Peril at End House (19 page)

It was all so sudden that for a moment no one knew what had happened.

Then, with a violent exclamation, Poirot ran to the window. Challenger was with him.

A moment later they reappeared, carrying with them the limp body of a man. As they lowered him carefully into a big leather armchair and his face came into view, I uttered a cry.

‘
The face
—the face at the window…’

It was the man I had seen looking in on us the previous evening. I recognized him at once. I realized that when I had said he was hardly human I had exaggerated as Poirot had accused me of doing.

Yet there was something about his face that justified my impression. It was a lost face—the face of one removed from ordinary humanity.

White, weak, depraved—it seemed a mere mask—as
though the spirit within had fled long ago.

Down the side of it there trickled a stream of blood.

Frederica came slowly forward till she stood by the chair.

Poirot intercepted her.

‘You are hurt, Madame?’

She shook her head.

‘The bullet grazed my shoulder—that is all.’

She put him aside with a gentle hand and bent down.

The man’s eyes opened and he saw her looking down at him.

‘I’ve done for you this time, I hope,’ he said in a low vicious snarl, and then, his voice changing suddenly till it sounded like a child’s, ‘Oh! Freddie, I didn’t mean it. I didn’t mean it. You’ve always been so decent to me…’

‘It’s all right—’

She knelt down beside him.

‘I didn’t mean—’

His head dropped. The sentence was never finished.

Frederica looked up at Poirot.

‘Yes, Madame, he is dead,’ he said, gently.

She rose slowly from her knees and stood looking down at him. With one hand she touched his forehead—pitifully, it seemed. Then she sighed and turned to the rest of us.

‘He was my husband,’ she said, quietly.

‘J.,’ I murmured.

Poirot caught my remark, and nodded a quick assent.

‘Yes,’ he said softly. ‘Always I felt that there was a J. I said so from the beginning, did I not?’

‘He was my husband,’ said Frederica again. Her voice was terribly tired. She sank into a chair that Lazarus brought for her. ‘I might as well tell you everything—now.’

‘He was—completely debased. He was a drug fiend. He taught me to take drugs. I have been fighting the habit ever since I left him. I think—at last—I am nearly cured. But it has been difficult. Oh! so horribly difficult. Nobody knows how difficult!

‘I could never escape from him. He used to turn up and demand money—with threats. A kind of blackmail. If I did not give him money he would shoot himself. That was always his threat. Then he took to threatening to shoot
me
. He was not responsible. He was mad—crazy…’

‘I suppose it was he who shot Maggie Buckley. He didn’t mean to shoot her, of course. He must have thought it was me.

‘I ought to have said, I suppose. But, after all, I wasn’t
sure
. And those queer accidents Nick had—that made me feel that perhaps it wasn’t him after all. It might have been someone quite different.

‘And then—one day—I saw a bit of his handwriting on a torn piece of paper on M. Poirot’s table. It was part of a letter he had sent me. I knew then that M. Poirot was on the track.

‘Since then I have felt that it was only a matter of time…’

‘But I don’t understand about the sweets. He wouldn’t have wanted to poison
Nick
. And anyway, I don’t see how he
could
have had anything to do with that. I’ve puzzled and puzzled.’

She put both hands to her face, then took them away and said with a queer pathetic finality:

‘That’s all…’

Lazarus came quickly to her side.

‘My dear,’ he said. ‘My dear.’

Poirot went to the sideboard, poured out a glass of wine and brought it to her, standing over her while she drank it.

She handed the glass back to him and smiled.

‘I’m all right now,’ she said. ‘What—what had we better do next?’

She looked at Japp, but the Inspector shook his head. ‘I’m on a holiday, Mrs Rice. Just obliging an old friend—that’s all I’m doing. The St Loo police are in charge of the case.’

She looked at Poirot.

‘And M. Poirot is in charge of the St Loo Police?’

‘Oh!
quelle idée, Madame!
I am a mere humble adviser.’

‘M. Poirot,’ said Nick. ‘Can’t we hush it up?’

‘You wish that, Mademoiselle?’

‘Yes. After all—I’m the person most concerned. And there will be no more attacks on me—now.’

‘No, that is true. There will be no more attacks on you now.’

‘You’re thinking of Maggie. But, M. Poirot, nothing will bring Maggie back to life again! If you make all this public, you’ll only bring a terrible lot of suffering and publicity on Frederica—and she hasn’t deserved it.’

‘You say she has not deserved it?’

‘Of course she hasn’t! I told you right at the beginning that she had a brute of a husband. You’ve seen to-night—what he was. Well, he’s dead. Let that be the end of things. Let the police go on looking for the man who shot Maggie. They just won’t find him, that’s all.’

‘So that is what you say, Mademoiselle?
Hush it all up
.’

‘Yes. Please. Oh!
Please
. Please,
dear
M. Poirot.’

Poirot looked slowly round.

‘What do you all say?’

Each spoke in turn.

‘I agree,’ I said, as Poirot looked at me.

‘I, too,’ said Lazarus.

‘Best thing to do,’ from Challenger.

‘Let’s forget everything that’s passed in this room tonight.’ This very determinedly from Croft.

‘You
would
say that!’ interpolated Japp.

‘Don’t be hard on me, dearie,’ his wife sniffed to Nick, who looked at her scornfully but made no reply.

‘Ellen?’

‘Me and William won’t say a word, sir. Least said, soonest mended.’

‘And you, M. Vyse?’

‘A thing like this can’t be hushed up,’ said Charles Vyse. ‘The facts must be made known in the proper quarter.’

‘Charles!’ cried Nick.

‘I’m sorry, dear. I look at it from the legal aspect.’

Poirot gave a sudden laugh.

‘So you are seven to one. The good Japp is neutral.’

‘I’m on holiday,’ said Japp, with a grin. ‘I don’t count.’

‘Seven to one. Only M. Vyse holds out—on the side of law and order! You know, M. Vyse, you are a man of character!’

Vyse shrugged his shoulders.

‘The position is quite clear. There is only one thing to do.’

‘Yes—you are an honest man.
Eh bien
—I, too, range myself on the side of the minority.
I, too, am for the truth
.’

‘M. Poirot!’ cried Nick.

‘Mademoiselle—you dragged me into the case. I came into it at your wish. You cannot silence me now.’

He raised a threatening forefinger in a gesture that I knew well.

‘Sit down—all of you, and I will tell you—the truth.’

Silenced by his imperious attitude, we sat down meekly and turned attentive faces towards him.

‘
Ecoutez!
I have a list here—a list of persons connected with the crime. I numbered them with the letters of the alphabet including the letter J. J. stood for a person unknown—linked to the crime by one of the others. I did not know who J. was until tonight,
but I knew that there was such a person
. The events of tonight have proved that I was right.

‘But yesterday, I suddenly realized that I had made a grave error. I had made an omission. I added another letter to my list. The letter K.’

‘Another person unknown?’ asked Vyse, with a slight sneer.

‘Not exactly. I adopted J. as the symbol for a person unknown. Another person unknown would be merely another J. K. has a different significance.
It stands for a person who should have been included in the original list, but who was overlooked
.’

He bent over Frederica.

‘Reassure yourself, Madame.
Your husband was not guilty of murder
. Itwas the person K. who shot Mademoiselle Maggie.’

She stared.

‘But who is K.?’

Poirot nodded to Japp. He stepped forward and spoke in tones reminiscent of the days when he had given evidence in police courts.

‘Acting on information received, I took up a position here early in the evening, having been introduced secretly into the house by M. Poirot. I was concealed behind the curtains in the drawing-room. When everyone was assembled in this room, a young lady entered the drawing-room and switched on the light. She made her way to the fireplace and opened a small recess in the panelling that appeared to be operated with a spring. She took from the recess a pistol. With this in her hand she left the room. I followed her and opening the door a crack I was able to observe her further movements. Coats and wraps had been left in the hall by the visitors on arrival. The young lady carefully wiped the pistol with a handkerchief and then placed it in the pocket of a grey wrap, the property of Mrs Rice—’

A cry burst from Nick.

‘This is untrue—every word of it!’

Poirot pointed a hand at her.

‘
Voilà!
’he said. ‘
The person K.! It was Mademoiselle Nick who shot her cousin, Maggie Buckley
.’

‘Are you mad?’ cried Nick. ‘Why should I kill Maggie?’

‘In order to inherit the money left to her by Michael Seton! Her name too was Magdala Buckley—and it was to her he was engaged—not you.’

‘You—you—’

She stood there trembling—unable to speak. Poirot turned to Japp.

‘You telephoned to the police?’

‘Yes, they are waiting in the hall now. They’ve got the warrant.’

‘You’re all mad!’ cried Nick, contemptuously. She moved swiftly to Frederica’s side. ‘Freddie, give me your wrist-watch as—as a souvenir, will you?’

Slowly Frederica unclasped the jewelled watch from her wrist and handed it to Nick.

‘Thanks. And now—I suppose we must go through with this perfectly ridiculous comedy.’

‘The comedy you planned and produced in End House. Yes—but you should not have given the star part to Hercule Poirot. That, Mademoiselle, was your mistake—your very grave mistake.’

‘You want me to explain?’

Poirot looked round with a gratified smile and the air of mock humility I knew so well.

We had moved into the drawing-room and our numbers had lessened. The domestics had withdrawn tactfully, and the Crofts had been asked to accompany the police. Frederica, Lazarus, Challenger, Vyse and I remained.

‘Eh bien
—I confess it—I was fooled—fooled completely and absolutely. The little Nick, she had me where she wanted me, as your idiom so well expresses it. Ah! Madame, when you said that your friend was a clever little liar—how right you were! How right!’

‘Nick always told lies,’ said Frederica, composedly. ‘That’s why I didn’t really believe in these marvellous escapes of hers.’

‘And I—imbecile that I was—did!’

‘Didn’t they really happen?’ I asked. I was, I admit, still hopelessly confused.

‘They were invented—very cleverly—to give just the impression they did.’

‘What was that?’

‘They gave the impression that Mademoiselle Nick’s life was in danger. But I will begin earlier than that. I will tell you the story as I have pieced it out—not as it came to me imperfectly and in flashes.

‘At the beginning of the business then, we have this girl, this Nick Buckley, young and beautiful, unscrupulous, and passionately and fanatically devoted to her home.’

Charles Vyse nodded.

‘I told you that.’

‘And you were right. Mademoiselle Nick loved End House. But she had no money. The house was mortgaged. She wanted money—she wanted it feverishly—and she could not get it. She meets this young Seton at Le Touquet, he is attracted by her. She knows that in all probability he is his uncle’s heir and that that uncle is worth millions. Good, her star is in the ascendant, she thinks. But he is not really seriously attracted. He thinks her good fun, that is all. They meet at Scarborough, he takes her up in his machine and then—the catastrophe occurs. He meets Maggie and falls in love with her at first sight.

‘Mademoiselle Nick is dumbfounded. Her cousin
Maggie whom she has never considered pretty! But to young Seton she is “different”. The one girl in the world for him. They become secretly engaged. Only one person knows—has to know. That person is Mademoiselle Nick. The poor Maggie—she is glad that there is one person she can talk to. Doubtless she reads to her cousin parts of her fiancé’s letters. So it is that Mademoiselle gets to hear of the will. She pays no attention to it at the time. But it remains in her mind.

‘Then comes the sudden and unexpected death of Sir Matthew Seton, and hard upon that the rumours of Michael Seton’s being missing. And straightaway an outrageous plan comes into our young lady’s head. Seton does not know that her name is Magdala also. He only knows her as Nick. His will is clearly quite informal—a mere mention of a name. But in the eyes of the world Seton is her friend! It is with
her
that his name has been coupled. If she were to claim to be engaged to him, no one would be surprised.
But to do that successfully Maggie must be out of the way
.

‘Time is short. She arranges for Maggie to come and stay in a few days’ time. Then she has her escapes from death. The picture whose cord she cuts through. The brake of the car that she tampers with. The boulder—that perhaps was natural and she merely invented the story of being underneath on the path.

‘And then—she sees
my
name in the paper. (I told
you, Hastings, everyone knew Hercule Poirot!) and she has the audacity to make
me
an accomplice! The bullet through the hat that falls at my feet. Oh! the pretty comedy. And I am taken in! I believe in the peril that menaces her!
Bon!
She has got a valuable witness on her side. I play into her hands by asking her to send for a friend.

‘She seizes the chance and sends for Maggie to come a day earlier.

‘How easy the crime is actually! She leaves us at the dinner table and after hearing on the wireless that Seton’s death is a fact, she starts to put her plan into action. She has plenty of time, then, to take Seton’s letters to Maggie—look through them and select the few that will answer her purpose. These she places in her own room. Then, later, she and Maggie leave the fireworks and go back to the house. She tells her cousin to put on her shawl. Then stealing out after her, she shoots her. Quick, into the house, the pistol concealed in the secret panel (of whose existence she thinks nobody knows). Then upstairs. There she waits till voices are heard. The body is discovered. It is her cue.

‘Down she rushes and out through the window.

‘How well she played her part! Magnificently! Oh, yes, she staged a fine drama here. The maid, Ellen, said this was an evil house. I am inclined to agree with her. It was from the house that Mademoiselle Nick took her inspiration.’

‘But those poisoned sweets,’ said Frederica. ‘I still don’t understand about that.’

‘It was all part of the same scheme. Do you not see that if Nick’s life was attempted
after
Maggie was dead that absolutely settled the question that Maggie’s death had been a mistake.

‘When she thought the time was ripe she rang up Madame Rice and asked her to get her a box of chocolates.’

‘Then it
was
her voice?’

‘But, yes! How often the simple explanation is the true one!
N’est ce pas?
She made her voice sound a little different—that was all. So that you might be in doubt when questioned. Then, when the box arrived—again how simple. She fills three of the chocolates with cocaine (she had cocaine with her, cleverly concealed), eats one of them and is ill—but not
too
ill. She knows very well how much cocaine to take and just what symptoms to exaggerate.

‘And the card—
my
card!
Ah! Sapristi
—she has a nerve! It
was
my card—the one I sent with the flowers. Simple, was it not? Yes, but it had to be thought of…’

There was a pause and then Frederica asked:

‘Why did she put the pistol in my coat?’

‘I thought you would ask me that, Madame. It was bound to occur to you in time. Tell me—had it ever entered your head that Mademoiselle Nick no
longer liked you? Did you ever feel that she might—hate you?’

‘It’s difficult to say,’ said Frederica, slowly. ‘We lived an insincere life. She
used
to be fond of me.’

‘Tell me, M. Lazarus—it is not a time for false modesty, you understand—was there ever anything between you and her?’

‘No.’ Lazarus shook his head. ‘I was attracted to her at one time. And then—I don’t know why—I went off her.’

‘Ah!’ said Poirot, nodding his head sagely. ‘That was her tragedy. She attracted people—and then they “went off her”. Instead of liking her better and better you fell in love with her friend. She began to hate Madame—Madame who had a rich friend behind her. Last winter when she made a will, she was fond of Madame. Later it was different.

‘She remembered that will. She did not know that Croft had suppressed it—that it had never reached its destination. Madame (or so the world would say) had got a motive for desiring her death. So it was to Madame she telephoned asking her to get the chocolates. Tonight, the will would have been read, naming Madame her residuary legatee—and then the pistol would be found in her coat—
the pistol with which Maggie Buckley was shot
. If Madame found it, she might incriminate herself by trying to get rid of it.’

‘She must have hated me,’ murmured Frederica.

‘Yes, Madame. You had what she had not—the knack of winning love, and
keeping
it.’

‘I’m rather dense,’ said Challenger, ‘but I haven’t quite fathomed the will business yet.’

‘No? That’s a different business altogether—a very simple one. The Crofts are lying low down here. Madmoiselle Nick has to have an operation. She has made no will. The Crofts see a chance. They persuade her to make one and take charge of it for the post. Then, if anything happens to her—if she dies—they produce a cleverly forged will—leaving the money to Mrs Croft with a reference to Australia and Philip Buckley whom they know once visited the country.

‘But Mademoiselle Nick has her appendix removed quite satisfactorily so the forged will is no good. For the moment, that is. Then the attempts on her life begin. The Crofts are hopeful once more. Finally, I announce her death. The chance is too good to be missed. The forged will is immediately posted to M. Vyse. Of course, to begin with, they naturally thought her much richer than she is. They knew nothing about the mortgage.’

‘What I really want to know, M. Poirot,’ said Lazarus, ‘is how you actually got wise to all this. When did you begin to suspect?’

‘Ah! there I am ashamed. I was so long—so long.
There were things that worried me—yes. Things that seemed not quite right. Discrepancies between what Mademoiselle Nick told me and what other people told me. Unfortunately, I always believed Mademoiselle Nick.

‘And then, suddenly, I got a revelation. Mademoiselle Nick made one mistake. She was too clever. When I urged her to send for a friend she promised to do so—and suppressed the fact that she had already sent for Mademoiselle Maggie. It seemed to her less suspicious—
but it was a mistake
.’

‘For Maggie Buckley wrote a letter home immediately on arrival, and in it she used one innocent phrase that puzzled me: “
I don’t see why Nick should have telegraphed for me the way she did. Tuesday would have done just as well.
” What did that mention of Tuesday mean?
It could only mean one thing
. Maggie had been coming to stay on Tuesday anyway. But in that case Mademoiselle Nick had lied—or had at any rate suppressed the truth.

‘And for the first time I looked at her in a different light. I criticized her statements. Instead of believing them, I said, “Suppose this were not true.” I remembered the discrepancies. “How would it be if every time it was Mademoiselle Nick who was lying and not the other person?”

‘I said to myself: “Let us be simple. What has
really
happened?”

‘And I saw that what had really happened was that
Maggie Buckley
had been killed. Just that! But who could want Maggie Buckley dead?

‘And then I thought of something else—a few foolish remarks that Hastings had made not five minutes before. He had said that there were plenty of abbreviations for Margaret—Maggie, Margot, etc. And it suddenly occurred to me to wonder what was Mademoiselle Maggie’s real name?

‘Then,
tout d’un coup
, it came to me! Supposing her name was
Magdala
! It was a Buckley name, Mademoiselle Nick had told me so. Two Magadala Buckleys. Supposing…

‘In my mind I ran over the letters of Michael Seton’s that I had read. Yes—there was nothing impossible. There was a mention of Scarborough—but Maggie had been in Scarborough with Nick—her mother had told me so.

‘And it explained one thing which had worried me. Why were there so
few
letters? If a girl keeps her love letters at all, she keeps
all
of them. Why these select few? Was there any peculiarity about them?

‘And I remembered that there was no
name
mentioned in them. They all began differently—but they began with a term of endearment. Nowhere in them was there the name—
Nick
.

‘And there was something else, something that I
ought to have seen at once—that cried the truth aloud.’

‘What was that?’

‘Why—this. Mademoiselle Nick underwent an operation for appendicitis on February 27th last. There is a letter of Michael Seton’s dated March 2nd, and no mention of anxiety, of illness or anything unusal. That ought to have shown me that the letters were written to a
different person altogether
.

‘Then I went through a list of questions that I had made. And I answered them in the light of my new idea.

‘In all but a few isolated questions the result was simple and convincing. And I answered, too, another question which I had asked myself earlier.
Why did Mademoiselle Nick buy a black dress?
The answer was that she and her cousin had to be dressed alike, with the scarlet shawl as an additional touch. That was the true and convincing answer,
not
the other. A girl would not buy mourning before she knew her lover was dead. She would be unreal—unnatural.

‘And so I, in turn, staged my little drama. And the thing I hoped for happened! Nick Buckley had been very vehement about the question of a secret panel. She had declared there was no such thing. But if there were—and I did not see why Ellen should have invented it—
Nick must know of it
. Why was she so vehement?
Was it possible that she had hidden the pistol there? With the secret intention of using it to throw suspicion on somebody later?

‘I let her see that appearances were very black against Madame. That was as she had planned. As I foresaw, she was unable to resist the crowning proof. Besides it was safer for herself. That secret panel might be found by Ellen and the pistol in it!

‘We are all safely in here. She is waiting outside for her cue. It is absolutely safe, she thinks, to take the pistol from its hiding place and put it in Madame’s coat…

‘And so—at the last—she failed…’

Frederica shivered.

‘All the same,’ she said. ‘I’m glad I gave her my watch.’

‘Yes, Madame.’

She looked up at him quickly.

‘You know about that too?’

‘What about Ellen?’ I asked, breaking in. ‘Did she know or suspect anything?’

‘No. I asked her. She told me that she decided to stay in the house that night because in her own phrase she “thought something was up”. Apparently Nick urged her to see the fireworks rather too decisively. She had fathomed Nick’s dislike of Madame. She told me that “she felt in her bones something was going to happen”, but she thought it was going to happen to Madame.
She knew Miss Nick’s temper, she said, and she was always a queer little girl.’

‘Yes,’ murmured Frederica. ‘Yes, let us think of her like that. A queer little girl. A queer little girl who couldn’t help herself…I shall—anyway.’