Hercule Poirot and the Greenshore Folly Read online

  Contents

  Foreword

  Hercule Poirot and the Greenshore Folly

  Chapter I

  Chapter II

  Chapter III

  Chapter IV

  Chapter V

  Chapter VI

  Chapter VII

  Chapter VIII

  Chapter IX

  About the Author

  The Agatha Christie Collection

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Foreword

  Although it was published in November 1956, the Hercule Poirot novel Dead Man’s Folly had a complicated two-year genesis. In November 1954 Agatha Christie’s agent Hughes Massie wrote to the Diocesan Board of Finance in Exeter explaining that his client would like to see stained glass windows in the chancel of Churston Ferrers Church (Christie’s local church) and was willing to pay for them by assigning the rights of a story to a fund set up for that purpose. The Diocesan Board and the local church were both very happy with the arrangement and in a letter of 3 December 1954 Hughes Massie confirmed ‘Mrs Mallowan’s intentions to assign the magazine rights of a long short story to be entitled The Greenshore Folly’ to such a fund. The amount involved was reckoned to be in the region of £1,000 (£18,000 in today’s value).

  By March 1955 the Diocesan Board was getting restive and wondering about the progress of the sale. But for the first time in 35 years, much to everyone’s embarrassment, it proved impossible to sell the story. The problem was its length; it was a long novella, which was a difficult length, neither a novel nor a short story, for the magazine market. By mid-July 1955, the decision was made to withdraw the story from sale, as ‘Agatha thinks [it] is packed with good material which she can use for her next full length novel’. As a compromise, it was agreed that she would write another short story for the Church, also to be called, for legal reasons, ‘The Greenshore Folly’, ‘though it will probably be published under some other title’. So, the original and rejected novella ‘The Greenshore Folly’ was elaborated into the novel Dead Man’s Folly and Christie wrote the shorter and similarly titled Miss Marple story ‘Greenshaw’s Folly’ to swell the coffers of the Church authorities. ‘Greenshaw’s Folly’ was first published in 1956 and was collected in The Adventure of the Christmas Pudding in 1960.

  Unpublished for nearly 60 years, Hercule Poirot and the Greenshore Folly is Agatha Christie’s original version of the story before she expanded it. Though many passages survived unchanged in Dead Man’s Folly, especially at the beginning of the book, there are notable differences as the story develops and changes direction.

  Hercule Poirot and the Greenshore Folly

  I

  It was Miss Lemon, Poirot’s efficient secretary, who took the telephone call.

  Laying aside her shorthand notebook, she raised the receiver and said without emphasis, ‘Trafalgar 8137.’

  Hercule Poirot leaned back in his upright chair and closed his eyes. His fingers beat a meditative soft tattoo on the edge of the table. In his head he continued to compose the polished period of the letter he had been dictating.

  Placing her hand over the receiver, Miss Lemon asked in a low voice, ‘Will you accept a personal call from Lapton, Devon?’

  Poirot frowned. The place meant nothing to him.

  ‘The name of the caller?’ he demanded cautiously.

  Miss Lemon spoke into the mouthpiece.

  ‘Air-raid?’ she asked doubtingly. ‘Oh, yes – what was the last name again?’

  Once more she turned to Hercule Poirot.

  ‘Mrs. Ariadne Oliver.’

  Hercule Poirot’s eyebrows shot up. A memory rose up in his mind: windswept grey hair … an eagle profile …

  He rose and replaced Miss Lemon at the telephone.

  ‘Hercule Poirot speaks,’ he announced grandiloquently.

  ‘Is that Mr. Hercules Porrot speaking personally?’ the suspicious voice of the telephone operator demanded.

  Poirot assured her that that was the case.

  ‘You’re through to Mr. Porrot,’ said the voice.

  Its thin reedy accents were replaced by a magnificent booming contralto which caused Poirot hastily to shift the receiver a couple of inches further from his ear.

  ‘Mr. Poirot, is that really you?’ demanded Mrs. Oliver.

  ‘Myself in person, Madame.’

  ‘This is Mrs. Oliver. I don’t know if you’ll remember me –’

  ‘But of course I remember you, Madame. Who could forget you?’

  ‘Well, people do sometimes,’ said Mrs. Oliver. ‘Quite often, in fact. I don’t think that I’ve got a very distinctive personality. Or perhaps it’s because I’m always doing different things to my hair. But all that’s neither here nor there. I hope I’m not interrupting you when you’re frightfully busy?’

  ‘No, no, you do not derange me in the least.’

  ‘Good gracious – I’m sure I don’t want to drive you out of your mind. The fact is, I need you.’

  ‘Need me?’

  ‘Yes, at once. Can you take an aeroplane?’

  ‘I do not take aeroplanes. They make me sick.’ ‘They do me, too. Anyway, I don’t suppose it would be any quicker than the train really, because I think the only airport near here is Exeter which is miles away. So come by train. Twelve o’clock from Paddington. You get out at Lapton to Nassecombe. You can do it nicely. You’ve got three quarters of an hour if my watch is right – though it isn’t usually.’

  ‘But where are you, Madame? What is all this about?’

  ‘Greenshore House, Lapton. A car or taxi will meet you at the station at Lapton.’

  ‘But why do you need me? What is all this about?’ Poirot repeated frantically.

  ‘Telephones are in such awkward places,’ said Mrs. Oliver. ‘This one’s in the hall … People passing through and talking … I can’t really hear. But I’m expecting you. Everybody will be so thrilled. Good bye.’

  There was a sharp click as the receiver was replaced. The line hummed gently.

  With a baffled air of bewilderment, Poirot put back the receiver and murmured something under his breath. Miss Lemon sat with her pencil poised, incurious. She repeated in muted tones the final phrase of dictation before the interruption.

  ‘– allow me to assure you, my dear sir, that the hypothesis you have advanced –’

  Poirot waved aside the advancement of the hypothesis.

  ‘That was Mrs. Oliver,’ he said. ‘Ariadne Oliver, the detective novelist. You may have read –’ But he stopped, remembering that Miss Lemon only read improving books and regarded such frivolities as fictional crime with contempt. ‘She wants me to go down to Devonshire today, at once, in –’ he glanced at the clock ‘–thirty-five minutes.’

  Miss Lemon raised disapproving eyebrows.

  ‘That will be running it rather fine,’ she said. ‘For what reason?’

  ‘You may well ask! She did not tell me.’

  ‘How very peculiar. Why not?’

  ‘Because,’ said Hercule Poirot thoughtfully, ‘she was afraid of being overheard. Yes, she made that quite clear.’

  ‘Well, really,’ said Miss Lemon, bristling in her employer’s defence. ‘The things people expect! Fancy thinking that you’d go rushing off on some wild goose chase like that! An important man like you! I have always noticed that these artists and writers are very unbalanced – no sense of proportion. Shall I telephone through a telegram: Regret unable leave London?’

  Her hand went out to the telephone. Poirot’s voice arrested the gesture.

  ‘Du tout!’ he said. ‘On the contrary. Be so kind as to summon a taxi immediately.’ He raised his voice. ‘
Georges! A few necessities of toilet in my small valise. And quickly, very quickly, I have a train to catch.’

  II

  The train, having done one hundred and eighty-odd miles of its two hundred and twelve miles journey at top speed, puffed gently and apologetically through the last thirty and drew into Lapton station. Only one person alighted, Hercule Poirot. He negotiated with care a yawning gap between the step of the train and the platform and looked round him. At the far end of the train a porter was busy inside a luggage compartment. Poirot picked up his valise and walked back along the platform to the exit. He gave up his ticket and walked out through the booking office.

  A large Humber saloon was drawn up outside and a chauffeur in uniform came forward.

  ‘Mr. Hercule Poirot?’ he inquired respectfully.

  He took Poirot’s case from him and opened the door of the car for him. They drove away from the station, over the railway bridge and down a country road which presently disclosed a very beautiful river view.

  ‘The Dart, sir,’ said the chauffeur.

  ‘Magnifique!’ said Poirot obligingly.

  The road was a long straggling country lane running between green hedges, dipping down and then up. On the upward slope two girls in shorts with bright scarves over their heads and carrying heavy rucksacks on their backs were toiling slowly upwards.

  ‘There’s a Youth Hostel just above us, sir,’ explained the chauffeur, who had clearly constituted himself Poirot’s guide to Devon … ‘Upper Greenshore, they call it. Come for a couple of nights at a time, they do, and very busy they are there just now. Forty or fifty a night.’

  ‘Ah, yes,’ said Poirot. He was reflecting, and not for the first time, that seen from the back, shorts were becoming to very few of the female sex. He shut his eyes in pain.

  ‘They seem heavily laden,’ he murmured.

  ‘Yes, sir, and it’s a long pull from the station or the bus stop. Best part of two miles. If you don’t object, sir,’ he hesitated, ‘we could give them a lift.’

  ‘By all means. By all means,’ said Poirot benignantly.

  The chauffeur slowed down and came to a purring halt beside the two girls. Two flushed and perspiring faces were raised hopefully. The door was opened and the girls climbed in.

  ‘It is most kind, please,’ said one of them politely in a foreign accent. ‘It is longer way than I think, yes.’ The other girl who clearly had not much English merely nodded her head several times gratefully and smiled, and murmured ‘Grazie’

  Bright dark chestnut fuzzy curls escaped from her head scarf and she had on big earnest looking spectacles.

  The English speaking girl continued talking vivaciously. She was in England for a fortnight’s holiday. Her home was Rotterdam. She had already seen Stratford on Avon, Clovelly, Exeter Cathedral, Torquay and, ‘after visiting beauty spot here and historic Dartmouth, I go to Plymouth, discovery of New World from Plymouth Hoe.’

  The Italian girl murmered ‘Hoe?’ and shook her head, puzzled.

  ‘She does not much English speak,’ said the Dutch girl, but I understand she has relative near here married to gentleman who keeps a shop for groceries, so she will spend time with them. My friend I come from Rotterdam with has eat veal and ham pie not good in shop at Exeter and is sick there. It is not always good in hot weather, the veal and ham pie.’

  The chauffeur slowed down at a fork in the road. The girls got out, uttered thanks in two languages and the chauffeur with a wave of the hand directed them to the left hand road. He also laid aside for a moment his Olympian aloofness.

  ‘You want to be careful of Cornish Pasties too,’ he warned them. Put anything in them, they will, holiday time.’

  The car drove rapidly down the right hand road into a thick belt of trees.

  ‘Nice enough young women, some of them, though foreign,’ said the chauffeur. ‘But absolutely shocking the way they trespass. Don’t seem to understand places are private.’

  They went on, down a steep hill through woods, then through a gate and along a drive, winding up finally in front of a big white Georgian house looking out over the river.

  The chauffeur opened the door of the car as a tall butler appeared on the steps.

  ‘Mr. Hercule Poirot?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Mrs. Oliver is expecting you, sir. You will find her down at the Battery. Allow me to show you the way.’

  Poirot was directed to a winding path that led along the wood with glimpses of the river below. The path descended gradually until it came out at last on an open space, round in shape with a low battlemented parapet. On the parapet Mrs. Oliver was sitting.

  She rose to meet him and several apples fell from her lap and rolled in all directions. Apples seemed to be an inescapable motif of meeting Mrs. Oliver.

  ‘I can’t think why I always drop things,’ said Mrs. Oliver somewhat indistinctly, since her mouth was full of apple. ‘How are you, M. Poirot?’

  ‘Très bien, chère Madame,’ replied Poirot politely. ‘And you?’

  Mrs. Oliver was looking somewhat different from when Poirot had last seen her, and the reason lay, as she had already hinted over the telephone, in the fact that she had once more experimented with her coiffure. The last time Poirot had seen her, she had been adopting a windswept effect. Today, her hair, richly blued, was piled upward in a multiplicity of rather artificial little curls in a pseudo Marquise style. The Marquise effect ended at her neck; the rest of her could have been definitely labelled ‘country practical,’ consisting of a violent yolk of egg rough tweed coat and skirt and a rather bilious looking mustard coloured jumper.

  ‘I knew you’d come,’ said Mrs. Oliver cheerfully.

  ‘You could not possibly have known,’ said Poirot severely.

  ‘Oh, yes I did.’

  ‘I still ask myself why I am here.’

  ‘Well, I know the answer. Curiosity.’

  Poirot looked at her and his eyes twinkled a little.

  ‘Your famous Woman’s Intuition,’ he said, ‘has perhaps for once not led you too far astray.’

  ‘Now, don’t laugh at my woman’s intuition. Haven’t I always spotted the murderer right away?’

  Poirot was gallantly silent. Otherwise he might have replied, ‘At the fifth attempt, perhaps, and not always then!’

  Instead he said, looking round him, ‘It is indeed a beautiful property that you have here.’

  ‘This? But it doesn’t belong to me, M. Poirot. Did you think it did? Oh, no, it belongs to some people called Stubbs.’

  ‘Who are they?’

  ‘Oh, nobody really,’ said Mrs. Oliver vaguely. ‘Just rich. No, I’m down here professionally, doing a job.’

  ‘Ah, you are getting local colour for one of your chefs-d’oeuvre?’

  ‘No, no. Just what I said. I’m doing a job. I’ve been engaged to arrange a murder.’

  Poirot stared at her.

  ‘Oh, not a real one,’ said Mrs. Oliver reassuringly. ‘There’s a big Fête thing on tomorrow, and as a kind of novelty there’s going to be a Murder Hunt. Arranged by me. Like a Treasure Hunt, you see; only they’ve had a Treasure Hunt so often that they thought this would be a novelty. So they offered me a very substantial fee to come down and think it up. Quite fun, really – rather a change from the usual grim routine.’

  ‘How does it work?’

  ‘Well, there’ll be a Victim, of course. And Clues. And Suspects. All rather conventional – you know, the Vamp and the Blackmailer and the Young Lovers and the Sinister Butler and so on. Half a crown to enter and you get shown the first Clue and you’ve got to find the Victim, and the Weapon and say Whodunnit and the Motive. And there are Prizes.’

  ‘Remarkable,’ said Hercule Poirot.

  ‘Actually,’ said Mrs. Oliver ruefully, ‘it’s all much harder to arrange than you’d think. Because you’ve got to allow for real people being quite intelligent, and in my books they needn’t be.’

  ‘And it is to assist you in arranging
this that you have sent for me?’

  Poirot did not try very hard to keep an outraged resentment out of his voice.

  ‘Oh, no,’ said Mrs. Oliver. ‘Of course not! I’ve done all that. Everything’s all set for tomorrow. No, I wanted you for quite another reason.’

  ‘What reason?’

  Mrs. Oliver’s hands strayed upward to her head. She was just about to sweep them frenziedly through her hair in the old familiar gesture when she remembered the intricacy of her coiffure. Instead, she relieved her feelings by tugging at her ear lobes.

  ‘I daresay I’m a fool,’ she said. ‘But I think there’s something wrong.’

  ‘Something wrong? How?’

  ‘I don’t know … That’s what I want you to find out. But I’ve felt – more and more – that I was being – oh! – engineered … jockeyed along … Call me a fool if you like, but I can only say that if there was to be a real murder tomorrow instead of a fake one, I shouldn’t be surprised!’

  Poirot stared at her and she looked back at him defiantly.

  ‘Very interesting,’ said Poirot.

  ‘I suppose you think I’m a complete fool,’ said Mrs. Oliver defensively.

  ‘I have never thought you a fool,’ said Poirot.

  ‘And I know what you always say – or look – about Intuition.’

  ‘One calls things by different names,’ said Poirot. ‘I am quite ready to believe that you have noticed something or heard something that has definitely aroused in you anxiety. I think it possible that you yourself may not even know just what it is that you have seen or noticed or heard. You are aware only of the result. If I may so put it, you do not know what it is that you know. You may label that intuition if you like.’

  ‘It makes one feel such a fool,’ said Mrs. Oliver, ruefully, ‘not to be able to be definite.’

  ‘We shall arrive,’ said Poirot encouragingly. ‘You say that you have had the feeling of being – how did you put it – jockeyed along? Can you explain a little more clearly what you mean by that?’

  ‘Well, it’s rather difficult … You see, this is my murder, so to speak. I’ve thought it out and planned it and it all fits in – dovetails. Well, if you know anything at all about writers, you’ll know that they can’t stand suggestions. People say, “Splendid, but wouldn’t it be better if so and so did so and so?” Or, “Wouldn’t it be a wonderful idea if the victim was A instead of B? Or the murderer turned out to be D instead of E?” I mean, one wants to say: “All right then, write it yourself if you want it that way”!’