Elephants Can Remember (5 page)

‘Not if you don’t want me to know,’ said Mrs Oliver.

‘But I expect you are interested. After all, you write crime stories about people who kill themselves or kill each other, or who have reasons for things. I should think you would be interested.’

‘Yes, I’ll admit that,’ said Mrs Oliver. ‘But the last thing I want to do is to offend you by seeking for information which is no business of mine to know.’

‘Well, I wondered,’ said Celia. ‘I’ve often wondered from time to time why, and how, but I knew very little about things. I mean, about how things were going on at home. The holidays before that I had been away on exchange on the Continent, so I hadn’t seen my mother and father really very recently. I mean, they’d come out to Switzerland and taken me out from school once or twice, but that was all. They seemed much as usual, but they seemed older. My father, I think, was ailing. I mean, getting feebler. I don’t know if it was heart or what it was. One doesn’t really think about that. My mother, too, she was going rather nervy. Not hypochondriac but a little inclined to fuss over her health. They were on good terms, quite friendly. There wasn’t anything that I noticed. Only sometimes one would, well, sometimes one gets ideas. One doesn’t think they’re true or necessarily right at all, but one just wonders if –’

‘I don’t think we’d better talk about it any more,’ said Mrs Oliver. ‘We don’t need to know or find out. The whole thing’s over and done with. The verdict was quite satisfactory. No means to show, or motive, or anything like that. But there was no question of your father having deliberately killed your mother, or of your mother having deliberately killed your father.’

‘If I thought which was most likely,’ said Celia, ‘I would think my father killed my mother. Because, you see, it’s more natural for a man to shoot anyone, I think. To shoot a woman for whatever reason it was. I don’t think a woman, or a woman like my mother, would be so likely to shoot my father. If she wanted him dead, I should think she might have chosen some other method. But I don’t think either of them wanted the other one dead.’

‘So it could have been an outsider.’

‘Yes, but what does one mean by an outsider?’ said Celia.

‘Who else was there living in the house?’

‘A housekeeper, elderly, rather blind and rather deaf, a foreign girl, an au pair girl, she’d been my governess once – she was awfully nice – she came back to look after my mother who had been in hospital – And there was an aunt whom I never loved much. I don’t think any of them could have been likely to have any grudge against my parents. There was nobody who profited by their deaths, except, I suppose, myself and my brother Edward, who was four years younger than I was. We inherited what money there was but it wasn’t very much. My father had his pension, of course. My mother had a small income of her own. No. There was nothing there of any importance.’

‘I’m sorry,’ said Mrs Oliver. ‘I’m sorry if I’ve distressed you by asking all this.’

‘You haven’t distressed me. You’ve brought it up in my mind a little and it has interested me. Because, you see, I am of an age now that I wish I did know. I knew and was fond of them, as one is fond of parents. Not passionately, just normally, but I realize I don’t know what they were really
like
. What their life was like. What
mattered
to them. I don’t know anything about it at all. I wish I did know. It’s like a burr, something sticking into you, and you can’t leave it alone. Yes. I would like to know. Because then, you see, I shouldn’t have to think about it any more.’

‘So you do? Think about it?’

Celia looked at her for a moment. She seemed to be trying to come to a decision.

‘Yes,’ she said, ‘I think about it nearly all the time. I’m getting to have a thing about it, if you know what I mean. And Desmond feels the same.’

Hercule Poirot let the revolving door wind him round. Arresting the swing of it with one hand, he stepped forward into the small restaurant. There were not many people there. It was an unfashionable time of day, but his eyes soon saw the man he had come to meet. The square, solid bulk of Superintendent Spence rose from the table in one corner.

‘Good,’ he said. ‘You have arrived here. You had no difficulty in finding it?’

‘None at all. Your instructions were most adequate.’

‘Let me introduce you now. This is Chief Superintendent Garroway. Monsieur Hercule Poirot.’

Garroway was a tall, thin man with a lean, ascetic face, grey hair which left a small round spot like a tonsure, so that he had a faint resemblance to an ecclesiastic.

‘This is wonderful,’ said Poirot.

‘I am retired now, of course,’ said Garroway, ‘but one remembers. Yes, certain things one remembers, although they are past and gone, and the general public probably remembers nothing about them. But yes.’

Hercule Poirot very nearly said ‘Elephants do remember,’ but checked himself in time. That phrase was so associated in his mind now with Mrs Ariadne Oliver that he found it difficult to restrain it from his tongue in many clearly unsuitable categories.

‘I hope you have not been getting impatient,’ said Superintendent Spence.

He pulled forward a chair, and the three men sat down. A menu was brought. Superintendent Spence, who was clearly addicted to this particular restaurant, offered tentative words of advice. Garroway and Poirot made their choice. Then, leaning back a little in their chairs and sipping glasses of sherry, they contemplated each other for some minutes in silence before speaking.

‘I must apologize to you,’ said Poirot, ‘I really must apologize to you for coming to you with my demands about an affair which is over and done with.’

‘What interests me,’ said Spence, ‘is what has interested you. I thought first that it was unlike you to have this wish to delve in the past. It is connected with something that has occurred nowadays, or is it sudden curiosity about a rather inexplicable, perhaps, case? Do you agree with that?’

He looked across the table. ‘Inspector Garroway,’ he said, ‘as he was at that time, was the officer in charge of the investigations into the Ravenscroft shooting. He was an old friend of mine and so I had no difficulty in getting in touch with him.’

‘And he was kind enough to come here today,’ said Poirot, ‘simply because I must admit to a curiosity which I am sure I have no right to feel about an affair that is past and done with.’

‘Well, I wouldn’t say that,’ said Garroway. ‘We all have interests in certain cases that are past. Did Lizzie Borden really kill her father and mother with an axe? There are people who still do not think so. Who killed Charles Bravo and why? There are several different ideas, mostly not very well founded. But still people try to find alternative explanations.’

His keen, shrewd eyes looked across at Poirot.

‘And Monsieur Poirot, if I am not mistaken, has occasionally shown a leaning towards looking into cases, going back, shall we say, for murder, back into the past, twice, perhaps three times.’

‘Three times, certainly,’ said Superintendent Spence.

‘Once, I think I am right, by request of a Canadian girl.’

‘That is so,’ said Poirot. ‘A Canadian girl, very vehement, very passionate, very forceful, who had come here to investigate a murder for which her mother had been condemned to death, although she died before sentence was carried out. Her daughter was convinced that her mother had been innocent.’

‘And you agreed?’ said Garroway.

‘I did not agree,’ said Poirot, ‘when she first told me of the matter. But she was very vehement and very sure.’

‘It was natural for a daughter to wish her mother to have been innocent and to try and prove against all appearances that she was innocent,’ said Spence.

‘It was just a little more than that,’ said Poirot. ‘She convinced me of the type of woman her mother was.’

‘A woman incapable of murder?’

‘No,’ said Poirot, ‘it would be very difficult, and I am sure both of you agree with me, to think there is anyone quite incapable of murder if one knows what kind of person they are, what led up to it. But in that particular case, the mother never protested her innocence. She appeared to be quite content to be sentenced. That was curious to begin with. Was she a defeatist? It did not seem so. When I began to enquire, it became clear that she was not a defeatist. She was, one would say, almost the opposite of it.’

Garroway looked interested. He leaned across thetable, twisting a bit of bread off the roll on his plate.

‘And was she innocent?’

‘Yes,’ said Poirot. ‘She was innocent.’

‘And that surprised you?’

‘Not by the time I realized it,’ said Poirot. ‘There were one or two things – one thing in particular – that showed she
could not
have been guilty. One fact that nobody had appreciated at the time. Knowing that one had only to look at what there was, shall we say, on the menu in the way of looking elsewhere.’
¹

Grilled trout was put in front of them at this point.

‘There was another case, too, where you looked into the past, not quite in the same way,’ continued Spence. ‘A girl who said at a party that she had once seen a murder committed.’
²

‘There again one had to – how shall I put it? – step backwards instead of forward,’ said Poirot. ‘Yes, that is very true.’

‘And had the girl seen the murder committed?’

‘No,’ said Poirot, ‘because it was the wrong girl. This trout is delicious,’ he added, with appreciation.

‘They do all fish dishes very well here,’ said Superintendent Spence.

He helped himself from the sauce boat proffered to him.

‘A most delicious sauce,’ he added.

Silent appreciation of food filled the next three minutes.

‘When Spence came along to me,’ said Superintendent Garroway, ‘asking if I remembered anything about the Ravenscroft case, I was intrigued and delighted at once.’

‘You haven’t forgotten all about it?’

‘Not the Ravenscroft case. It wasn’t an easy case to forget about.’

‘You agree,’ said Poirot, ‘that there were discrepancies about it? Lack of proof, alternative solutions?’

‘No,’ said Garroway, ‘nothing of that kind. All the evidence recorded the visible facts. Deaths of which there were several former examples, yes, all plain sailing. And yet –’

‘Well?’ said Poirot.

‘And yet it was all wrong,’ said Garroway. ‘Ah,’ said Spence. He looked interested. ‘That’s what you felt once, isn’t it?’ said Poirot, turning to him.

‘In the case of Mrs McGinty. Yes.’
³

‘You weren’t satisfied,’ said Poirot, ‘when that extremely difficult young man was arrested. He had every reason for doing it, he looked as though he had done it, everyone thought he had done it. But you knew he hadn’t done it. You were so sure of it that you came to me and told me to go along to seewhat I could find out.’

‘See if you could help – and you did help, didn’tyou?’ said Spence.

Poirot sighed.

‘Fortunately, yes. But what a tiresome young man he was. If ever a young man deserved to be hanged, not because he had done a murder but because he wouldn’t help anyone to prove that he hadn’t. Now we have the Ravenscroft case. You say, Superintendent Garroway, something was wrong?’

‘Yes, I felt quite sure of it if you understand what I mean.’

‘I do understand,’ said Poirot. ‘And so does Spence. One does come across these things sometimes. The proofs are there, the motive, the opportunity, the clues, the
mise-en-scène
, it’s all there. A complete blueprint, as you might say. But all the same, those whose profession it is,
know
. They know that it’s all wrong, just like a critic in the artistic world knows when a picture is all wrong. Knows when it’s a fake and not the real thing.’

‘There wasn’t anything I could do about it, either,’ said Superintendent Garroway. ‘I looked into it, around it, up above it and down below it, as you might say. I talked to the people. There was nothing there. It looked like a suicide pact, it had all the marks of the suicide pact. Alternatively, of course, it could be a husband who shot a wife and then himself, or a wife who shot her husband and then herself. All those three things happen. When one comes across them, one knows they have happened. But in most cases one has some idea of
why
.’

‘There wasn’t any real idea of
why
in this case, was that it?’ said Poirot.

‘Yes. That’s it. You see, the moment you begin to enquire into a case, to enquire about people and things, you get a very good picture as a rule of what their lives have been like. This was a couple, ageing, the husband with a good record, a wife affectionate, pleasant, on good terms together. That’s a thing one soon finds out about. They were happy living together. They went for walks, they played picquet, and poker patience with each other in the evenings, they had children who caused them no particular anxiety. A boy in school in England and a girl in a
pensionnat
in Switzerland. There was nothing wrong with their lives as far as one could tell. From such medical evidence as one could obtain, there was nothing definitely wrong with their health. The husband had suffered from high blood pressure at one time, but was in good condition by the taking of suitable medicaments which kept him on an even keel. His wife was slightly deaf and had had a little minor heart trouble, nothing to be worried about. Of course it could be, as does happen sometimes, that one or other of them had fears for their health. There are a lot of people who are in good health but are quite convinced they have cancer, are quite sure that they won’t live another year. Sometimes that leads to their taking their own life. The Ravenscrofts didn’t seem that kind of person. They seemed well balanced and placid.’

‘So what did you really think?’ said Poirot. ‘The trouble is that I couldn’t think. Looking back, I said to myself it was suicide. It could only have been suicide. For some reason or other they decided that life was unbearable to them. Not through financial trouble, not through health difficulties, not because of unhappiness. And there, you see, I came to a full stop. It had all the marks of suicide. I cannot see any other thing that could have happened except suicide. They went for a walk. In that walk they took a revolver with them. The revolver lay between the two bodies. There were blurred fingerprints of both of them. Both of them in fact had handled it, but there was nothing to show who had fired it last. One tends to think the husband perhaps shot his wife and then himself. That is only because it seems more likely. Well, why? A great many years have passed. When something reminds me now and again, something I read in the papers of bodies, a husband’s and wife’s bodies somewhere, lying dead, having taken their own lives apparently, I think back and then I wonder again what happened in the Ravenscroft case. Twelve years ago or fourteen and I still remember the Ravenscroft case and wonder – well, just the one word, I think. Why – why – why? Did the wife really hate her husband and want to get rid of him? Did they go on hating each other until they could bear it no longer?’

Garroway broke off another piece of bread and chewed at it.

‘You got some idea, Monsieur Poirot? Has somebody come to you and told you something that has awakened your interest particularly? Do you know something that might explain the “Why”?’

‘No. All the same,’ said Poirot, ‘you must have had a theory. Come now, you had a theory?’

‘You’re quite right, of course. One does have theories. One expects them all, or one of them at least, to work out, but they don’t usually. I think that my theory was in the end that you couldn’t look for the cause, because one didn’t know enough. What
did
I know about them? General Ravenscroft was close on sixty, his wife was thirty-five. All I knew of them, strictly speaking, was the last five or six years of their lives. The General had retired on a pension. They had come back to England from abroad and all the evidence that came to me, all the knowledge, was of a brief period during which they had first a house at Bournemouth and then moved to where they lived in the home where the tragedy took place. They had lived there peacefully, happily, their children came home there for school holidays. It was a peaceful period, I should say, at the end of what one presumed was a peaceful life. I knew of their life after retirement in England, of their family. There was no financial motive, no motive of hatred, no motive of sexual involvement, of intrusive love-affairs. No. But there
was
a period before that. What did I know about that? What I knew was a life spent mostly abroad with occasional visits home, a good record for the man, pleasant remembrances of her from friends of the wife’s. There was no outstanding tragedy, dispute, nothing that one knew of. But then I mightn’t have known. One doesn’t know. There was a period of, say, twenty-thirty years, years from childhood to the time they married, the time they lived abroad in Malaya and other places. Perhaps the root of the tragedy was there. There is a proverb my grandmother used to repeat:
Old sins have long shadows
. Was the cause of death some long shadow, a shadow from the past? That’s not an easy thing to find out about. You find out about a man’s record, what friends or acquaintances say, but you don’t know any inner details. Well, I think little by little the theory grew up in my mind that that would have been the place to look, if I could have looked. Something that had happened then, in another country, perhaps. Something that had been thought to be forgotten, to have passed out of existence, but which still perhaps existed. A grudge from the past, some happening that nobody knew about, that had happened elsewhere, not in their life in England, but which may have been there. If one had known where to look for it.’

‘Not the sort of thing, you mean,’ said Poirot, ‘that anybody would remember. I mean, remember nowadays. Something that no friends of theirs in England, perhaps, would have known about.’

‘Their friends in England seem to have been mostly made since retirement, though I suppose old friends did come and visit them or see them occasionally. But one doesn’t hear about things that happened in the past. People forget.’