arisen because both he and his younger
partner knew Mrs. LlewellynSmythe's
handwriting very well. It was young Cole
who had first said,
"You know, I really can't believe that
Louise Llewellyn-Smythe wrote that
codicil. I know she had arthritis lately but
look at these specimens of her own writing
that I've brought along from amongst her
papers to show you. There's something
wrong about that codicil."
Mr. Fullerton had agreed that there was
something wrong about it. He had said
they would take expert opinion on this
215
handwriting question. The answer had
been quite definite. Separate opinions had
not varied. The handwriting of the codicil
was definitely not that of Louise
Llewellyn-Smythe. If Olga had been less
greedy, Mr. Fullerton thought, if she had ,
been content to write a codicil beginning
as this one had done--"Because of her
great care and attention to me and the
affection and kindness she has shown me, I leave--" That was how it had begun, that was how it could have begun, and if
it had gone on to specify a good round
sum of money left to the devoted au pair
girl, the relations might have considered it
over-done, but they would have accepted
it without questioning. But to cut out the
relations altogether, the nephew who had
been his aunt's residuary legatee in the last
four wills she had made during a period of
nearly twenty years, to leave everything to
the stranger Olga Seminoff--that was not
in Louise Llewellyn-Smythe's character.
In fact, a plea of undue influence could
upset such a document anyway. No. She
had been greedy, this hot, passionate
child. Possibly Mrs. LlewellynSmythe
had told her that some money would be I
216 I
left her because of her kindness, because
of her attention, because of a fondness the
old lady was beginning to feel for this girl
who fulfilled all her whims, who did whatever
she asked her. And that had opened
up a vista for Olga. She would have everything.
The old lady should leave everything
to her, and she would have all the
money. All the money and the house and
the clothes and the jewels. Everything. A
greedy girl. And now retribution had
caught up with her.
And Mr. Fullerton, against his will, against his legal instincts and against a
good deal more, felt sorry for her. Very
sorry for her. She had known suffering
since she was a child, had known the
rigours of a police state, had lost her
parents, lost a brother and sister and
known injustice and fear, and it had
developed in her a trait that she had no
doubt been born with but which she had
never been able so far to indulge. It had
developed a childish passionate greed.
"Everyone is against me," said Olga.
"Everyone. You are all against me. You
are not fair because I am a foreigner, because I do not belong to this country,
HP15
217
because I do not know what to say, what
to do. What can I do? Why do you not
tell me what I can do?"
"Because I do not really think there is
anything much you can do," said Mr.
Fullerton. "Your best chance is to make a
clean breast of things."
"If I say what you want me to say, it
will be all lies and not true. She made that
Will. She wrote it down there. She told
me to go out of the room while the others
signed it."
"There is evidence against you, you
know. There are people who will say that
Mrs. Llewellyn-Smythe often did not
know what she was signing. She had
several documents of different kinds, and
she did not always re-read what was put
before her."
"Well, then she did not know what she
was saying."
"My dear child," said Mr. Fullerton,
"your best hope is the fact that you are a
first offender, that you are a foreigner, that
you understand the English language only
in a rather rudimentary form. In that case
you may get off with a minor sentence—or
you may, indeed, get put on probation."
218
"Oh, words. Nothing but words. I shall
be put in prison and never let out again."
"Now you are talking nonsense," Mr.
Fullerton said.
"It would be better if I ran away, if I
ran away and hid myself so that nobody
could find me."
"Once there is a warrant out for your
arrest, you would be found."
"Not if I did it quickly. Not if I went
at once. Not if someone helped me. I
could get away. Get away from England.
In a boat or a plane. I could find someone
who forges passports or visas, or whatever
you have to have. Someone who will do
something for me. I have friends. I have
people who are fond of me. Somebody
could help me to disappear. That is what
is needed. I could put on a wig. I could
walk about on crutches."
"Listen," Mr. Fullerton had said, and
he had spoken then with authority, "I am
sorry for you. I will recommend you to a
lawyer who will do his best for you. You
can't hope to disappear. You are talking
like a child."
"I have got enough money. I have saved
money." And then she had said, "You
219
have tried to be kind. Yes, I believe that.
But you will not do anything because it is
all the law—the law. But someone will
help me. Someone will. And I shall get
away where nobody will ever find me."
Nobody, Mr. Fullerton thought, had
found her. He wondered—yes; he
wondered very much—where she was or
could be now.
220
14
A DMITTED to Apple Trees, Hercule
/^ Poirot was shown into the drawing-ZA.
room and told that Mrs. Drake
would not be long.
In passing through the hall he heard a
hum of female voices from behind what he
took to be the dining-room door.
Poirot crossed to the drawing-room
window and surveyed the neat and
pleasant garden. Well laid out, kept
studiously in control. Rampant autumn
michaelmas daisies still survived, tied up
severely to sticks; chrysanthemums had
not yet relinquished life. There were still
a persistent rose or two scorning the
approach of winter.
Poirot could discern no sign as yet of
the preliminary activities of a landscape
gardener. All was care and convention. He
wondered if Mrs. Drake had been one too
many for Michael Garfield. He had spread
his lures in vain. It showed every
sign of
221
remaining a splendidly kept suburban
garden.
The door opened.
"I am sorry to have kept you waiting, Monsieur Poirot," said Mrs. Drake.
Outside in the hall there was a diminishing
hum of voices as various people
took their leave and departed.
"It's our church Christmas fete,"
explained Mrs. Drake. "A Committee
Meeting for arrangements for it and all the
rest of it. These things always go on much
longer than they ought to, of course.
Somebody always objects to something, or
has a good idea--the good idea usually
being a perfectly impossible one."
There was a slight acerbity in her tone.
Poirot could well imagine that Rowena
Drake would put things down as quite
absurd, firmly and definitely. He could
understand well enough from remarks he
had heard from Spence's sister, from hints
of what other people had said and from
various other sources, that Rowena Drake
was that dominant type of personality
whom everyone expects to run the show, and whom nobody has much affection for
while she is doing it. He could imagine,
222
too, that her conscientiousness had not
been the kind to be appreciated by an
elderly relative who was herself of the
same type. Mrs. Llewellyn-Smythe, he
gathered, had come here to live so as to be
near to her nephew and his wife, and that
the wife had readily undertaken the supervision
and care of her husband's aunt as
far as she could do so without actually
living in the house. Mrs. LlewellynSmythe
had probably acknowledged in her
own mind that she owed a great deal to
Rowena, and had at the same time
resented what she had no doubt thought
of as her bossy ways.
"Well, they've all gone now," said
Rowena Drake, hearing the final shutting
of the hall door. "Now what can I do for
you? Something more about that dreadful
party? I wish I'd never had it here. But no
other house really seemed suitable. Is Mrs.
Oliver still staying with Judith Butler?"
"Yes. She is, I believe, returning to
London in a day or two. You had not met
her before?"
"No. I love her books."
"She is, I believe, considered a very
good writer," said Poirot.
223
"Oh well, she is a good writer. No
doubt of that. She's a very amusing person
too. Has she any ideas herself--I mean
about who might have done this awful
thing?"
"I think not. And you, Madame?"
"I told you already. I've no idea
whatever."
"You would perhaps say so, and yet--
you might, might you not, have, perhaps, what amounts to a very good idea, but
only an idea. A half-formed idea. A possibie idea."
"Why should you think that?"
She looked at him curiously.
"You might have seen something--
something quite small and unimportant
but which on reflection might seem more
significant to you, perhaps, than it had
done at first."
"You must have something in your
mind. Monsieur Poirot, some definite
incident."
"Well, I admit it. It is because of what
someone said to me."
"Indeed! And who was that?"
"A Miss Whittaker. A schoolteacher."
"Oh yes, of course. Elizabeth Whit224
taker. She's the mathematics mistress, isn't she, at The Elms? She was at the
party, I remember. Did she see
something?"
"It was not so much that she saw something
as she had the idea that you might
have seen something."
Mrs. Drake looked surprised and shook
her head.
"I can't think of anything I can possibly
have seen," said Rowena Drake, "but one
never knows."
"It had to do with a vase," said Poirot.
"A vase of flowers."
"A vase of flowers?" Rowena Drake
looked puzzled. Then her brow cleared.
"Oh, of course. I know. Yes, there was a
big vase of autumn leaves and chrysanthemums
on the table in the angle of the
stairs. A very nice glass vase. One of my
wedding presents. The leaves seemed to be
drooping and so did one or two of the
flowers. I remember noticing it as I passed
through the hall--it was near the end of
the party, I think, by then, but I'm not
sure--I wondered why it looked like that, and I went up and dipped my fingers into
it and found that some idiot must have
225
forgotten to put any water into it after
arranging it. It made me very angry. So I
took it into the bathroom and filled it up.
But what could I have seen in that bathroom?
There was nobody in it. I am quite
sure of that. I think one or two of the older
girls and boys had done a little harmless, what the Americans call 'necking'3 there
during the course of the party, but there
was certainly nobody when I went into it
with the vase."
"No, no, I do not mean that," said
Poirot. "But I understood that there was
an accident. That the vase slipped out of
your hand and it fell to the hall below and
was shattered to pieces."
smithereens. I was rather upset about it
because as I've said, it had been one of
our wedding presents, and it was really a
perfect flower vase, heavy enough to hold
big autumn bouquets and things like that.
It was very stupid of me. One of those
things. My fingers just slipped. It went out
of my hand and crashed on the hall floor
below. Elizabeth Whittaker was standing
there. She helped me pick up the pieces
and sweep some of the broken glass out of
226
the way in case someone stepped on it. We
just swept it into a corner by the Grandfather
clock to be cleared up later."
She looked inquiringly at Poirot.
"Is that the incident you mean?" she
asked.
"Yes," said Poirot. "Miss Whittaker
wondered, I think, how you had come to
drop the vase. She thought that something
perhaps had startled you."
"Startled me?" Rowena Drake looked at
him, then frowned as she tried to think
again. "No, I don't think I was startled, anyway. It was just one of those ways
things do slip out of your hands. Sometimes
when you're washing up. I think, really, it's a result of being tired. I was
pretty tired by that time, what with the
preparations for the party and running the
party and all the rest of it. It went very
well, I must say. I think it was--oh, just
one of those clumsy actions that you can't
help when you're tired."
"There was nothing--you are
sure--
that startled you? Something unexpected
that you saw."
"Saw? Where? In the hall below? I
didn't see anything in the hall below. It
227
was empty at the moment because
everyone was in at the Snapdragon
excepting, of course, for Miss Whittaker.
And I don't think I even noticed her until
she came forward to help when I ran
down."
"Did you see someone, perhaps, leaving
the library door?"
"The library door ... I see what you
mean. Yes, I could have seen that." She
paused for quite a long time, then she
looked at Poirot with a very straight, firm
glance. "I didn't see anyone leave the
library," she said. "Nobody at all ..."
He wondered. The way in which she
said it was what aroused the belief in his
mind that she was not speaking the truth,
that instead she had seen someone or
something, perhaps the door just opening
a little, a mere glance perhaps of a figure
inside. But she was quite firm in her
denial. Why, he wondered, had she been
so firm? Because the person she had seen
was a person she did not want to believe
for one moment had had anything to do
with the crime committed on the other
side of the door? Someone she cared
about, or someone—which seemed more
228
likely, he thought--someone whom she
wished to protect. Someone, perhaps, who
had not long passed
beyond childhood, someone whom she might feel was not
truly conscious of the awful thing they had
just done.
He thought her a hard creature but a
person of integrity. He thought that she
was, like many women of the same type,
women who were often magistrates, or
who ran councils or charities, or interested
themselves in what used to be called "good
works". Women who had an inordinate
belief in extenuating circumstances, who
were ready, strangely enough, to make
excuses for the young criminal. An
adolescent boy, a mentally retarded girl.
Someone perhaps who had already been--
what is the phrase--"in care". If that had
been the type of person she had seen
coming out of the library, then he thought
it possible that Rowena Drake's protective
instinct might have come into play. It was
not unknown in the present age for children