of them didn't. A little make-up was
employed on the male half of the arrangement.
You know, a mask or a wig, sideburns, a beard, some greasepaint effects.
Most of the boys were probably known to
the girls already and one or two strangers
might have been included. Anyway, there
was a lot of quite happy giggling," said
Miss Whittaker, showing for a moment or
two a kind of academic contempt for this
kind of fun. "After that there was an
obstacle race and then there was flour
packed into a glass tumbler and reversed, sixpence laid on top and everyone took a
slice off. When the flour collapsed that
person was out of the competition and the
others remained until the last one claimed
the sixpence. After that there was dancing, and then there was supper. After that, as
a final climax, came the Snapdragon."
"When did you yourself see the girl
Joyce last?"
"I've no idea," said Elizabeth Whittaker.
"I don't know her very well. She's
not in my class. She wasn't a very
145
interesting girl so I wouldn't have been
watching her. I do remember I saw her
cutting the flour because she was so
clumsy that she capsized it almost at once.
So-she was alive then—but that was quite
early on."
"You did not see her go into the library
with anyone?"
"Certainly not. I should have mentioned
it before if I had. That at least might have
been significant and important."
"And now," said Poirot, "for my second
question or questions. How long have you
been at the school here?"
"Six years this next autumn."
"And you teach—?"
"Mathematics and Latin."
"Do you remember a girl who was
teaching here two years ago—Janet White
by name?"
Elizabeth Whittaker stiffened. She half
rose from her chair, then sat down again.
"But that—but that has nothing to do
with all this, surely?"
"It could have," said Poirot.
"But how? In what way?"
Scholastic circles were less well
146
informed than village gossip, Poirot
thought.
"Joyce claimed before witnesses to have
seen a murder done some years ago. Could
that possibly have been the murder of
Janet White, do you think? How did Janet
White die?"
"She was strangled, walking home from
the school one night."
"Alone?"
"Probably not alone."
"But not with Nora Ambrose?"
"What do you know about Nora
Ambrose?"
"Nothing as yet," said Poirot, "but I
should like to. What were they like, Janet
White and Nora Ambrose?"
"Over-sexed," said Elizabeth Whittaker,
"but in different ways. How could
Joyce have seen anything of the kind or
know anything about it? It took place in a
lane near the Quarry Wood. She wouldn't
have been more than ten or eleven years
old."
"Which one had the boy friend?" asked
Poirot. "Nora or Janet?"
"All this is past history."
"Old sins have long shadows," quoted
147
Poirot. "As we advance through life, we
learn the truth of that saying. Where is
Nora Ambrose now?"
"She left the school and took another
post in the north of England—she was,
naturally, very upset. They were—great
friends."
"The police never solved the case?"
Miss Whittaker shook her head. She got
up and looked at her watch.
"I must go now."
"Thank you for what you have told
me."
148
11
'ERCULE POIROT looked up at
the facade of Quarry House. A
-solid, well-built example of midVictorian
architecture. He had a vision of
its interior—a heavy mahogany sideboard,
a central rectangular table also of heavy
mahogany, a billiard room, perhaps, a
large kitchen with adjacent scullery, stone
flags on the floor, a massive coal range now
no doubt replaced by electricity or gas.
H
He noted that most of the upper
windows were still curtained. He rang the
front-door bell. It was answered by a thin,
grey-haired woman who told him that
Colonel and Mrs. Weston were away in
London and would not be back until next
week.
He asked about the Quarry Woods and
was told that they were open to the public
without charge. The entrance was about
five minutes' walk along the road. He
would see a notice-board on an iron gate.
He found his way there easily enough,
149
and passing through the gate began to
descend a path that led downwards
through trees and shrubs.
Presently he came to a halt and stood
there lost in thought. His mind was not
only on what he saw, on what lay around
him. Instead he was conning over one or
two sentences, and reflecting over one or
two facts that had given him at the time,
as he expressed it to himself, furiously to
think. A forged Will, a forged Will and a
girl. A girl who had disappeared, the girl in whose favour the Will had been forged.
A young artist who had come here
professionally to make out of an abandoned
quarry of rough stone a garden, a
sunk garden. Here again, Poirot looked
round him and nodded his head with
approval of the phrase. A Quarry Garden
was an ugly term. It suggested the noise
of blasting rock, the carrying away by
lorries of vast masses of stone for road
making. It had behind it industrial
demand. But a Sunk Garden--that was
different. It brought with it vague remembrances
in his own mind. So Mrs.
Llewellyn-Smythe had gone on a National
Trust tour of gardens in Ireland. He
150
himself, he remembered, had been in
Ireland five or six years ago. He had gone
there to investigate a robbery of old family
silver. There had been some interesting
points about the case which had aroused
his curiosity, and having (as usual)--
Poirot added this bracket to his thoughts
--solved his mission with full success, he
had put in a few days travelling around
and seeing the sights.
He could not remember now the
particular garden he had been to see.
Somewhere, he thought, not very far from
Cork. Killarney? No, not Killarney. Somewhere
not far from Bantry Bay. And he
remembered it because it had been a
garden quite different from the gardens
which he had so far acclaimed as the great
successes of this age, the gardens of the
Chateaux in France, the formal beauty of
Versailles. Here, he remembered, he had
started with a little group of people in a
boat. A boat difficult to get into if two
strong and able boatman had not practically
lifted him in. They had rowed
towards a small island, not a very
interesting island, Poirot had thought, and
began to wish that he had not come. His
151
feet were wet and cold and that wind was
blowing through the crevices of his mackintosh.
What beauty, he had thought, what
formality, what symmetrical arrangement
of great beauty could there be on this
rocky island with its sparse trees? A
mistake--definitely a mistake.
They had landed at the little wharf. The
fishermen had landed him with the same
adroitness they had shown before. The
remaining members of the party had gone
on ahead, talking and laughing. Poirot, readjusting his mackintosh in position and
tying up his shoes again, had followed
them up the rather dull path with shrubs
and bushes and a few sparse trees either
side. A most uninteresting park, he
thought.
And then, rather suddenly, they had
come out from among the scrub on to a
terrace with steps leading down from it.
Below it he had looked down into what
struck him at once as something entirely
magical. Something as it might have been
if elemental beings such as he believed
were common in Irish poetry, had come
out of their hollow hills and had created
there, not so much by toil and hard labour
152
as by waving a magic wand, a garden. You
looked down into the garden. Its beauty, the flowers and bushes, the artificial water
below in the fountain, the path round it, enchanted, beautiful and entirely unexpected.
He wondered how it had been
originally. It seemed too symmetrical to
have been a quarry. A deep hollow here in
the raised ground of the island, but
beyond it you could see the waters of the
Bay and the hills rising the other side, their misty tops an enchanting scene. He
thought perhaps that it might have been
that particular garden which had stirred
Mrs. Llewellyn-Smythe to possess such a
garden of her own, to have the pleasure of
taking an unkempt quarry set in this
smug, tidy, elementary and essentially
conventional countryside of that part of
England.
And so she had looked about for the
proper kind of well-paid slave to do her
bidding. And she had found the professionally
qualified young man called
Michael Garfield and had brought him
here and had paid him no doubt a large
fee, and had in due course built a house
HP11
153
for him. Michael Garfield, thought Poirot,
looking round him, had not failed her.
He went and sat down on a bench, a bench which had been strategically placed.
He pictured to himself what the sunken
quarry would look like in the spring.
There were young beech trees and birches with their white shivering barks. Bushes
of thorn and white rose, little xxjuniper
trees. But now it was autumn, and autumn
had been catered for also. The gold and
red of acers, a parrotia or two, a path that
led along a winding way to fresh delights.
There were flowering bushes of gorse or
Spanish broom--Poirot was not famous
for knowing the names of either flowers
or shrubs--only roses arid tulips could he
approve and recognise.
But everything that grew here had the
appearance of having grown by its own
will. It had not been arranged or forced
into submission. And yet, thought Poirot,
that is not really so. All has been arranged,
all has been planned to this tiny little plant
that grows here and to that large towering
bush that rises up so fiercely with its
golden and red leaves. Oh yes. All has
154
been planned here and arranged. What is
more, I would say that it had obeyed.
He wondered then whom it had obeyed.
Mrs. Llewellyn-Smy the or Mr. Michael
Garfield? It makes a difference, said Poirot
to himself, yes, it makes a difference. Mrs.
Llewellyn-Smythe was knowledgeable, he
felt sure. She had gardened for many
years, she was no doubt a- Fellow of the
Royal Horticultural Society, she went to
shows, she consulted catalogues, she
visited gardens. She took journeys abroad,
no doubt, for botanical reasons. She would
know what she wanted, she would say
what she wanted. Was that enough? Poirot
thought it was not quite enough. She could
have given orders to gardeners and made
sure her orders were carried out. But did
she know—really know—see in her
mind's eye exactly what her orders would
look like when they had be^n carried out?
Not in the first year of their planting, not
even the second, but things that she would
see two years later, three years later,
perhaps, even six or seven years later.
Michael Garfield, thought Poirot, Michael
has told him what she wants, and he
155
knows how to make this bare quarry of
stone and rock blossom as a desert can
blossom. He planned and he brought it
about; he had no doubt the intense
pleasure that comes to an artist who is
commissioned by a client with plenty of
money. Here was his conception of a
fairy-land tucked away in a conventional
and rather dull hillside, and here it would
grow up. Expensive shrubs for which large
cheques would have to be written, and rare
plants that perhaps would only be obtainable
through the goodwill of a friend, and
here, too, the humble things that were
needed and which cost next to nothing at
all. In spring on the bank just to his left
there would be primroses, their modest
green leaves all bunched together up the
side of it told him that.
"In England," said Poirot, "people
show you their herbaceous borders and
they take you to see their roses and they
talk at inordinate length about their iris
gardens, and to show they appreciate one
of the great beauties of England, they take
you on a day when the sun shines and the
beech trees are in leaf, and underneath
them are all the bluebells. Yes, it is a very
156
beautiful sight, but I have been shown it,
I think, once too often. I prefer—" the
thought broke off in his mind as he
thought back to what he had preferred. A
drive through Devon lanes. A winding
road with great banks going up each side
of it, and on those banks a great carpet
and showing of primroses. So pale, so
subtly and timidly yellow, and coming
from them that sweet, faint, elusive smell
that the primrose has in large quantities,
which is the smell of spring almost more
than any other smell. And so it would not
be all rare shrubs here. There would be
spring and autumn, there would be little
wild cyclamen and there would be autumn
crocus here too. It was a beautiful place.
He wondered about the people who
lived in Quarry House now. He had their
names, a retired elderly Colonel and his
wife, but surely, he thought, Spence might
have told him more about them. He had
the feeling that whoever owned this now
had not got the love of it that dead Mrs.
Llewellyn-Smythe had had. He got up and
walked along the path a little way. It was
an easy path, carefully levelled, designed,
he thought, to be easy for an elderly
157
person to walk where she would at will, without undue amount of steep steps, and
at a convenient angle at convenient intervals
a seat that looked rustic but was much
less rustic than it looked. In fact, the angle
for the back and for one's feet was remarkably
comfortable. Poirot thought to
himself, I'd like to see this Michael
Gai-field. He made a good thing of this. He
knew his job, he was a good planner and
he got experienced people to carry his
plans out, and he managed, I think, to get
his patron's plans so arranged that she
would think that the whole planning had
been hers. But I don't think it was only
hers. It was mostly his. Yes, I'd like to
see him. If he's still in the cottage--or the
bungalow--that was built for him, I
suppose--his thought broke off.
He stared. Stared across a hollow that
lay at his feet where the path ran round
the other side of it. Stared at one particular
golden red branching shrub which framed
something that Poirot did not know for a
moment was really there or was a mere
effect of shadow and sunshine and leaves.
What am I seeing? thought Poirot. Is
this the result of enchantment? It could
158
be. In this place here, it could be. Is it a
human being I see, or is it—what could it
be? His mind reverted to some adventures
of his many years ago which he had