Third Girl

He nodded his head and listened whilst Poirot went into details of exactly what he wanted done. When he had finished with Mr Goby, Poirot rang up Scotland Yard where in due course he got through to a friend of his. When he in turn had listened to Poirot’s requirements, he replied,

‘Don’t want much, do you? Any murder, anywhere. Time, place and victim unknown. Sounds a bit of a wild goose chase, if you ask me, old boy.’ He added disapprovingly, ‘You don’t seem really to know anything!’

At 4.15 that afternoon Poirot sat in Mrs Oliver’s drawing-room sipping appreciatively at a large cup of chocolate topped with foaming whipped cream which his hostess had just placed on a small table beside him. She added a small plate full of langue de chats biscuits.

‘Chère Madame, what kindness.’ He looked over his cup with faint surprise at Mrs Oliver’s coiffure and also at her new wallpaper. Both were new to him. The last time he had seen Mrs Oliver, her hair style had been plain and severe. It now displayed a richness of coils and twists arranged in intricate patterns all over her head. Its prolific luxury was, he suspected, largely artificial. He debated in his mind how many switches of hair might unexpectedly fall off if Mrs Oliver was to get suddenly excited, as was her wont. As for the wallpaper…

‘These cherries—they are new?’ he waved a teaspoon. It was, he felt, rather like being in a cherry orchard.

‘Are there too many of them, do you think?’ said Mrs Oliver. ‘So hard to tell beforehand with wallpaper. Do you think my old one was better?’

Poirot cast his mind back dimly to what he seemed to remember as large quantities of bright coloured tropical birds in a forest. He felt inclined to remark ‘Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose,’ but restrained himself.

‘And now,’ said Mrs Oliver, as her guest finally replaced his cup on its saucer and sat back with a sigh of satisfaction, wiping remnants of foaming cream from his moustache, ‘what is all this about?’

‘That I can tell you very simply. This morning a girl came to see me. I suggested she might make an appointment. One has one’s routine, you comprehend. She sent back word that she wanted to see me at once because she thought she might have committed a murder.’

‘What an odd thing to say. Didn’t she know?’

‘Precisely! C’est inouï! so I instructed George to show her in. She stood there! She refused to sit down. She just stood there staring at me. She seemed quite half-witted. I tried to encourage her. Then suddenly she said that she’d changed her mind. She said she didn’t want to be rude but that—(what do you think?)—but that I was too old…’

Mrs Oliver hastened to utter soothing words. ‘Oh well, girls are like that. Anyone over thirty-five they think is half dead. They’ve no sense, girls, you must realise that.’

‘It wounded me,’ said Hercule Poirot.

‘Well, I shouldn’t worry about it, if I were you. Of course it was a very rude thing to say.’

‘That does not matter. And it is not only my feelings. I am worried. Yes, I am worried.’

‘Well, I should forget all about it if I were you,’ advised Mrs Oliver comfortably.

‘You do not understand. I am worried about this girl. She came to me for help. Then she decided that I was too old. Too old to be of any use to her. She was wrong of course, that goes without saying, and then she just ran away. But I tell you that girl needs help.’

‘I don’t suppose she does really,’ said Mrs Oliver soothingly. ‘Girls make a fuss about things.’

‘No. You are wrong. She needs help.’

‘You don’t think she really has committed a murder?’

‘Why not? She said she had.’

‘Yes, but—’ Mrs Oliver stopped. ‘She said she might have,’ she said slowly. ‘But what can she possibly mean by that?’

‘Exactly. It does not make sense.’

‘Who did she murder or did she think she murdered?’

Poirot shrugged his shoulders.

‘And why did she murder someone?’

Again Poirot shrugged his shoulders.

‘Of course it could be all sorts of things.’ Mrs Oliver began to brighten as she set her ever prolific imagination to work. ‘She could have run over someone in her car and not stopped. She could have been assaulted by a man on a cliff and struggled with him and managed to push him over. She could have given someone the wrong medicine by mistake. She could have gone to one of those purple pill parties and had a fight with someone. She could have come to and found she had stabbed someone. She—’

‘Assez, madame, assez!’

But Mrs Oliver was well away.

‘She might have been a nurse in the operating theatre and administered the wrong anaesthetic or—’ she broke off, suddenly anxious for clearer details. ‘What did she look like?’

Poirot considered for a moment.

‘An Ophelia devoid of physical attraction.’

‘Oh dear,’ said Mrs Oliver. ‘I can almost see her when you say that. How queer.’

‘She is not competent,’ said Poirot. ‘That is how I see her. She is not one who can cope with difficulties. She is not one of those who can see beforehand the dangers that must come. She is one of whom others will look round and say “we want a victim. That one will do”.’

But Mrs Oliver was no longer listening. She was clutching her rich coils of hair with both hands in a gesture with which Poirot was familiar.

‘Wait,’ she cried in a kind of agony. ‘Wait!’

Poirot waited, his eyebrows raised.

‘You didn’t tell me her name,’ said Mrs Oliver.

‘She did not give it. Unfortunate, I agree with you.’

‘Wait!’ implored Mrs Oliver, again with the same agony. She relaxed her grip on her head and uttered a deep sigh. Hair detached itself from its bonds and tumbled over her shoulders, a super imperial coil of hair detached itself completely and fell on the floor. Poirot picked it up and put it discreetly on the table.

‘Now then,’ said Mrs Oliver, suddenly restored to calm. She pushed in a hairpin or two, and nodded her head while she thought. ‘Who told this girl about you, M. Poirot?’

‘No one, so far as I know. Naturally, she had heard about me, no doubt.’

Mrs Oliver thought that ‘naturally’ was not the word at all. What was natural was that Poirot himself was sure that everyone had always heard of him. Actually large numbers of people would only look at you blankly if the name of Hercule Poirot was mentioned, especially the younger generation. ‘But how am I going to put that to him,’ thought Mrs Oliver, ‘in such a way that it won’t hurt his feelings?’

‘I think you’re wrong,’ she said. ‘Girls—well, girls and young men—they don’t know very much about detectives and things like that. They don’t hear about them.’

‘Everyone must have heard about Hercule Poirot,’ said Poirot, superbly.

It was an article of belief for Hercule Poirot.

‘But they are all so badly educated nowadays,’ said Mrs Oliver. ‘Really, the only people whose names they know are pop singers, or groups, or disc jockeys—that sort of thing. If you need someone special, I mean a doctor or a detective or a dentist—well, then, I mean you would ask someone—ask who’s the right person to go to? And then the other person says—“My dear, you must go to that absolutely wonderful man in Queen Anne’s Street, twists your legs three times round your head and you’re cured,” or “All my diamonds were stolen, and Henry would have been furious, so I couldn’t go to the police, but there’s a simply uncanny detective, most discreet, and he got them back for me and Henry never knew a thing.”—That’s the way it happens all the time. Someone sent that girl to you.’

‘I doubt it very much.’

‘You wouldn’t know until you were told. And you’re going to be told now. It’s only just come to me. I sent that girl to you.’