The Hollow Read online

  “I expect it’s more comfortable here,” said Midge.

  “Does one really care about being comfortable?” David asked scornfully.

  “There are times,” said Midge, “when I feel I don’t care about anything else.”

  “The pampered attitude to life,” said David. “If you were a worker—”

  Midge interrupted him.

  “I am a worker. That’s just why being comfortable is so attractive. Box beds, down pillows—early-morning tea softly deposited beside the bed—a porcelain bath with lashings of hot water—and delicious bath salts. The kind of easy chair you really sink into….”

  Midge paused in her catalogue.

  “The workers,” said David, “should have all these things.”

  But he was a little doubtful about the softly deposited early-morning tea, which sounded impossibly sybaritic for an earnestly organized world.

  “I couldn’t agree with you more,” said Midge heartily.

  Fifteen

  Hercule Poirot, enjoying a mid-morning cup of chocolate, was interrupted by the ringing of the telephone. He got up and lifted the receiver.

  “’Allo?”

  “M. Poirot?”

  “Lady Angkatell?”

  “How nice of you to know my voice! Am I disturbing you?”

  “But not at all. You are, I hope, none the worse for the distressing events of yesterday?”

  “No, indeed. Distressing, as you say, but one feels, I find, quite detached. I rang you up to know if you could possibly come over—an imposition, I know, but I am really in great distress.”

  “But certainly, Lady Angkatell. Did you mean now?”

  “Well, yes, I did mean now. As quickly as you can. That’s very sweet of you.”

  “Not at all. I will come by the woods, then?”

  “Oh, of course—the shortest way. Thank you so much, dear M. Poirot.”

  Pausing only to brush a few specks of dust off the lapels of his coat and to slip on a thin overcoat, Poirot crossed the lane and hurried along the path through the chestnuts. The swimming pool was deserted—the police had finished their work and gone. It looked innocent and peaceful in the soft misty autumn light.

  Poirot took a quick look into the pavilion. The platinum fox cape, he noted, had been removed. But the six boxes of matches still stood upon the table by the settee. He wondered more than ever about those matches.

  “It is not a place to keep matches—here in the damp. One box, for convenience, perhaps—but not six.”

  He frowned down on the painted iron table. The tray of glasses had been removed. Someone had scrawled with a pencil on the table—a rough design of a nightmarish tree. It pained Hercule Poirot. It offended his tidy mind.

  He clicked his tongue, shook his head, and hurried on towards the house, wondering at the reason for this urgent summons.

  Lady Angkatell was waiting for him at the french windows and swept him into the empty drawing room.

  “It was nice of you to come, M. Poirot.”

  She clasped his hand warmly.

  “Madame, I am at your service.”

  Lady Angkatell’s hands floated out expressively. Her wide, beautiful eyes opened.

  “You see, it’s all so difficult. The inspector person is interviewing—no, questioning—taking a statement—what is the term they use?—Gudgeon. And really our whole life here depends on Gudgeon, and one does so sympathize with him. Because naturally it is terrible for him to be questioned by the police—even Inspector Grange, who I do feel is really nice and probably a family man—boys, I think, and he helps them with Meccano in the evenings—and a wife who has everything spotless but a little overcrowded….”

  Hercule Poirot blinked as Lady Angkatell developed her imaginary sketch of Inspector Grange’s home life.

  “By the way his moustache droops,” went on Lady Angkatell, “I think that a home that is too spotless might be sometimes depressing—like soap on hospital nurses’ faces. Quite a shine! But that is more in the country where things lag behind—in London nursing homes they have lots of powder and really vivid lipstick. But I was saying, M. Poirot, that you really must come to lunch properly when all this ridiculous business is over.”

  “You are very kind.”

  “I do not mind the police myself,” said Lady Angkatell. “I really find it all quite interesting. ‘Do let me help you in any way I can,’ I said to Inspector Grange. He seems rather a bewildered sort of person, but methodical.

  “Motive seems so important to policemen,” she went on. “Talking of hospital nurses just now, I believe that John Christow—a nurse with red hair and an upturned nose—quite attractive. But of course it was a long time ago and the police might not be interested. One doesn’t really know how much poor Gerda had to put up with. She is the loyal type, don’t you think? Or possibly she believes what is told her. I think if one has not a great deal of intelligence, it is wise to do that.”

  Quite suddenly, Lady Angkatell flung open the study door and ushered Poirot in, crying brightly, “Here is M. Poirot.” She swept round him and out, shutting the door. Inspector Grange and Gudgeon were sitting by the desk. A young man with a notebook was in a corner. Gudgeon rose respectfully to his feet.

  Poirot hastened into apologies.

  “I retire immediately. I assure you I had no idea that Lady Angkatell—”

  “No, no, you wouldn’t have.” Grange’s moustache looked more pessimistic than ever this morning. “Perhaps,” thought Poirot, fascinated by Lady Angkatell’s recent sketch of Grange, “there has been too much cleaning or perhaps a Benares brass table has been purchased so that the good inspector he really cannot have space to move.”

  Angrily he dismissed these thoughts. Inspector Grange’s clean but overcrowded home, his wife, his boys and their addiction to Meccano were all figments of Lady Angkatell’s busy brain.

  But the vividness with which they assumed concrete reality interested him. It was quite an accomplishment.

  “Sit down, M. Poirot,” said Grange. “There’s something I want to ask you about, and I’ve nearly finished here.”

  He turned his attention back to Gudgeon, who deferentially and almost under protest resumed his seat and turned an expressionless face towards his interlocutor.

  “And that’s all you can remember?”

  “Yes, sir. Everything, sir, was very much as usual. There was no unpleasantness of any kind.”

  “There’s a fur cape thing—out in that summerhouse by the pool. Which of the ladies did it belong to?”

  “Are you referring, sir, to a cape of platinum fox? I noticed it yesterday when I took out the glasses to the pavilion. But it is not the property of anyone in this house, sir.”

  “Whose is it, then?”

  “It might possibly belong to Miss Cray, sir. Miss Veronica Cray, the motion picture actress. She was wearing something of the kind.”

  “When?”

  “When she was here the night before last, sir.”

  “You didn’t mention her as having been a guest here?”

  “She was not a guest, sir. Miss Cray lives at Dovecotes, the—er—cottage up the lane, and she came over after dinner, having run out of matches, to borrow some.”

  “Did she take away six boxes?” asked Poirot.

  Gudgeon turned to him.

  “That is correct, sir. Her ladyship, after having inquired if we had plenty, insisted on Miss Cray’s taking half a dozen boxes.”

  “Which she left in the pavilion,” said Poirot.

  “Yes, sir, I observed them there yesterday morning.”

  “There is not much that that man does not observe,” remarked Poirot as Gudgeon departed, closing the door softly and deferentially behind him.

  Inspector Grange merely remarked that servants were the devil!

  “However,” he said with a little renewed cheerfulness, “there’s always the kitchenmaid. Kitchenmaids talk—not like these stuck-up upper servants.

  “I’ve
put a man on to make inquiries at Harley Street,” he went on. “And I shall be there myself later in the day. We ought to get something there. Daresay, you know, that wife of Christow’s had a good bit to put up with. Some of these fashionable doctors and their lady patients—well, you’d be surprised! And I gather from Lady Angkatell that there was some trouble over a hospital nurse. Of course, she was very vague about it.”

  “Yes,” Poirot agreed. “She would be vague.”

  A skilfully built-up picture…John Christow and amorous intrigues with hospital nurses…the opportunities of a doctor’s life…plenty of reasons for Gerda Christow’s jealousy which had culminated at last in murder.

  Yes, a skilfully suggested picture, drawing attention to a Harley Street background—away from The Hollow—away from the moment when Henrietta Savernake, stepping forward, had taken the revolver from Gerda Christow’s unresisting hand…Away from that other moment when John Christow, dying, had said “Henrietta.”

  Suddenly opening his eyes, which had been half-closed, Hercule Poirot demanded with irresistible curiosity:

  “Do your boys play with Meccano?”

  “Eh, what?” Inspector Grange came back from a frowning reverie to stare at Poirot. “Why, what on earth? As a matter of fact, they’re a bit young—but I was thinking of giving Teddy a Meccano set for Christmas. What made you ask?”

  Poirot shook his head.

  What made Lady Angkatell dangerous, he thought, was the fact that those intuitive, wild guesses of hers might be often right. With a careless (seemingly careless?) word she built up a picture—and if part of the picture was right, wouldn’t you, in spite of yourself, believe in the other half of the picture?….

  Inspector Grange was speaking.

  “There’s a point I want to put to you, M. Poirot. This Miss Cray, the actress—she traipses over here borrowing matches. If she wanted to borrow matches, why didn’t she come to your place, only a step or two away? Why come about half a mile?”

  Hercule Poirot shrugged his shoulders.

  “There might be reasons. Snob reasons, shall we say? My little cottage, it is small, unimportant. I am only a weekender, but Sir Henry and Lady Angkatell are important—they live here—they are what is called in the country. This Miss Veronica Cray, she may have wanted to get to know them—and after all, this was a way.”

  Inspector Grange got up.

  “Yes,” he said, “that’s perfectly possible, of course, but one doesn’t want to overlook anything. Still, I’ve no doubt that everything’s going to be plain sailing. Sir Henry has identified the gun as one of his collection. It seems they were actually practising with it the afternoon before. All Mrs. Christow had to do was to go into the study and get it from where she’d seen Sir Henry put it and the ammunition away. It’s all quite simple.”

  “Yes,” Poirot murmured. “It seems all quite simple.”

  Just so, he thought, would a woman like Gerda Christow commit a crime. Without subterfuge or complexity—driven suddenly to violence by the bitter anguish of a narrow but deeply loving nature.

  And yet surely—surely, she would have had some sense of self-preservation. Or had she acted in that blindness—that darkness of the spirit—when reason is entirely laid aside?

  He recalled her blank, dazed face.

  He did not know—he simply did not know.

  But he felt that he ought to know.

  Sixteen

  Gerda Christow pulled the black dress up over her head and let it fall on a chair.

  Her eyes were piteous with uncertainty.

  She said: “I don’t know—I really don’t know. Nothing seems to matter.”

  “I know, dear, I know.” Mrs. Patterson was kind but firm. She knew exactly how to treat people who had had a bereavement. “Elsie is wonderful in a crisis,” her family said of her.

  At the present moment she was sitting in her sister Gerda’s bedroom in Harley Street being wonderful. Elsie Patterson was tall and spare with an energetic manner. She was looking now at Gerda with a mixture of irritation and compassion.

  Poor dear Gerda—tragic for her to lose her husband in such an awful way. And really, even now, she didn’t seem to take in the—well, the implications, properly. Of course, Mrs. Patterson reflected, Gerda always was terribly slow. And there was shock, too, to take into account.

  She said in a brisk voice: “I think I should decide on that black marocain at twelve guineas.”

  One always did have to make up Gerda’s mind for her.

  Gerda stood motionless, her brow puckered. She said hesitantly:

  “I don’t really know if John liked mourning. I think I once heard him say he didn’t.”

  “John,” she thought. “If only John were here to tell me what to do.”

  But John would never be there again. Never—never—never…Mutton getting cold—congealing on the table…the bang of the consulting room door, John running up two steps at a time, always in a hurry, so vital, so alive….

  Alive.

  Lying on his back by the swimming pool…the slow drip of blood over the edge…the feel of the revolver in her hand….

  A nightmare, a bad dream, presently she would wake up and none of it would be true.

  Her sister’s crisp voice came cutting through her nebulous thoughts.

  “You must have something black for the inquest. It would look most odd if you turned up in bright blue.”

  Gerda said: “That awful inquest!” and half-shut her eyes.

  “Terrible for you, darling,” said Elsie Patterson quickly. “But after it is all over you will come straight down to us and we shall take great care of you.”

  The nebulous blur of Gerda Christow’s thoughts hardened. She said, and her voice was frightened, almost panic-stricken:

  “What am I going to do without John?”

  Elsie Patterson knew the answer to that one. “You’ve got your children. You’ve got to live for them.”

  Zena, sobbing and crying, “My Daddy’s dead!” Throwing herself on her bed. Terry, pale, inquiring, shedding no tears.

  An accident with a revolver, she had told them—poor Daddy has had an accident.

  Beryl Collins (so thoughtful of her) had confiscated the morning papers so that the children should not see them. She had warned the servants too. Really, Beryl had been most kind and thoughtful.

  Terence coming to his mother in the dim drawing room, his lips pursed close together, his face almost greenish in its odd pallor.

  “Why was Father shot?”

  “An accident, dear. I—I can’t talk about it.”

  “It wasn’t an accident. Why do you say what isn’t true? Father was killed. It was murder. The paper says so.”

  “Terry, how did you get hold of a paper? I told Miss Collins—”

  He had nodded—queer repeated nods like a very old man.

  “I went out and bought one, of course. I knew there must be something in them that you weren’t telling us, or else why did Miss Collins hide them?”

  It was never any good hiding truth from Terence. That queer, detached, scientific curiosity of his had always to be satisfied.

  “Why was he killed, Mother?”

  She had broken down then, becoming hysterical.

  “Don’t ask me about it—don’t talk about it—I can’t talk about it…it’s all too dreadful.”

  “But they’ll find out, won’t they? I mean, they have to find out. It’s necessary.”

  So reasonable, so detached. It made Gerda want to scream and laugh and cry. She thought: “He doesn’t care—he can’t care—he just goes on asking questions. Why, he hasn’t cried, even.”

  Terence had gone away, evading his Aunt Elsie’s ministrations, a lonely little boy with a stiff, pinched face. He had always felt alone. But it hadn’t mattered until today.

  Today, he thought, was different. If only there was someone who would answer questions reasonably and intelligently.

  Tomorrow, Tuesday, he and Nicholson Mino
r were going to make nitroglycerine. He had been looking forward to it with a thrill. The thrill had gone. He didn’t care if he never made nitroglycerine.

  Terence felt almost shocked at himself. Not to care any more about scientific experiment. But when a chap’s father had been murdered…He thought: “My father—murdered.”

  And something stirred—took root—grew…a slow anger.

  Beryl Collins tapped on the bedroom door and came in. She was pale, composed, efficient. She said:

  “Inspector Grange is here.” And as Gerda gasped and looked at her piteously, Beryl went on quickly: “He said there was no need for him to worry you. He’ll have a word with you before he goes, but it is just routine questions about Dr. Christow’s practice and I can tell him everything he wants to know.”

  “Oh thank you, Collie.”

  Beryl made a rapid exit and Gerda sighed out:

  “Collie is such a help. She’s so practical.”

  “Yes, indeed,” said Mrs. Patterson. “An excellent secretary, I’m sure. Very plain, poor girl, isn’t she? Oh, well, I always think that’s just as well. Especially with an attractive man like John.”

  Gerda flamed out at her:

  “What do you mean, Elsie? John would never—he never—you talk as though John would have flirted or something horrid if he had had a pretty secretary. John wasn’t like that at all.”

  “Of course not, darling,” said Mrs. Patterson. “But after all, one knows what men are like!”

  In the consulting room Inspector Grange faced the cool, belligerent glance of Beryl Collins. It was belligerent, he noted that. Well, perhaps that was only natural.

  “Plain bit of goods,” he thought. “Nothing between her and the doctor, I shouldn’t think. She may have been sweet on him, though. It works that way sometimes.”

  But not this time, he came to the conclusion, when he leaned back in his chair a quarter of an hour later. Beryl Collins’s answers to his questions had been models of clearness. She replied promptly, and obviously had every detail of the doctor’s practice at her fingertips. He shifted his ground and began to probe gently into the relations existing between John Christow and his wife.