The Hollow Read online

  “Don’t you want to know why I did come?”

  “You find a difficulty, perhaps, in putting it into words.”

  “Yes, I think I do. The inquest, M. Poirot, is tomorrow. One has to make up one’s mind just how much—”

  She broke off. Getting up, she wandered across to the mantelpiece, displaced one or two of the ornaments and moved a vase of Michaelmas daisies from its position in the middle of a table to the extreme corner of the mantelpiece. She stepped back, eyeing the arrangement with her head on one side.

  “How do you like that, M. Poirot?”

  “Not at all, Mademoiselle.”

  “I thought you wouldn’t.” She laughed, moved everything quickly and deftly back to its original position. “Well, if one wants to say a thing one has to say it! You are, somehow, the sort of person one can talk to. Here goes. Is it necessary, do you think, that the police should know that I was John Christow’s mistress?”

  Her voice was quite dry and unemotional. She was looking, not at him, but at the wall over his head. With one forefinger she was following the curve of the jar that held the purple flowers. He had an idea that in the touch of that finger was her emotional outlet.

  Hercule Poirot said precisely and also without emotion:

  “I see. You were lovers?”

  “If you prefer to put it like that.”

  He looked at her curiously.

  “It was not how you put it, Mademoiselle.”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  Henrietta shrugged her shoulders. She came and sat down by him on the sofa. She said slowly:

  “One likes to describe things as—as accurately as possible.”

  His interest in Henrietta Savernake grew stronger. He said:

  “You had been Dr. Christow’s mistress—for how long?”

  “About six months.”

  “The police will have, I gather, no difficulty in discovering the fact?”

  Henrietta considered.

  “I imagine not. That is, if they are looking for something of that kind.”

  “Oh, they will be looking, I can assure you of that.”

  “Yes, I rather thought they would.” She paused, stretched out her fingers on her knee and looked at them, then gave him a swift, friendly glance. “Well, M. Poirot, what does one do? Go to Inspector Grange and say—what does one say to a moustache like that? It’s such a domestic, family moustache.”

  Poirot’s hand crawled upwards to his own proudly borne adornment.

  “Whereas mine, Mademoiselle?”

  “Your moustache, M. Poirot, is an artistic triumph. It has no associations with anything but itself. It is, I am sure, unique.”

  “Absolutely.”

  “And it is probably the reason why I am talking to you as I am. Granted that the police have to know the truth about John and myself, will it necessarily have to be made public?”

  “That depends,” said Poirot. “If the police think it had no bearing on the case, they will be quite discreet. You—are very anxious on this point?”

  Henrietta nodded. She stared down at her fingers for a moment or two, then suddenly lifted her head and spoke. Her voice was no longer dry and light.

  “Why should things be made worse than they are for poor Gerda? She adored John and he’s dead. She’s lost him. Why should she have to bear an added burden?”

  “It is for her that you mind?”

  “Do you think that is hypocritical? I suppose you’re thinking that if I cared at all about Gerda’s peace of mind, I would never have become John’s mistress. But you don’t understand—it was not like that. I did not break up his married life. I was only one—of a procession.”

  “Ah, it was like that?”

  She turned on him sharply.

  “No, no, no! Not what you are thinking. That’s what I mind most of all! The false idea that everybody will have of what John was like. That’s why I’m here talking to you—because I’ve got a vague, foggy hope that I can make you understand. Understand, I mean, the sort of person John was. I can see so well what will happen—the headlines in the papers—A Doctor’s Love Life—Gerda, myself, Veronica Cray. John wasn’t like that—he wasn’t, actually, a man who thought much about women. It wasn’t women who mattered to him most, it was his work. It was in his work that his interest and excitement—yes, and his sense of adventure—really lay. If John had been taken unawares at any moment and asked to name the woman who was most in his mind, do you know who he would have said?—Mrs. Crabtree.”

  “Mrs. Crabtree?” Poirot was surprised. “Who, then, is this Mrs. Crabtree?”

  There was something between tears and laughter in Henrietta’s voice as she went on:

  “She’s an old woman—ugly, dirty, wrinkled, quite indomitable. John thought the world of her. She’s a patient in St. Christopher’s Hospital. She’s got Ridgeway’s Disease. That’s a disease that’s very rare, but if you get it you’re bound to die—there just isn’t any cure. But John was finding a cure—I can’t explain technically—it was all very complicated—some question of hormone secretions. He’d been making experiments and Mrs. Crabtree was his prize patient—you see, she’s got guts, she wants to live—and she was fond of John. She and he were fighting on the same side. Ridgeway’s Disease and Mrs. Crabtree is what has been uppermost in John’s mind for months—night and day—nothing else really counted. That’s what being the kind of doctor John was really means—not all the Harley Street stuff and the rich, fat women, that’s only a sideline. It’s the intense scientific curiosity and the achievement. I—oh, I wish I could make you understand.”

  Her hands flew out in a curiously despairing gesture, and Hercule Poirot thought how very lovely and sensitive those hands were.

  He said:

  “You seem to understand very well.”

  “Oh, yes, I understood. John used to come and talk, do you see? Not quite to me—partly, I think, to himself. He got things clear that way. Sometimes he was almost despairing—he couldn’t see how to overcome the heightened toxicity—and then he’d get an idea for varying the treatment. I can’t explain to you what it was like—it was like, yes, a battle. You can’t imagine the—the fury of it and the concentration—and yes, sometimes the agony. And sometimes the sheer tiredness….”

  She was silent for a minute or two, her eyes dark with remembrance.

  Poirot said curiously:

  “You must have a certain technical knowledge yourself?”

  She shook her head.

  “Not really. Only enough to understand what John was talking about. I got books and read about it.”

  She was silent again, her face softened, her lips half-parted. She was, he thought, remembering.

  With a sigh, her mind came back to the present. She looked at him wistfully.

  “If I could only make you see—”

  “But you have, Mademoiselle.”

  “Really?”

  “Yes. One recognizes authenticity when one hears it.”

  “Thank you. But it won’t be so easy to explain to Inspector Grange.”

  “Probably not. He will concentrate on the personal angle.”

  Henrietta said vehemently:

  “And that was so unimportant—so completely unimportant.”

  Poirot’s eyebrows rose slowly. She answered his unspoken protest.

  “But it was! You see—after a while—I got between John and what he was thinking of. I affected him, as a woman. He couldn’t concentrate as he wanted to concentrate—because of me. He began to be afraid that he was beginning to love me—he didn’t want to love anyone. He—he made love to me because he didn’t want to think about me too much. He wanted it to be light, easy, just an affair like other affairs that he had had.”

  “And you—” Poirot was watching her closely. “You were content to have it—like that.”

  Henrietta got up. She said, and once more it was her dry voice:

  “No, I wasn’t—content. After all, o
ne is human….”

  Poirot waited a minute then he said:

  “Then why, Mademoiselle—”

  “Why?” She whirled round on him. “I wanted John to be satisfied, I wanted John to have what he wanted. I wanted him to be able to go on with the thing he cared about—his work. If he didn’t want to be hurt—to be vulnerable again—why—why, that was all right by me.”

  Poirot rubbed his nose.

  “Just now, Miss Savernake, you mentioned Veronica Cray. Was she also a friend of John Christow’s?”

  “Until last Saturday night, he hadn’t seen her for fifteen years.”

  “He knew her fifteen years ago?”

  “They were engaged to be married.” Henrietta came back and sat down. “I see I’ve got to make it all clearer. John loved Veronica desperately. Veronica was, and is, a bitch of the first water. She’s the supreme egoist. Her terms were that John was to chuck everything he cared about and become Miss Veronica Cray’s little tame husband. John broke up the whole thing—quite rightly. But he suffered like hell. His one idea was to marry someone as unlike Veronica as possible. He married Gerda, whom you might describe inelegantly as a first-class chump. That was all very nice and safe, but as anyone could have told him the day came when being married to a chump irritated him. He had various affairs—none of them important. Gerda, of course, never knew about them. But I think, myself, that for fifteen years there has been something wrong with John—something connected with Veronica. He never really got over her. And then, last Saturday, he met her again.”

  After a long pause, Poirot recited dreamily:

  “He went out with her that night to see her home and returned to The Hollow at 3 a.m.”

  “How do you know?”

  “A housemaid had the toothache.”

  Henrietta said irrelevantly, “Lucy has far too many servants.”

  “But you yourself knew that, Mademoiselle.”

  “Yes.”

  “How did you know?”

  Again there was an infinitesimal pause. Then Henrietta replied slowly:

  “I was looking out of my window and saw him come back to the house.”

  “The toothache, Mademoiselle?”

  She smiled at him.

  “Quite another kind of ache, M. Poirot.”

  She got up and moved towards the door, and Poirot said:

  “I will walk back with you, Mademoiselle.”

  They crossed the lane and went through the gate into the chestnut plantation.

  Henrietta said:

  “We need not go past the pool. We can go up to the left and along the top path to the flower walk.”

  A track led steeply uphill towards the woods. After a while they came to a broader path at right angles across the hillside above the chestnut trees. Presently they came to a bench and Henrietta sat down, Poirot beside her. The woods were above and behind them, and below were the closely planted chestnut groves. Just in front of the seat a curving path led downwards, to where just a glimmer of blue water could be seen.

  Poirot watched Henrietta without speaking. Her face had relaxed, the tension had gone. It looked rounder and younger. He realized what she must have looked like as a young girl.

  He said very gently at last:

  “Of what are you thinking, Mademoiselle?”

  “Of Ainswick.”

  “What is Ainswick?”

  “Ainswick? It’s a place.” Almost dreamily, she described Ainswick to him. The white, graceful house, the big magnolia growing up it, the whole set in an amphitheatre of wooded hills.

  “It was your home?”

  “Not really. I lived in Ireland. It was where we came, all of us, for holidays. Edward and Midge and myself. It was Lucy’s home actually. It belonged to her father. After his death it came to Edward.”

  “Not to Sir Henry? But it is he who has the title.”

  “Oh, that’s a KCB,” she explained. “Henry was only a distant cousin.”

  “And after Edward Angkatell, to whom does it go, this Ainswick?”

  “How odd, I’ve never really thought. If Edward doesn’t marry—” She paused. A shadow passed over her face. Hercule Poirot wondered exactly what thought was passing through her mind.

  “I suppose,” said Henrietta slowly, “it will go to David. So that’s why—”

  “Why what?”

  “Why Lucy asked him here…David and Ainswick?” She shook her head. “They don’t fit somehow.”

  Poirot pointed to the path in front of them.

  “It is by that path, Mademoiselle, that you went down to the swimming pool yesterday?”

  She gave a quick shiver.

  “No, by the one nearer the house. It was Edward who came this way.” She turned on him suddenly. “Must we talk about it any more? I hate the swimming pool. I even hate The Hollow.”

  Poirot murmured:

  “I hate the dreadful hollow behind the little wood;

  Its lips in the field above are dabbled with blood-red heath,

  The red-ribb’d ledges drip with a silent horror of blood

  And Echo there, whatever is ask’d her, answers ‘Death.’”

  Henrietta turned an astonished face on him.

  “Tennyson,” said Hercule Poirot, nodding his head proudly. “The poetry of your Lord Tennyson.”

  Henrietta was repeating:

  “And Echo there, whatever is ask’d her…” She went on, almost to herself, “But of course—I see—that’s what it is—Echo!”

  “How do you mean, Echo?”

  “This place—The Hollow itself! I almost saw it before—on Saturday when Edward and I walked up to the ridge. An echo of Ainswick. And that’s what we are, we Angkatells. Echoes! We’re not real—not real as John was real.” She turned to Poirot. “I wish you had known him, M. Poirot. We’re all shadows compared to John. John was really alive.”

  “I knew that even when he was dying, Mademoiselle.”

  “I know. One felt it…And John is dead, and we, the echoes, are alive…It’s like, you know, a very bad joke.”

  The youth had gone from her face again. Her lips were twisted, bitter with sudden pain.

  When Poirot spoke, asking a question, she did not, for a moment, take in what he was saying.

  “I am sorry. What did you say, M. Poirot?”

  “I was asking whether your aunt, Lady Angkatell, liked Dr. Christow?”

  “Lucy? She is a cousin, by the way, not an aunt. Yes, she liked him very much.”

  “And your—also a cousin?—Mr. Edward Angkatell—did he like Dr. Christow?”

  Her voice was, he thought, a little constrained, as she replied:

  “Not particularly—but then he hardly knew him.”

  “And your—yet another cousin? Mr. David Angkatell?”

  Henrietta smiled.

  “David, I think, hates all of us. He spends his time immured in the library reading the Encyclopædia Britannica.”

  “Ah, a serious temperament.”

  “I am sorry for David. He has had a difficult home life. His mother was unbalanced—an invalid. Now his only way of protecting himself is to try to feel superior to everyone. It’s all right as long as it works, but now and then it breaks down and the vulnerable David peeps through.”

  “Did he feel himself superior to Dr. Christow?”

  “He tried to—but I don’t think it came off. I suspect that John Christow was just the kind of man that David would like to be. He disliked John in consequence.”

  Poirot nodded his head thoughtfully.

  “Yes—self-assurance, confidence, virility—all the intensive male qualities. It is interesting—very interesting.”

  Henrietta did not answer.

  Through the chestnuts, down by the pool, Hercule Poirot saw a man stooping, searching for something, or so it seemed.

  He murmured: “I wonder—”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  Poirot said: “That is one of Inspector Grange’s men. He seems to be look
ing for something.”

  “Clues, I suppose. Don’t policemen look for clues? Cigarette ash, footprints, burnt matches.”

  Her voice held a kind of bitter mockery. Poirot answered seriously.

  “Yes, they look for these things—and sometimes they find them. But the real clues, Miss Savernake, in a case like this, usually lie in the personal relationships of the people concerned.”

  “I don’t think I understand you.”

  “Little things,” said Poirot, his head thrown back, his eyes half-closed. “Not cigarette ash, or a rubber heel mark—but a gesture, a look, an unexpected action….”

  Henrietta turned her head sharply to look at him. He felt her eyes, but he did not turn his head. She said:

  “Are you thinking of—anything in particular?”

  “I was thinking of how you stepped forward and took the revolver out of Mrs. Christow’s hand then dropped it in the pool.”

  He felt the slight start she gave. But her voice was quite normal and calm.

  “Gerda, M. Poirot, is rather a clumsy person. In the shock of the moment, and if the revolver had had another cartridge in it, she might have fired it and—and hurt someone.”

  “But it was rather clumsy of you, was it not, to drop it in the pool?”

  “Well, I had had a shock too.” She paused. “What are you suggesting, M. Poirot?”

  Poirot sat up, turned his head, and spoke in a brisk, matter-of-fact way.

  “If there were fingerprints on that revolver, that is to say, fingerprints made before Mrs. Christow handled it, it would be interesting to know whose they were—and that we shall never know now.”

  Henrietta said quietly but steadily:

  “Meaning that you think they were mine. You are suggesting that I shot John and then left the revolver beside him so that Gerda could come along and pick it up and be left holding the baby. That is what you are suggesting, isn’t it? But surely, if I did that, you will give me credit for enough intelligence to have wiped off my own fingerprints first!”

  “But surely you are intelligent enough to see, Mademoiselle, that if you had done so and if the revolver had had no fingerprints on it but Mrs. Christow’s, that would have been very remarkable! For you were all shooting with that revolver the day before. Gerda Christow would hardly have wiped the revolver clean of fingerprints before using it—why should she?”