

“You came to me—why?”

“I thought you could help,” said Mrs. Oliver. “You see, it’s — it’s notsimple.”

“It could be and it could not,” said Poirot. “A lot depends. You must tellme more, you know. The police, I presume, are in charge. A doctor was, nodoubt, called. What did he say?”

“There’s to be an inquest,” said Mrs. Oliver.

“Naturally.”

“Tomorrow or the next day.”

“This girl, Joyce, how old was she?”

“I don’t know exactly. I should think perhaps twelve or thirteen.”

“Small for her age?”

“No, no, I should think rather mature, perhaps. Lumpy,” said Mrs.

Oliver.

“Well-developed? You mean sexy-looking?”

“Yes, that is what I mean. But I don’t think that was the kind of crime itwas—I mean that would have been more simple, wouldn’t it?”

“It is the kind of crime,” said Poirot, “of which one reads every day inthe paper. A girl who is attacked, a school child who is assaulted—yes,every day. This happened in a private house which makes it different, butperhaps not so different as all that. But all the same, I’m not sure yet thatyou’ve told me everything.”

“No, I don’t suppose I have,” said Mrs. Oliver. “I haven’t told you thereason, I mean, why I came to you.”

“You knew this Joyce, you knew her well?”

“I didn’t know her at all. I’d better explain to you, I think, just how Icame to be there.”

“There is where?”

“Oh, a place called Woodleigh Common.”

“Woodleigh Common,” said Poirot thoughtfully. “Now where lately—”

he broke off.

“It’s not very far from London. About—oh, thirty to forty miles, I think.

It’s near Medchester. It’s one of those places where there are a few nicehouses, but where a certain amount of new building has been done. Resid-ential. A good school nearby, and people can commute from there to Lon-don or into Medchester. It’s quite an ordinary sort of place where peoplewith what you might call everyday reasonable incomes live.”

“Woodleigh Common,” said Poirot again, thoughtfully.

“I was staying with a friend there. Judith Butler. She’s a widow. I wenton a Hellenic cruise this year and Judith was on the cruise and we becamefriends. She’s got a daughter. A girl called Miranda who is twelve or thir-teen. Anyway, she asked me to come and stay and she said friends of herswere giving this party for children, and it was to be a Hallowe’en party.

She said perhaps I had some interesting ideas.”

“Ah,” said Poirot, “she did not suggest this time that you should arrangea murder hunt or anything of that kind?”

“Good gracious, no,” said Mrs. Oliver. “Do you think I should ever con-sider such a thing again?”

“I should think it unlikely.”

“But it happened, that’s what’s so awful,” said Mrs. Oliver. “I mean, itcouldn’t have happened just because I was there, could it?”

“I do not think so. At least—Did any of the people at the party know whoyou were?”

“Yes,” said Mrs. Oliver. “One of the children said something about mywriting books and that they liked murders. That’s how it—well—that’swhat led to the thing—I mean to the thing that made me come to you.”

“Which you still haven’t told me.”

“Well, you see, at first I didn’t think of it. Not straight away. I mean, chil-dren do queer things sometimes. I mean there are queer children about,children who — well, once I suppose they would have been in mentalhomes and things, but they send them home now and tell them to lead or-dinary lives or something, and then they go and do something like this.”

“There were some young adolescents there?”

“There were two boys, or youths as they always seem to call them in po-lice reports. About sixteen to eighteen.”

“I suppose one of them might have done it. Is that what the policethink?”

“They don’t say what they think,” said Mrs. Oliver, “but they looked asthough they might think so.”

“Was this Joyce an attractive girl?”

“I don’t think so,” said Mrs. Oliver. “You mean attractive to boys, doyou?”

“No,” said Poirot, “I think I meant—well, just the plain simple meaningof the word.”

“I don’t think she was a very nice girl,” said Mrs. Oliver, “not one you’dwant to talk to much. She was the sort of girl who shows off and boasts.

It’s a rather tiresome age, I think. It sounds unkind what I’m saying, but—”

“It is not unkind in murder to say what the victim was like,” said Poirot.

“It is very, very necessary. The personality of the victim is the cause ofmany a murder. How many people were there in the house at the time?”

“You mean for the party and so on? Well, I suppose there were five orsix women, some mothers, a schoolteacher, a doctor’s wife, or sister, Ithink, a couple of middle-aged married people, the two boys of sixteen toeighteen, a girl of fifteen, two or three of eleven or twelve—well that sortof thing. About twenty-five or thirty in all, perhaps.”

“Any strangers?”

“They all knew each other, I think. Some better than others. I think thegirls were mostly in the same school. There were a couple of women whohad come in to help with the food and the supper and things like that.

When the party ended, most of the mothers went home with their chil-dren. I stayed behind with Judith and a couple of others to help RowenaDrake, the woman who gave the party, to clear up a bit, so the cleaningwomen who came in the morning wouldn’t have so much mess to dealwith. You know, there was a lot of flour about, and paper caps out ofcrackers and different things. So we swept up a bit, and we got to the lib-rary last of all. And that’s when — when we found her. And then I re-membered what she’d said.”

“What who had said?”

“Joyce.”

“What did she say? We are coming to it now, are we not? We are comingto the reason why you are here?”

“Yes. I thought it wouldn’t mean anything to—oh, to a doctor or the po-lice or anyone, but I thought it might mean something to you.”

“Eh bien,” said Poirot, “tell me. Was this something Joyce said at theparty?”

“No—earlier in the day. That afternoon when we were fixing things up.

It was after they’d talked about my writing murder stories and Joyce said‘I saw a murder once’ and her mother or somebody said ‘Don’t be silly,Joyce, saying things like that’ and one of the older girls said ‘You’re justmaking it up’ and Joyce said ‘I did. I saw it I tell you. I did. I saw someonedo a murder,’ but no one believed her. They just laughed and she got veryangry.”

“Did you believe her?”

“No, of course not.”

“I see,” said Poirot, “yes, I see.” He was silent for some moments, tappinga finger on the table. Then he said: “I wonder—she gave no details—nonames?”

“No. She went on boasting and shouting a bit and being angry becausemost of the other girls were laughing at her. The mothers, I think, and theolder people, were rather cross with her. But the girls and the youngerboys just laughed at her! They said things like ‘Go on, Joyce, when wasthis? Why did you never tell us about it?’ And Joyce said, ‘I’d forgotten allabout it, it was so long ago.’”

“Aha! Did she say how long ago?”

“‘Years ago,’” she said. You know, in rather a would-be grown-up way.

“‘Why didn’t you go and tell the police then?’ one of the girls said. Ann, Ithink, or Beatrice. Rather a smug, superior girl.”

“Aha, and what did she say to that?”

“She said: ‘Because I didn’t know at the time it was a murder.’”

“A very interesting remark,” said Poirot, sitting up rather straighter inhis chair.

“She’d got a bit mixed up by then, I think,” said Mrs. Oliver. “You know,trying to explain herself and getting angry because they were all teasingher.

“They kept asking her why she hadn’t gone to the police, and she kepton saying ‘Because I didn’t know then that it was a murder. It wasn’t untilafterwards that it came to me quite suddenly that that was what I hadseen.’”

“But nobody showed any signs of believing her—and you yourself didnot believe her—but when you came across her dead you suddenly feltthat she might have been speaking the truth?”

“Yes, just that. I didn’t know what I ought to do, or what I could do. Butthen, later, I thought of you.”

Poirot bowed his head gravely in acknowledgement. He was silent for amoment or two, then he said:

“I must pose to you a serious question, and reflect before you answer it.

Do you think that this girl had really seen a murder? Or do you think thatshe merely believed that she had seen a murder?”

“The first, I think,” said Mrs. Oliver. “I didn’t at the time. I just thoughtthat she was vaguely remembering something she had once seen and wasworking it up to make it sound important and exciting. She became veryvehement, saying, ‘I did see it, I tell you. I did see it happen.’”

“And so.”

“And so I’ve come along to you,” said Mrs. Oliver, “because the only wayher death makes sense is that there really was a murder and that she wasa witness to it.”

“That would involve certain things. It would involve that one of thepeople who were at the party committed the murder, and that that sameperson must also have been there earlier that day and have heard whatJoyce said.”

“You don’t think I’m just imagining things, do you?” said Mrs. Oliver.

“Do you think that it is all just my very far-fetched imagination?”

“A girl was murdered,” said Poirot. “Murdered by someone who hadstrength enough to hold her head down in a bucket of water. An uglymurder and a murder that was committed with what we might call, notime to lose. Somebody was threatened, and whoever it was struck as soonas it was humanly possible.”

“Joyce could not have known who it was who did the murder she saw,”

said Mrs. Oliver. “I mean she wouldn’t have said what she did if there wassomeone actually in the room who was concerned.”

“No,” said Poirot, “I think you are right there. She saw a murder, but shedid not see the murderer’s face. We have to go beyond that.”

“I don’t understand exactly what you mean.”

“It could be that someone who was there earlier in the day and heardJoyce’s accusation knew about the murder, knew who committed themurder, perhaps was closely involved with that person. It may have beenthat someone thought he was the only person who knew what his wifehad done, or his mother or his daughter or his son. Or it might have beena woman who knew what her husband or mother or daughter or son haddone. Someone who thought that no one else knew. And then Joyce begantalking….”

“And so—”

“Joyce had to die?”

“Yes. What are you going to do?”

“I have just remembered,” said Hercule Poirot, “why the name ofWoodleigh Common was familiar to me.”