Elephants Can Remember (3 page)

‘Just tell me,’ said Mrs Oliver, ‘do you think I’m a terrible nosey-parker?’

‘No, I don’t,’ said Poirot. ‘On the whole I don’t think you are a woman of great curiosity. But I can quite see you getting in a het-up state at a literary party, busy defending yourself against too much kindness, too much praise. You ran yourself instead into a very awkward dilemma, and took a very strong dislike to the person who ran you into it.’

‘Yes. She’s a very tiresome woman, a very disagreeable woman.’

‘This murder in the past of this husband and wife who were supposed to get on well together and no apparent signs of a quarrel was known. One never really read about any cause for it, according to you?’

‘They were shot. Yes, they were shot. It could have been a suicide pact. I think the police thought it was at first. Of course, one can’t find out about things all those years afterwards.’

‘Oh yes,’ said Poirot, ‘I think I could find out something about it.’

‘You mean – through the exciting friends you’ve got?’

‘Well, I wouldn’t say the exciting friends, perhaps. Certainly there are knowledgeable friends, friends who could get certain records, look up the accounts that were given of the crime at the time, some access I could get to certain records.’

‘You could find out things,’ said Mrs Oliver hopefully, ‘and then tell me.’

‘Yes,’ said Poirot, ‘I think I could help you to know at any rate the full facts of the case. It’ll take a little time, though.’

‘I can see that if you do that, which is what I want you to do,
I’ve
got to do something myself. I’ll have to see the girl. I’ve got to see whether she knows anything about all this, ask her if she’d like me to give her mother-in-law-to-be a raspberry or whether there is any other way in which I can help her. And I’d like to see the boy she’s going to marry, too.’

‘Quite right,’ said Poirot. ‘Excellent.’

‘And I suppose,’ said Mrs Oliver, ‘there might be people –’ She broke off, frowning.

‘I don’t suppose people will be very much good,’ said Hercule Poirot. ‘This is an affair of the past. A
cause célèbre
perhaps at the time. But what is a
cause
célèbre
when you come to think of it? Unless it comes to an astonishing
dénouement
, which this one didn’t. Nobody remembers it.’

‘No,’ said Mrs Oliver, ‘that is quite true. There was a lot about it in the papers and mentions of it for some time, and then it just – faded out. Well, like things do now. Like that girl, the other day. You know, who left her home and they couldn’t find her anywhere. Well, I mean, that was five or six years ago and then suddenly a little boy, playing about in a sand heap or a gravel pit or something, suddenly came across her dead body. Five or six years later.’

‘That is true,’ said Poirot. ‘And it is true that knowing from that body how long it is since death and what happened on the particular day and going back over various events of which there is a written record, one may in the end turn up a murderer. But it will be more difficult in your problem since it seems the answer must be one of two things: that the husband disliked his wife and wanted to get rid of her, or that the wife hated her husband or else had a lover. Therefore, it might have been a passionate crime or something quite different. Anyway, there would be nothing, as it were, to find out about it. If the police could not find out at the time, then the motive must have been a difficult one, not easy to see. Therefore it has remained a nine days’ wonder, that is all.’

‘I suppose I can go to the daughter. Perhaps that is what that odious woman was getting me to do – wanted me to do. She thought the daughter knew – well, the daughter might have known,’ said Mrs Oliver. ‘Children do, you know. They know the most extraordinary things.’

‘Have you any idea how old this goddaughter of yours would have been at the time?’

‘Well, I have if I reckon it up, but I can’t say off-hand. I think she might have been nine or ten, but perhaps older, I don’t know. I think that she was away at school at the time. But that may be just my fancy, remembering back what I read.’

‘But you think Mrs Burton-Cox’s wish was to make you get information from the daughter? Perhaps the daughter knows something, perhaps she said something to the son, and the son said something to his mother. I expect Mrs Burton-Cox tried to question the girl herself and got rebuffed, but thought the famous Mrs Oliver, being both a godmother and also full of criminal knowledge, might obtain information. Though why it should matter to her, I still don’t see,’ said Poirot. ‘And it does not seem to me that what you call vaguely “people” can help after all this time.’ He added. ‘Would anybody remember?’

‘Well, that’s where I think they might,’ said Mrs Oliver.

‘You surprise me,’ said Poirot, looking at her with a somewhat puzzled face. ‘
Do
people remember?’

‘Well,’ said Mrs Oliver, ‘I was really thinking of elephants.’

‘Elephants?’

As he had thought often before, Poirot thought that really Mrs Oliver was the most unaccountable woman. Why suddenly elephants?

‘I was thinking of elephants at the lunch yesterday,’ said Mrs Oliver.

‘Why were you thinking of elephants?’ said Poirot, with some curiosity.

‘Well, I was really thinking of teeth. You know, things one tries to eat, and if you’ve got some sort of false teeth – well, you can’t do it very well. You know, you’ve got to know what you can eat and what you can’t.’

‘Ah!’ said Poirot, with a deep sigh. ‘Yes, yes. The dentists, they can do much for you, but not everything.’

‘Quite so. And then I thought of – you know – our teeth being only bone and so not awfully good, and how nice it would be to be a dog, who has real ivory teeth. And then I thought of anyone else who has ivory teeth, and I thought about walruses and – oh, other things like that. And I thought about elephants. Of course when you think of ivory you do think of elephants, don’t you? Great big elephant tusks.’

‘That is very true,’ said Poirot, still not seeing the point of what Mrs Oliver was saying.

‘So I thought that what we’ve really got to do is to get at the people who are like elephants. Because elephants, so they say, don’t forget.’

‘I have heard the phrase, yes,’ said Poirot.

‘Elephants don’t forget,’ said Mrs Oliver. ‘You know, a story children get brought up on? How someone, an Indian tailor, stuck a needle or something in an elephant’s tusk. No. Not a tusk, his trunk, of course, an elephant’s trunk. And the next time the elephant came past he had a great mouthful of water and he splashed it out all over the tailor though he hadn’t seen him for several years. He hadn’t forgotten. He remembered. That’s the point, you see. Elephants remember. What I’ve got to do is – I’ve got to get in touch with some elephants.’

‘I do not know yet if I quite see what you mean,’ said Hercule Poirot. ‘Who are you classifying as elephants? You sound as though you were going for information to the Zoo.’

‘Well, it’s not exactly like that,’ said Mrs Oliver. ‘Not elephants, as elephants, but the way people up to a point would resemble elephants. There are some people who
do
remember. In fact, one does remember queer things, I mean there are a lot of things that
I
remember very well. They happened – I remember a birthday party I had when I was five, and a pink cake – a lovely pink cake. It had a sugar bird on it. And I remember the day my canary flew away and I cried. And I remember another day when I went into a field and there was a bull there and somebody said it would gore me, and I was terrified and wanted to run out of the field. Well, I remember that quite well. It was a Tuesday too. I don’t know why I should remember it was a Tuesday, but it was a Tuesday. And I remember a wonderful picnic with blackberries. I remember getting pricked terribly, but getting more blackberries than anyone else. It was wonderful! By that time I was nine, I think. But one needn’t go back as far as that. I mean, I’ve been to hundreds of weddings in my life, but when I look back on a wedding there are only two that I remember
particularly
. One where I was a bridesmaid. It took place in the New Forest, I remember, and I can’t remember who was there actually. I think it was a cousin of mine getting married. I didn’t know her very well but she wanted a good many bridesmaids and, well, I came in handy, I suppose. But I know another wedding. That was a friend of mine in the Navy. He was nearly drowned in a submarine, and then he was saved, and then the girl he was engaged to, her people didn’t want her to marry him but then he did marry her after that and I was one of her bridesmaids at the marriage. Well, I mean, there’s always things you
do
remember.’

‘I see your point,’ said Poirot. ‘I find it interesting. So you will go
à la recherche des éléphants
?’

‘That’s right. I’d have to get the date right.’ ‘There,’ said Poirot, ‘I hope I may be able to help you.’

‘And then I’ll think of people I knew about at that time, people that I may have known who also knew the same friends that I did, who probably knew General What-not. People who may have known them abroad, but whom I also knew although I mayn’t have seen them for a good many years. You can look up people, you know, that you haven’t seen for a long time. Because people are always quite pleased to see someone coming up out of the past, even if they can’t remember very much about you. And then you naturally will talk about the things that were happening at that date, that you remember about.’

‘Very interesting,’ said Poirot. ‘I think you are very well equipped for what you propose to do. People who knew the Ravenscrofts either well or not very well; people who lived in the same part of the world where the things happened or who might have been staying there. More difficult, but I think one could get at it. And so, somehow or other one would try different things. Start a little talk going about what happened, what they think happened, what anyone else has ever told you about what might have happened. About any love-affairs the husband or wife had, about any money that somebody might have inherited. I think you could scratch up a lot of things.

‘Oh dear,’ said Mrs Oliver. ‘I’m afraid really I’m just a nosey-parker.’

‘You’ve been given an assignment,’ said Poirot, ‘not by someone you like, not by someone you wish to oblige, but someone you entirely dislike. That does not matter. You are still on a quest, a quest of knowledge. You take your own path. It is the path of the elephants. The elephants
may
remember.
Bon voyage
,’ said Poirot.

‘I beg your pardon,’ said Mrs Oliver.

‘I’m sending you forth on your voyage of discovery,’ said Poirot. ‘
A la recherche des éléphants
.’

‘I expect I’m mad,’ said Mrs Oliver sadly. She brushed her hands through her hair again so that she looked like the old picture books of Struwelpeter. ‘I was just thinking of starting a story about a Golden Retriever. But it wasn’t going well. I couldn’t get started, if you know what I mean.’

‘All right, abandon the Golden Retriever. Concern yourself only with elephants.’

‘Can you find my address book for me, Miss Livingstone?’

‘It’s on your desk, Mrs Oliver. In the left-hand corner.’

‘I don’t mean that one,’ said Mrs Oliver. ‘That’s the one I’m using now. I mean my last one. The one I had last year, or perhaps the one before that again.’

‘Has it been thrown away, perhaps?’ suggested Miss Livingstone.

‘No, I don’t throw away address books and things like that because so often you want one. I mean some address that you haven’t copied into the new one. I expect it may be in one of the drawers of the tallboys.’

Miss Livingstone was a fairly new arrival, replacing Miss Sedgwick. Ariadne Oliver missed Miss Sedgwick. Sedgwick knew so many things. She knew the places where Mrs Oliver sometimes put things, the kind of places Mrs Oliver kept things in. She remembered the names of people Mrs Oliver had written nice letters to, and the names of people that Mrs Oliver, goaded beyond endurance, had written rather rude things to. She was invaluable, or rather, had been invaluable. ‘She was like – what was the book called?’ Mrs Oliver said, casting her mind back. ‘Oh yes, I know – a big brown book. All Victorians had it.
Enquire Within Upon Everything
. And you could too! How to take iron mark stains off linen, how to deal with curdled mayonnaise, how to start a chatty letter to a bishop. Many, many things. It was all there in
Enquire Within Upon Everything
.’ Great Aunt Alice’s great standby.

Miss Sedgwick had been just as good as Aunt Alice’s book. Miss Livingstone was not at all the same thing. Miss Livingstone stood there always, very long-faced with a sallow skin, looking purposefully efficient. Every line of her face said ‘I am very efficient.’ But she wasn’t really, Mrs Oliver thought. She only knew all the places where former literary employers of hers had kept things and where she clearly considered Mrs Oliver ought to keep them.

‘What I want,’ said Mrs Oliver, with firmness and the determination of a spoilt child, ‘is my 1970 address book. And I think 1969 as well. Please look for it as quick as you can, will you?’

‘Of course, of course,’ said Miss Livingstone.

She looked round her with the rather vacant expression of someone who is looking for something she has never heard of before but which efficiency may be able to produce by some unexpected turn of luck.

If I don’t get Sedgwick back, I shall go mad, thought Mrs Oliver to herself. I can’t deal with this thing if I don’t have Sedgwick.

Miss Livingstone started pulling open various drawers in the furniture in Mrs Oliver’s so-called study and writing-room.

‘Here is last year’s,’ said Miss Livingstone happily. ‘That will be much more up-to-date, won’t it? 1971.’

‘I don’t want 1971,’ said Mrs Oliver.

Vague thoughts and memories came to her.

‘Look in that tea-caddy table,’ she said.

Miss Livingstone looked round, looking worried.

‘That table,’ said Mrs Oliver, pointing.

‘A desk book wouldn’t be likely to be in a tea-caddy,’ said Miss Livingstone, pointing out to her employer the general facts of life.

‘Yes, it could,’ said Mrs Oliver. ‘I seem to remember.’

Edging Miss Livingstone aside, she went to the teacaddy table, raised the lid, looked at the attractive inlaid work inside. ‘And it
is
here,’ said Mrs Oliver, raising the lid of a papier-mâché round canister, devised to contain Lapsang Souchong as opposed to Indian tea, and taking out a curled-up small brown notebook.

‘Here it is,’ she said.

‘That’s only 1968, Mrs Oliver. Four years ago.’ ‘That’s about right,’ said Mrs Oliver, seizing it and taking it back to the desk. ‘That’s all for the present, Miss Livingstone, but you might see if you can find my birthday book somewhere.’

‘I didn’t know . . .’

‘I don’t use it now,’ said Mrs Oliver, ‘but I used to have one once. Quite a big one, you know. Started when I was a child. Goes on for years. I expect it’ll be in the attic upstairs. You know, the one we use as a spare room sometimes when it’s only boys coming for holidays, or people who don’t mind. The sort of chest or bureau thing next to the bed.’

‘Oh. Shall I look and see?’

‘That’s the idea,’ said Mrs Oliver.

She cheered up a little as Miss Livingstone went out of the room. Mrs Oliver shut the door firmly behind her, went back to the desk and started looking down the addresses written in faded ink and smelling of tea.

‘Ravenscroft. Celia Ravenscroft. Yes. 14 Fishacre Mews, S. W.3. That’s the Chelsea address. She was living there then. But there was another one after that. Somewhere like Strand-on-the-Green near Kew Bridge.’

She turned a few more pages. ‘Oh yes, this seems to be a later one. Mardyke Grove. That’s off Fulham Road, I think. Somewhere like that. Has she got a telephone number? It’s very rubbed out, but I think – yes, I think that’s right – Flaxman . . . Anyway, I’ll try it.’

She went across to the telephone. The door opened and Miss Livingstone looked in.

‘Do you think that perhaps –’

‘I found the address I want,’ said Mrs Oliver. ‘Go on looking for that birthday book. It’s important.’

‘Do you think you could have left it when you were in Sealy House?’

‘No, I don’t,’ said Mrs Oliver. ‘Go on looking.’ She murmured, as the door closed, ‘Be as long as you like about it.’

She dialled the telephone and waited, opening the door to call up the stairs: ‘You might try that Spanish chest. You know, the one that’s bound with brass. I’ve forgotten where it is now. Under the table in the hall, I think.’

Mrs Oliver’s first dialling was not successful. She appeared to have connected herself to a Mrs Smith Potter, who seemed both annoyed and unhelpful and had no idea what the present telephone number might be of anyone who had lived in that particular flat before.

Mrs Oliver applied herself to an examination of the address book once more. She discovered two more addresses which were hastily scrawled over other numbers and did not seem wildly helpful. However, at the third attempt a somewhat illegible Ravenscroft seemed to emerge from the crossings out and initials and addresses.

A voice admitted to knowing Celia. ‘Oh dear, yes. But she hasn’t lived here for
years
. I think she was in Newcastle when I last heard from her.’

‘Oh dear,’ said Mrs Oliver, ‘I’m afraid I haven’t got that address.’

‘No, I haven’t got it either,’ said the kindly girl. ‘I think she went to be secretary to a veterinary surgeon.’

It did not sound very hopeful. Mrs Oliver tried once or twice more. The addresses in the latest of her two address books were no use, so she went back a bit further. She struck oil, as you might put it, when she came to the last one, which was for the year 1967.

‘Oh, you mean Celia,’ said a voice. ‘Celia Ravenscroft, wasn’t it? Or was it Finchwell?’

Mrs Oliver just prevented herself in time from saying, ‘No, and it wasn’t redbreast either.’

‘A very competent girl,’ said the voice. ‘She worked for me for over a year and a half. Oh yes, very competent. I would have been quite happy if she had stayed longer. I think she went from here to somewhere in Harley Street, but I think I’ve got her address somewhere. Now let me see.’ There was a long pause while Mrs X – name unknown – was seeing. ‘I’ve got one address here. It seems to be in Islington somewhere. Do you think that’s possible?’

Mrs Oliver said that anything was possible and thanked Mrs X very much and wrote it down.

‘So difficult, isn’t it, trying to find people’s addresses. They do send them to you usually. You know, a sort of postcard or something of that kind. Personally I always seem to lose it.’

Mrs Oliver said that she herself also suffered in this respect. She tried the Islington number. A heavy, foreign voice replied to her.

‘You want, yes – you tell me what? Yes, who live here?’

‘Miss Celia Ravenscroft?’ ‘Oh yes, that is very true. Yes, yes she lives here. She has a room on the second floor. She is out now and she not come home.’

‘Will she be in later this evening?’

‘Oh, she be home very soon now, I think, because she come home to dress for party and go out.’

Mrs Oliver thanked her for the information and rang off.

‘Really,’ said Mrs Oliver to herself, with some annoyance, ‘girls!’

She tried to think how long it was since she had last seen her goddaughter, Celia. One lost touch. That was the whole point. Celia, she thought, was in London now. If her boyfriend was in London, or if the mother of her boyfriend was in London – all of it went together. Oh dear, thought Mrs Oliver, this really makes my head ache. ‘Yes, Miss Livingstone?’ she turned her head.

Miss Livingstone, looking rather unlike herself and decorated with a good many cobwebs and a general coating of dust, stood looking annoyed in the doorway holding a pile of dusty volumes.

‘I don’t know whether any of these things will be any use to you, Mrs Oliver. They seem to go back for a great many years.’ She was disapproving.

‘Bound to,’ said Mrs Oliver.

‘I don’t know if there’s anything particular you want me to search for.’

‘I don’t think so,’ said Mrs Oliver, ‘if you’ll just put them on the corner of the sofa there I can look at them this evening.’

Miss Livingstone, looking more disapproving every moment, said, ‘Very good, Mrs Oliver. I think I will just dust them first.’

‘That will be very kind of you,’ said Mrs Oliver, just stopping herself in time from saying – ‘and for goodness’ sake dust yourself as well. You’ve got six cobwebs in your left ear.’

She glanced at her watch and rang the Islington number again. The voice that answered this time was purely Anglo-Saxon and had a crisp sharpness about it that Mrs Oliver felt was rather satisfactory.

‘Miss Ravenscroft? – Celia Ravenscroft?’

‘Yes, this is Celia Ravenscroft.’

‘Well, I don’t expect you’ll remember me very well. I’m Mrs Oliver. Ariadne Oliver. We haven’t seen each other for a long time, but actually I’m your godmother.’

‘Oh yes, of course. I know that. No, we haven’t seen each other for a long time.’

‘I wonder very much if I could see you, if you could come and see me, or whatever you like. Would you like to come to a meal or . . .’

‘Well, it’s rather difficult at present, where I’m working. I could come round this evening, if you like. About half past seven or eight. I’ve got a date later but . . .’

‘If you do that I shall be very, very pleased,’ said Mrs Oliver.

‘Well, of course I will.’

‘I’ll give you the address.’ Mrs Oliver gave it.

‘Good. I’ll be there. Yes, I know where that is, quite well.’

Mrs Oliver made a brief note on the telephone pad, and looked with some annoyance at Miss Livingstone, who had just come into the room struggling under the weight of a large album.

‘I wondered if this could possibly be it, Mrs Oliver?’

‘No, it couldn’t,’ said Mrs Oliver. ‘That’s got cookery recipes in it.’

‘Oh dear,’ said Miss Livingstone, ‘so it has.’

‘Well, I might as well look at some of them anyway,’ said Mrs Oliver, removing the volume firmly. ‘Go and have another look. You know, I’ve thought about the linen cupboard. Next door to the bathroom. You’d have to look on the top shelf above the bath towels. I do sometimes stick papers and books in there. Wait a minute. I’ll come up and look myself.’

Ten minutes later Mrs Oliver was looking through the pages of a faded album. Miss Livingstone, having entered her final stage of martyrdom, was standing by the door. Unable to bear the sight of so much suffering, Mrs Oliver said,

‘Well, that’s all right. You might just take a look in the desk in the dining-room. The old desk. You know, the one that’s broken a bit. See if you can find some more address books. Early ones. Anything up to about ten years old will be worth while having a look at. And after that,’ said Mrs Oliver, ‘I don’t think I shall want anything more today.’

Miss Livingstone departed. ‘I wonder,’ said Mrs Oliver to herself, releasing a deep sigh as she sat down. She looked through the pages of the birthday book. ‘Who’s better pleased? She to go or I to see her go? After Celia has come and gone, I shall have to have a busy evening.’

Taking a new exercise book from the pile she kept on a small table by her desk, she entered various dates, possible addresses and names, looked up one or two more things in the telephone book and then proceeded to ring up Monsieur Hercule Poirot.

‘Ah, is that you, Monsieur Poirot?’

‘Yes, madame, it is I myself.’

‘Have you done anything?’ said Mrs Oliver.

‘I beg your pardon – have I done what?’

‘Anything,’ said Mrs Oliver. ‘What I asked you about yesterday.’

‘Yes, certainly. I have put things in motion. I have arranged to make certain enquiries.’

‘But you haven’t made them yet,’ said Mrs Oliver, who had a poor view of what the male view was of doing something.

‘And you,
chère madame
?’

‘I have been very busy,’ said Mrs Oliver.

‘Ah! And what have you been doing, madame?’

‘Assembling elephants,’ said Mrs Oliver, ‘if that means anything to you.’

‘I think I can understand what you mean, yes.’

‘It’s not very easy, looking into the past,’ said Mrs Oliver. ‘It is astonishing, really, how many people one does remember when one comes to look up names. My word, the silly things they write in birthday books sometimes, too. I can’t think why when I was about sixteen or seventeen or even thirty, I wanted people to write in my birthday book. There’s a sort of quotation from a poet for every particular day in the year. Some of them are terribly silly.’

‘You are encouraged in your search?’

‘Not quite encouraged,’ said Mrs Oliver. ‘But I still think I’m on the right lines. I’ve rung up my goddaughter –’

‘Ah. And you are going to see her?’

‘Yes, she is coming to see me. Tonight between seven and eight, if she doesn’t run out on me. One never knows. Young people are very unreliable.’

‘She appeared pleased that you had rung her up?’

‘I don’t know,’ said Mrs Oliver, ‘not particularly pleased. She’s got a very incisive voice and – I remember now, the last time I saw her, that must be about six years ago, I thought then that she was rather frightening.’