‘What about the cottage? Do they get that?’
‘It was rented. Of course, under the Rent Restriction Act the landlord couldn’t get the old woman out. But now she’s dead, I don’t think the niece could have taken over—anyway she and her husband didn’t want to. They’ve got a small modern council house of their own of which they are extremely proud.’ Spence sighed. ‘I went into the niece and her husband pretty closely—they seemed the best bet, as you’ll understand. But I couldn’t get hold of anything.’
‘Bien. Now let us talk about Mrs McGinty herself. Describe her to me—and not only in physical terms, if you please.’
Spence grinned.
‘Don’t want a police description? Well, she was sixty-four. Widow. Husband had been employed in the drapery department of Hodges in Kilchester. He died about seven years ago. Pneumonia. Since then, Mrs McGinty has been going out daily to various houses round about. Domestic chores. Broadhinny’s a small village which has lately become residential. One or two retired people, one of the partners in an engineering works, a doctor, that sort of thing. There’s quite a good bus and train service to Kilchester, and Cullenquay which, as I expect you know, is quite a large summer resort, is only eight miles away, but Broadhinny itself is still quite pretty and rural—about a quarter of a mile off the main Drymouth and Kilchester road.’
Poirot nodded.
‘Mrs McGinty’s cottage was one of four that form the village proper. There is the post office and village shop, and agricultural labourers live in the others.’
‘And she took in a lodger?’
‘Yes. Before her husband died, it used to be summer visitors, but after his death she just took one regular. James Bentley had been there for some months.’
‘So we come to—James Bentley?’
‘Bentley’s last job was with a house agent’s in Kilchester. Before that, he lived with his mother in Cullenquay. She was an invalid and he looked after her and never went out much. Then she died, and an annuity she had died with her. He sold the little house and found a job. Well educated man, but no special qualifications or aptitudes, and, as I say, an unprepossessing manner. Didn’t find it easy to get anything. Anyway, they took him on at Breather & Scuttle’s. Rather a second-rate firm. I don’t think he was particularly efficient or successful. They cut down staff and he was the one to go. He couldn’t get another job, and his money ran out. He usually paid Mrs McGinty every month for his room. She gave him breakfast and supper and charged him three pounds a week—quite reasonable, all things considered. He was two months behind in paying her, and he was nearly at the end of his resources. He hadn’t got another job and she was pressing him for what he owed her.’
‘And he knew that she had thirty pounds in the house? Why did she have thirty pounds in the house, by the way, since she had a Savings Bank account?’
‘Because she didn’t trust the Government. Said they’d got two hundred pounds of her money, but they wouldn’t get any more. She’d keep that where she could lay her hands on it any minute. She said that to one or two people. It was under a loose board in her bedroom floor—a very obvious place. James Bentley admitted he knew it was there.’
‘Very obliging of him. And did niece and husband know that too?’
‘Oh yes.’
‘Then we have now arrived back at my first question to you. How did Mrs McGinty die?’
‘She died on the night of November 22nd. Police surgeon put the time of death as being between 7 and 10 p.m. She’d had her supper—a kipper and bread and margarine, and according to all accounts, she usually had that about half-past six. If she adhered to that on the night in question, then by the evidence of digestion she was killed about eight-thirty or nine o’clock. James Bentley, by his own account, was out walking that evening from seven-fifteen to about nine. He went out and walked most evenings after dark. According to his own story he came in at about nine o’clock (he had his own key) and went straight upstairs to his room. Mrs McGinty had had wash-basins fixed in the bedrooms because of summer visitors. He read for about half an hour and then went to bed. He heard and noticed nothing out of the way. Next morning he came downstairs and looked into the kitchen, but there was no one there and no signs of breakfast being prepared. He says he hesitated a bit and then knocked on Mrs McGinty’s door, but got no reply.
‘He thought she must have overslept, but didn’t like to go on knocking. Then the baker came and James Bentley went up and knocked again, and after that, as I told you, the baker went next door and fetched in a Mrs Elliot, who eventually found the body and went off the deep end. Mrs McGinty was lying on the parlour floor. She’d been hit on the back of the head with something rather in the nature of a meat chopper with a very sharp edge. She’d been killed instantaneously. Drawers were pulled open and things strewn about, and the loose board in the floor in her bedroom had been prised up and the cache was empty. All the windows were closed and shuttered on the inside. No signs of anything being tampered with or of being broken into from outside.’
‘Therefore,’ said Poirot, ‘either James Bentley must have killed her, or else she must have admitted her killer herself whilst Bentley was out?’
‘Exactly. It wasn’t any hold-up or burglar. Now who would she be likely to let in? One of the neighbours, or her niece, or her niece’s husband. It boils down to that. We eliminated the neighbours. Niece and her husband were at the pictures that night. It is possible—just possible, that one or other of them left the cinema unobserved, bicycled three miles, killed the old woman, hid the money outside the house, and got back into the cinema unnoticed. We looked into that possibility, but we didn’t find any confirmation of it. And why hide the money outside McGinty’s house if so? Difficult place to pick it up later. Why not somewhere along the three miles back? No, the only reason for hiding it where it was hidden—’
Poirot finished the sentence for him.
‘Would be because you were living in that house, but didn’t want to hide it in your room or anywhere inside. In fact: James Bentley.’
‘That’s right. Everywhere, every time, you came up against Bentley. Finally there was the blood on his cuff.’
‘How did he account for that?’
‘Said he remembered brushing up against a butcher’s shop the previous day. Baloney! It wasn’t animal blood.’
‘And he stuck to that story?’
‘Not likely. At the trial he told a completely different tale. You see, there was a hair on the cuff as well—a blood-stained hair, and the hair was identical with Mrs McGinty’s hair. That had got to be explained away. He admitted then that he had gone into the room the night before when he came back from his walk. He’d gone in, he said, after knocking, and found her there, on the floor, dead. He’d bent over and touched her, he said, to make sure. And then he’d lost his head. He’d always been very much affected by the sight of blood, he said. He went to his room in a state of collapse and more or less fainted. In the morning he couldn’t bring himself to admit he knew what had happened.’
‘A very fishy story,’ commented Poirot.
‘Yes, indeed. And yet, you know,’ said Spence thoughtfully, ‘it might well be true. It’s not the sort of thing that an ordinary man—or a jury—can believe. But I’ve come across people like that. I don’t mean the collapse story. I mean people who are confronted by a demand for responsible action and who simply can’t face up to it. Shy people. He goes in, say, and finds her. He knows that he ought to do something—get the police—go to a neighbour—do the right thing whatever it is. And he funks it. He thinks “I don’t need to know anything about it. I needn’t have come in here tonight. I’ll go to bed just as if I hadn’t come in here at all…” Behind it, of course, there’s fear—fear that he may be suspected of having a hand in it. He thinks he’ll keep himself out of it as long as possible, and so the silly juggins goes and puts himself into it—up to his neck.’
Spence paused.
‘It could have been that way.’
‘It could,’ said Poirot thoughtfully.
‘Or again, it may have been just the best story his counsel could think up for him. But I don’t know. The waitress in the café in Kilchester where he usually had lunch said that he always chose a table where he could look into a wall or a corner and not see people. He was that kind of a chap—just a bit screwy. But not screwy enough to be a killer. He’d no persecution complex or anything of that kind.’
Spence looked hopefully at Poirot—but Poirot did not respond—he was frowning.
The two men sat silent for a while.
Chapter 3
At last Poirot roused himself with a sigh.
‘Eh bien,’ he said. ‘We have exhausted the motive of money. Let us pass to other theories. Had Mrs McGinty an enemy? Was she afraid of anyone?’
‘No evidence of it.’
‘What did her neighbours have to say?’
‘Not very much. They wouldn’t to the police, perhaps, but I don’t think they were holding anything back. She kept herself to herself, they said. But that’s regarded as natural enough. Our villages, you know, M. Poirot, aren’t friendly. Evacuees found that during the war. Mrs McGinty passed the time of day with the neighbours but they weren’t intimate.’
‘How long had she lived there?’
‘Matter of eighteen or twenty years, I think.’
‘And the forty years before that?’
‘There’s no mystery about her. Farmer’s daughter from North Devon. She and her husband lived near Ilfracombe for a time, and then moved to Kilchester. Had a cottage the other side of it—but found it damp, so they moved to Broadhinny. Husband seems to have been a quiet, decent man, delicate—didn’t go to the pub much. All very respectable and above board. No mysteries anywhere, nothing to hide.’
‘And yet she was killed?’
‘And yet she was killed.’
‘The niece didn’t know of anyone who had a grudge against her aunt?’
‘She says not.’
Poirot rubbed his nose in an exasperated fashion.
‘You comprehend, my dear friend, it would be so much easier if Mrs McGinty was not Mrs McGinty, so to speak. If she could be what is called a Mystery Woman—a woman with a past.’
‘Well, she wasn’t,’ said Spence stolidly. ‘She was just Mrs McGinty, a more or less uneducated woman, who let rooms and went out charring. Thousands of them all over England.’
‘But they do not all get murdered.’
‘No. I grant you that.’
‘So why should Mrs McGinty get murdered? The obvious answer we do not accept. What remains? A shadowy and improbable niece. An even more shadowy and improbable stranger. Facts? Let us stick to facts. What are the facts? An elderly charwoman is murdered. A shy and uncouth young man is arrested and convicted of the murder. Why was James Bentley arrested?’
Spence stared.
‘The evidence against him. I’ve told you—’
‘Yes. Evidence. But tell me, my Spence, was it real evidence or was it contrived?’
‘Contrived?’
‘Yes. Granted the premise that James Bentley is innocent, two possibilities remain. The evidence was manufactured, deliberately, to throw suspicion upon him. Or else he was just the unfortunate victim of circumstances.’
Spence considered.
‘Yes. I see what you’re driving at.’
‘There is nothing to show that the former was the case. But again there is nothing to show that it was not so. The money was taken and hidden outside the house in a place easily found. To have actually hidden it in his room would have been a little too much for the police to swallow. The murder was committed at a time when Bentley was taking a lonely walk, as he often did. Did the bloodstain come on his sleeve as he said it did at his trial, or was that, too, contrived? Did someone brush against him in the darkness and smear tell-tale evidence on his sleeve?’
‘I think that’s going a bit far, M. Poirot.’
‘Perhaps, perhaps. But we have got to go far. I think that in this case we have got to go so far that the imagination cannot as yet see the path clearly…For, you see, mon cher Spence, if Mrs McGinty is just an ordinary charwoman—it is the murderer who must be extraordinary. Yes—that follows clearly. It is in the murderer and not the murdered that the interest of this case lies. That is not the case in most crimes. Usually it is in the personality of the murdered person that the crux of the situation lies. It is the silent dead in whom I am usually interested. Their hates, their loves, their actions. And when you really know the murdered victim, then the victim speaks, and those dead lips utter a name—the name you want to know.’
Spence looked rather uncomfortable.
‘Those foreigners!’ he seemed to be saying to himself.
‘But here,’ continued Poirot, ‘it is the opposite. Here we guess at a veiled personality—a figure still hidden in darkness. How did Mrs McGinty die? Why did she die? The answer is not to be found in studying the life of Mrs McGinty. The answer is to be found in the personality of the murderer. You agree with me there?’
‘I suppose so,’ said Superintendent Spence cautiously.
‘Someone who wanted—what? To strike down Mrs McGinty? Or to strike down James Bentley?’
The Superintendent gave a doubtful ‘H’m!’
‘Yes—yes, that is one of the first points to be decided. Who is the real victim? Who was intended to be the victim?’
Spence said incredulously: ‘You really think someone would bump off a perfectly inoffensive old woman in order to get someone else hanged for murder?’
‘One cannot make an omelette, they say, without breaking eggs. Mrs McGinty, then, may be the egg, and James Bentley is the omelette. So let me hear, now, what you know of James Bentley.’
‘Nothing much. Father was a doctor—died when Bentley was nine years old. He went to one of the smaller public schools, unfit for the Army, had a weak chest, was in one of the Ministries during the war and lived with a possessive mother.’
‘Well,’ said Poirot, ‘there are certain possibilities there…More than there are in the life history of Mrs McGinty.’
‘Do you seriously believe what you are suggesting?’
‘No, I do not believe anything as yet. But I say that there are two distinct lines of research, and that we have to decide, very soon, which is the right one to follow.’
‘How are you going to set about things, M. Poirot? Is there anything I can do?’
‘First, I should like an interview with James Bentley.’
‘That can be arranged. I’ll get on to his solicitors.’
‘After that and subject, of course, to the result, if any—I am not hopeful—of that interview, I shall go to Broadhinny. There, aided by your notes, I shall, as quickly as possible, go over that same ground where you have passed before me.’
‘In case I’ve missed anything,’ said Spence with a wry smile.
‘In case, I would prefer to say, that some circumstance should strike me in a different light to the one in which it struck you. Human reactions vary and so does human experience. The resemblance of a rich financier to a soap boiler whom I had known in Liège once brought about a most satisfactory result. But no need to go into that. What I should like to do is to eliminate one or other of the trails I indicated just now. And to eliminate the Mrs McGinty trail—trail No. 1—will obviously be quicker and easier than to attack trail No. 2. Where, now, can I stay in Broadhinny? Is there an inn of moderate comfort?’
‘There’s the Three Ducks—but it doesn’t put people up. There’s the Lamb in Cullavon three miles away—or there is a kind of a Guest House in Broadhinny itself. It’s not really a Guest House, just a rather decrepit country house where the young couple who own it take in paying guests. I don’t think,’ said Spence dubiously, ‘that it’s very comfortable.’
Hercule Poirot closed his eyes in agony.
‘If I suffer, I suffer,’ he said. ‘It has to be.’
‘I don’t know what you’ll go there as,’ continued Spence doubtfully as he eyed Poirot. ‘You might be some kind of an opera singer. Voice broken down. Got to rest. That might do.’
‘I shall go,’ said Hercule Poirot, speaking with accents of royal blood, ‘as myself.’
Spence received this pronouncement with pursed lips.
‘D’you think that’s advisable?’
‘I think it is essential! But yes, essential. Consider, cher ami, it is time we are up against. What do we know? Nothing. So the hope, the best hope, is to go pretending that I know a great deal. I am Hercule Poirot. I am the great, the unique Hercule Poirot. And I, Hercule Poirot, am not satisfied about the verdict in the McGinty case. I, Hercule Poirot, have a very shrewd suspicion of what really happened. There is a circumstance that I, alone, estimate at its true value. You see?’
‘And then?’
‘And then, having made my effect, I observe the reactions. For there should be reactions. Very definitely, there should be reactions.’
Superintendent Spence looked uneasily at the little man.
‘Look here, M. Poirot,’ he said. ‘Don’t go sticking out your neck. I don’t want anything to happen to you.’
‘But if it does, you would be proved right beyond the shadow of doubt, is it not so?’
‘I don’t want it proved the hard way,’ said Superintendent Spence.
Chapter 4
With great distaste, Hercule Poirot looked round the room in which he stood. It was a room of gracious proportions but there its attraction ended. Poirot made an eloquent grimace as he drew a suspicious finger along the top of a book case. As he had suspected—dust! He sat down gingerly on a sofa and its broken springs sagged depressingly under him. The two faded armchairs were, as he knew, little better. A large fierce-looking dog whom Poirot suspected of having mange growled from his position on a moderately comfortable fourth chair.
The room was large, and had a faded Morris wall-paper. Steel engravings of unpleasant subjects hung crookedly on the walls with one or two good oil paintings. The chair-covers were both faded and dirty, the carpet had holes in it and had never been of a pleasant design. A good deal of miscellaneous bric-à-brac was scattered haphazard here and there. Tables rocked dangerously owing to absence of castors. One window was open, and no power on earth could, apparently, shut it again. The door, temporarily shut, was not likely to remain so. The latch did not hold, and with every gust of wind it burst open and whirling gusts of cold wind eddied round the room.
‘I suffer,’ said Hercule Poirot to himself in acute self-pity. ‘Yes, I suffer.’
The door burst open and the wind and Mrs Summerhayes came in together. She looked round the room, shouted ‘What?’ to someone in the distance and went out again.
Mrs Summerhayes had red hair and an attractively freckled face and was usually in a distracted state of putting things down, or else looking for them.
Hercule Poirot sprang to his feet and shut the door.
A moment or two later it opened again and Mrs Summerhayes reappeared. This time she was carrying a large enamel basin and a knife.
A man’s voice from some way away called out:
‘Maureen, that cat’s been sick again. What shall I do?’
Mrs Summerhayes called: ‘I’m coming, darling. Hold everything.’
She dropped the basin and the knife and went out again.
Poirot got up again and shut the door. He said:
‘Decidedly, I suffer.’
A car drove up, the large dog leaped from the chair and raised its voice in a crescendo of barking. He jumped on a small table by the window and the table collapsed with a crash.
‘Enfin,’ said Hercule Poirot. ‘C’est insupportable!’
The door burst open, the wind surged round the room, the dog rushed out, still barking. Maureen’s voice came, upraised loud and clear.
‘Johnnie, why the hell did you leave the back door open! Those bloody hens are in the larder.’
‘And for this,’ said Hercule Poirot with feeling, ‘I pay seven guineas a week!’
The door banged to with a crash. Through the window came the loud squawking of irate hens.
Then the door opened again and Maureen Summerhayes came in and fell upon the basin with a cry of joy.
‘Couldn’t think where I’d left it. Would you mind frightfully, Mr Er—hum—I mean, would it bother you if I sliced the beans in here? The smell in the kitchen is too frightful.’
‘Madame, I should be enchanted.’
It was not, perhaps, the exact phrase, but it was near enough. It was the first time in twenty-four hours that Poirot had seen any chance of a conversation of more than six seconds’ duration.
Mrs Summerhayes flung herself down in a chair and began slicing beans with frenzied energy and considerable awkwardness.
‘I do hope,’ she said, ‘that you’re not too frightfully uncomfortable? If there’s anything you want altered, do say so.’
Poirot had already come to the opinion that the only thing in Long Meadows he could even tolerate was his hostess.
‘You are too kind, madame,’ he replied politely. ‘I only wish it were within my powers to provide you with suitable domestics.’
‘Domestics!’ Mrs Summerhayes gave a squeal. ‘What a hope! Can’t even get hold of a daily. Our really good one was murdered. Just my luck.’
‘That would be Mrs McGinty,’ said Poirot quickly.
‘Mrs McGinty it was. God, how I miss that woman! Of course it was all a big thrill at the time. First murder we’ve ever had right in the family, so to speak, but as I told Johnnie, it was a downright bit of bad luck for us. Without McGinty I just can’t cope.’
‘You were attached to her?’
‘My dear man, she was reliable. She came. Monday afternoons and Thursday mornings—just like a clock. Now I have that Burp woman from up by the station. Five children and a husband. Naturally she’s never here. Either the husband’s taken queer, or the old mother, or the children have some foul disease or other. With old McGinty, at least it was only she herself who came over queer, and I must say she hardly ever did.’
‘And you found her always reliable and honest? You had trust in her?’
‘Oh, she’d never pinch anything—not even food. Of course she snooped a bit. Had a look at one’s letters and all that. But one expects that sort of thing. I mean they must live such awfully drab lives, mustn’t they?’
‘Had Mrs McGinty had a drab life?’
‘Ghastly, I expect,’ said Mrs Summerhayes vaguely. ‘Always on your knees scrubbing. And then piles of other people’s washing-up waiting for you on the sink when you arrive in the morning. If I had to face that every day, I’d be positively relieved to be murdered. I really would.’
The face of Major Summerhayes appeared at the window. Mrs Summerhayes sprang up, upsetting the beans, and rushed across to the window, which she opened to the fullest extent.
‘That damned dog’s eaten the hens’ food again, Maureen.’
‘Oh damn, now he’ll be sick!’
‘Look here,’ John Summerhayes displayed a colander full of greenery, ‘is this enough spinach?’
‘Of course not.’
‘Seems a colossal amount to me.’
‘It’ll be about a teaspoonful when it’s cooked. Don’t you know by now what spinach is like?’
‘Oh Lord!’
‘Has the fish come?’
‘Not a sign of it.’
‘Hell, we’ll have to open a tin of something. You might do that, Johnnie. One of the ones in the corner cupboard. That one we thought was a bit bulged. I expect it’s quite all right really.’
‘What about the spinach?’
‘I’ll get that.’
She leaped through the window, and husband and wife moved away together.
‘Nom d’un nom d’un nom!’ said Hercule Poirot. He crossed the room and closed the window as nearly as he could. The voice of Major Summerhayes came to him borne on the wind.
‘What about this new fellow, Maureen? Looks a bit peculiar to me. What’s his name again?’
‘I couldn’t remember it just now when I was talking to him. Had to say Mr Er-um. Poirot—that’s what it is. He’s French.’
