Murder in the Mews Read online

  “You could warn the victim,” insisted Pamela.

  “Sometimes,” said Hercule Poirot, “warnings are useless.”

  Pamela said slowly, “You could warn the murderer—show him that you knew what was intended. . . .”

  Poirot nodded appreciatively.

  “Yes—a better plan, that. But even then you have to reckon with a criminal’s chief vice.”

  “What is that?”

  “Conceit. A criminal never believes that his crime can fail.”

  “But it’s absurd—stupid,” cried Pamela. “The whole crime was childish! Why, the police arrested Douglas Gold at once last night.”

  “Yes.” He added thoughtfully, “Douglas Gold is a very stupid young man.”

  “Incredibly stupid! I hear that they found the rest of the poison—whatever it was—?”

  “A form of stropanthin. A heart poison.”

  “That they actually found the rest of it in his dinner jacket pocket?”

  “Quite true.”

  “Incredibly stupid!” said Pamela again. “Perhaps he meant to get rid of it—and the shock of the wrong person being poisoned paralysed him. What a scene it would make on the stage. The lover putting the stropanthin in the husband’s glass and then, just when his attention is elsewhere, the wife drinks it instead . . . Think of the ghastly moment when Douglas Gold turned round and realized he had killed the woman he loved. . . .”

  She gave a little shiver.

  “Your triangle. The Eternal Triangle! Who would have thought it would end like this?”

  “I was afraid of it,” murmured Poirot.

  Pamela turned on him.

  “You warned her—Mrs. Gold. Then why didn’t you warn him as well?”

  “You mean, why didn’t I warn Douglas Gold?”

  “No. I mean Commander Chantry. You could have told him that he was in danger—after all, he was the real obstacle! I’ve no doubt Douglas Gold relied on being able to bully his wife into giving him a divorce—she’s a meek-spirited little woman and terribly fond of him. But Chantry is a mulish sort of devil. He was determined not to give Valentine her freedom.”

  Poirot shrugged his shoulders.

  “It would have been no good my speaking to Chantry,” he said.

  “Perhaps not,” Pamela admitted. “He’d probably have said he could look after himself and told you to go to the devil. But I do feel there ought to have been something one could have done.”

  “I did think,” said Poirot slowly, “of trying to persuade Valentine Chantry to leave the island, but she would not have believed what I had to tell her. She was far too stupid a woman to take in a thing like that. Pauvre femme, her stupidity killed her.”

  “I don’t believe it would have been any good if she had left the island,” said Pamela. “He would simply have followed her.”

  “He?”

  “Douglas Gold.”

  “You think Douglas Gold would have followed her? Oh, no, mademoiselle, you are wrong—you are completely wrong. You have not yet appreciated the truth of this matter. If Valentine Chantry had left the island, her husband would have gone with her.”

  Pamela looked puzzled.

  “Well, naturally.”

  “And then, you see, the crime would simply have taken place somewhere else.”

  “I don’t understand you?”

  “I am saying to you that the same crime would have occurred somewhere else—that crime being the murder of Valentine Chantry by her husband.”

  Pamela stared.

  “Are you trying to say that it was Commander Chantry—Tony Chantry—who murdered Valentine?”

  “Yes. You saw him do it! Douglas Gold brought him his drink. He sat with it in front of him. When the women came in we all looked across the room, he had the stropanthin ready, he dropped it into the pink gin and presently, courteously, he passed it along to his wife and she drank it.”

  “But the packet of stropanthin was found in Douglas Gold’s pocket!”

  “A very simple matter to slip it there when we were all crowding round the dying woman.”

  It was quite two minutes before Pamela got her breath.

  “But I don’t understand a word! The triangle—you said yourself—”

  Hercule Poirot nodded his head vigorously.

  “I said there was a triangle—yes. But you, you imagined the wrong one. You were deceived by some very clever acting! You thought, as you were meant to think, that both Tony Chantry and Douglas Gold were in love with Valentine Chantry. You believed, as you were meant to believe, that Douglas Gold, being in love with Valentine Chantry (whose husband refused to divorce her) took the desperate step of administering a powerful heart poison to Chantry and that, by a fatal mistake, Valentine Chantry drank that poison instead. All that is illusion. Chantry has been meaning to do away with his wife for some time. He was bored to death with her, I could see that from the first. He married her for her money. Now he wants to marry another woman—so he planned to get rid of Valentine and keep her money. That entailed murder.”

  “Another woman?”

  Poirot said slowly:

  “Yes, yes—the little Marjorie Gold. It was the eternal triangle all right! But you saw it the wrong way round. Neither of those two men cared in the least for Valentine Chantry. It was her vanity and Marjorie Gold’s very clever stage managing that made you think they did! A very clever woman, Mrs. Gold, and amazingly attractive in her demure Madonna, poor-little-thing-way! I have known four women criminals of the same type. There was Mrs. Adams who was acquitted of murdering her husband, but everybody knows she did it. Mary Parker did away with an aunt, a sweetheart and two brothers before she got a little careless and was caught. Then there was Mrs. Rowden, she was hanged all right. Mrs. Lecray escaped by the skin of her teeth. This woman is exactly the same type. I recognized it as soon as I saw her! That type takes to crime like a duck to water! And a very pretty bit of well-planned work it was. Tell me, what evidence did you ever have that Douglas Gold was in love with Valentine Chantry? When you come to think it out, you will realize that there was only Mrs. Gold’s confidences and Chantry’s jealous bluster. Yes? You see?”

  “It’s horrible,” cried Pamela.

  “They were a clever pair,” said Poirot with professional detachment. “They planned to ‘meet’ here and stage their crime. That Marjorie Gold, she is a cold-blooded devil! She would have sent her poor, innocent fool of a husband to the scaffold without the least remorse.”

  Pamela cried out:

  “But he was arrested and taken away by the police last night.”

  “Ah,” said Hercule Poirot, “but after that, me, I had a few little words with the police. It is true that I did not see Chantry put the stropanthin in the glass. I, like everyone else, looked up when the ladies came in. But the moment I realized that Valentine Chantry had been poisoned, I watched her husband without taking my eyes off him. And so, you see, I actually saw him slip the packet of stropanthin in Douglas Gold’s coat pocket. . . .”

  He added with a grim expression on his face:

  “I am a good witness. My name is well-known. The moment the police heard my story they realized that it put an entirely different complexion on the matter.”

  “And then?” demanded Pamela, fascinated.

  “Eh bien, then they asked Commander Chantry a few questions. He tried to bluster it out, but he is not really clever, he soon broke down.”

  “So Douglas Gold was set at liberty?”

  “Yes.”

  “And—Marjorie Gold?”

  Poirot’s face grew stern.

  “I warned her,” he said. “Yes, I warned her . . . Up on the Mount of the Prophet . . . It was the only chance of averting the crime. I as good as told her that I suspected her. She understood. But she believed herself too clever . . . I told her to leave the island if she valued her life. She chose—to remain. . . .”

  About the Author

  Agatha Christie is the most widely published au
thor of all time and in any language, outsold only by the Bible and Shakespeare. Her books have sold more than a billion copies in English and another billion in a hundred foreign languages. She is the author of eighty crime novels and short-story collections, nineteen plays, two memoirs, and six novels written under the name Mary Westmacott.

  She first tried her hand at detective fiction while working in a hospital dispensary during World War I, creating the now legendary Hercule Poirot with her debut novel The Mysterious Affair at Styles. With The Murder in the Vicarage, published in 1930, she introduced another beloved sleuth, Miss Jane Marple. Additional series characters include the husband-and-wife crime-fighting team of Tommy and Tuppence

  Beresford, private investigator Parker Pyne, and Scotland Yard detectives Superintendent Battle and Inspector Japp.

  Many of Christie’s novels and short stories were adapted into plays, films, and television series. The Mousetrap, her most famous play of all, opened in 1952 and is the longest-running play in history. Among her best-known film adaptations are Murder on the Orient Express (1974) and Death on the Nile (1978), with Albert Finney and Peter Ustinov playing Hercule Poirot, respectively. On the small screen Poirot has been most memorably portrayed by David Suchet, and Miss Marple by Joan Hickson and subsequently Geraldine McEwan and Julia McKenzie.

  Christie was first married to Archibald Christie and then to archaeologist Sir Max Mallowan, whom she accompanied on expeditions to countries that would also serve as the settings for many of her novels. In 1971 she achieved one of Britain’s highest honors when she was made a Dame of the British Empire. She died in 1976 at the age of eighty-five. Her one hundred and twentieth anniversary was celebrated around the world in 2010.

  Visit www.AuthorTracker.com for exclusive information on your favorite HarperCollins authors.

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  Copyright

  This book is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogue are drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  This title was previously published as Dead Man’s Mirror.

  AGATHA CHRISTIE® POIROT® MURDER IN THE MEWS™. Copyright © 1937 Agatha Christie Limited (a Chorion company). All rights reserved.

  MURDER IN THE MEWS © 1937. Published by permission of G.P. Putnam’s Sons, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this ebook on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins ebooks.

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  FIRST HARPER PAPERBACK PUBLISHED 2011

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available upon request.

  ISBN 978-0-06-207399-0

  Epub Edition © AUGUST 2011 eISBN 978-0-06-176336-6

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