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‘Sacré tonnerre!’ thundered Poirot. ‘Will you be serious? You young people of today, will nothing make you serious? It would not have been a joke, Mademoiselle, if you had been lying in the hotel garden a pretty little corpse with a nice little hole through your head instead of your hat. You would not have laughed then—eh?’
‘Unearthly laughter heard at a séance,’ said Nick. ‘But seriously, M. Poirot—it’s very kind of you and all that—but the whole thing must be an accident.’
‘You are as obstinate as the devil!’
‘That’s where I got my name from. My grandfather was popularly supposed to have sold his soul to the devil. Everyone round here called him Old Nick. He was a wicked old man—but great fun. I adored him. I went everywhere with him and so they called us Old Nick and Young Nick. My real name is Magdala.’
‘That is an uncommon name.’
‘Yes, it’s a kind of family one. There have been lots of Magdalas in the Buckley family. There’s one up there.’
She nodded at a picture on the wall.
‘Ah!’ said Poirot. Then looking at a portrait hanging over the mantelpiece, he said:
‘Is that your grandfather, Mademoiselle?’
‘Yes, rather an arresting portait, isn’t it? Jim Lazarus offered to buy it, I wouldn’t sell. I’ve got an affection for Old Nick.’
‘Ah!’ Poirot was silent for a minute, then he said very earnestly:
‘Revenons à nos moutons. Listen, Mademoiselle. I implore you to be serious. You are in danger. Today, somebody shot at you with a Mauser pistol—’
‘A Mauser pistol?—’
For a moment she was startled.
‘Yes, why? Do you know of anyone who has a Mauser pistol?’
She smiled.
‘I’ve got one myself.’
‘You have?’
‘Yes—it was Dad’s. He brought it back from the War. It’s been knocking round here ever since. I saw it only the other day in that drawer.’
She indicated an old-fashioned bureau. Now, as though suddenly struck by an idea, she crossed to it and pulled the drawer open. She turned rather blankly. Her voice held a new note.
‘Oh!’ she said. ‘It’s—it’s gone.’
Chapter 3
Accidents?
It was from that moment that the conversation took on a different tone. Up to now, Poirot and the girl had been at cross-purposes. They were separated by a gulf of years. His fame and reputation meant nothing to her—she was of the generation that knows only the great names of the immediate moment. She was, therefore, unimpressed by his warnings. He was to her only a rather comic elderly foreigner with an amusingly melodramatic mind.
And this attitude baffled Poirot. To begin with, his vanity suffered. It was his constant dictum that all the world knew Hercule Poirot. Here was someone who did not. Very good for him, I could not but feel—but not precisely helpful to the object in view!
With the discovery of the missing pistol, however, the affair took on a new phase. Nick ceased to treat it as a mildly amusing joke. She still treated the matter lightly, because it was her habit and her creed to treat all occurrences lightly, but there was a distinct difference in her manner.
She came back and sat down on the arm of a chair, frowning thoughtfully.
‘That’s odd,’ she said.
Poirot whirled round on me.
‘You remember, Hastings, the little idea I mentioned? Well, it was correct, my little idea! Supposing Mademoiselle had been found shot lying in the hotel garden? She might not have been found for some hours—few people pass that way. And beside her hand—just fallen from it—is her own pistol. Doubtless the good Madame Ellen would identify it. There would be suggestions, no doubt, of worry or of sleeplessness—’
Nick moved uneasily.
‘That’s true. I have been worried to death. Everybody’s been telling me I’m nervy. Yes—they’d say all that…’
‘And bring in a verdict of suicide. Mademoiselle’s fingerprints conveniently on the pistol and nobody else’s—but yes, it would be very simple and convincing.’
‘How terribly amusing!’ said Nick, but not, I was glad to note, as though she were terribly amused.
Poirot accepted her words in the conventional sense in which they were uttered.
‘N’est ce pas? But you understand, Mademoiselle, there must be no more of this. Four failures—yes—but the fifth time there may be a success.’
‘Bring out your rubber-tyred hearses,’ murmured Nick.
‘But we are here, my friend and I, to obviate all that!’ I felt grateful for the ‘we’. Poirot has a habit of sometimes ignoring my existence.
‘Yes,’ I put in. ‘You mustn’t be alarmed, Miss Buckley. We will protect you.’
‘How frightfully nice of you,’ said Nick. ‘I think the whole thing is perfectly marvellous. Too, too thrilling.’
She still preserved her airy detached manner, but her eyes, I thought, looked troubled.
‘And the first thing to do,’ said Poirot, ‘is to have the consultation.’
He sat down and beamed upon her in a friendly manner.
‘To begin with, Mademoiselle, a conventional question—but—have you any enemies?’
Nick shook her head rather regretfully.
‘I’m afraid not,’ she said apologetically.
‘Bon. We will dismiss that possibility then. And now we ask the question of the cinema, of the detective novel—Who profits by your death, Mademoiselle?’
‘I can’t imagine,’ said Nick. ‘That’s why it all seems such nonsense. There’s this beastly old barn, of course, but it’s mortgaged up to the hilt, the roof leaks and there can’t be a coal mine or anything exciting like that hidden in the cliff.’
‘It is mortgaged—hein?’
‘Yes. I had to mortgage it. You see there were two lots of death duties—quite soon after each other. First my grandfather died—just six years ago, and then my brother. That just about put the lid on the financial position.’
‘And your father?’
‘He was invalided home from the War, then got pneumonia and died in 1919. My mother died when I was a baby. I lived here with grandfather. He and Dad didn’t get on (I don’t wonder), so Dad found it convenient to park me and go roaming the world on his own account. Gerald—that was my brother—didn’t get on with grandfather either. I dare say I shouldn’t have got on with him if I’d been a boy. Being a girl saved me. Grandfather used to say I was a chip off the old block and had inherited his spirit.’ She laughed. ‘He was an awful old rip, I believe. But frightfully lucky. There was a saying round here that everything he touched turned to gold. He was a gambler, though, and gambled it away again. When he died he left hardly anything beside the house and land. I was sixteen when he died and Gerald was twenty-two. Gerald was killed in a motor accident just three years ago and the place came to me.’
‘And after you, Mademoiselle? Who is your nearest relation?’
‘My cousin, Charles. Charles Vyse. He’s a lawyer down here. Quite good and worthy but very dull. He gives me good advice and tries to restrain my extravagant tastes.’
‘He manages your affairs for you—eh?’
‘Well—yes, if you like to put it that way. I haven’t many affairs to manage. He arranged the mortgage for me and made me let the lodge.’
‘Ah!—the lodge. I was going to ask you about that. It is let?’
‘Yes—to some Australians. Croft their name is. Very hearty, you know—and all that sort of thing. Simply oppressively kind. Always bringing up sticks of celery and early peas and things like that. They’re shocked at the way I let the garden go. They’re rather a nuisance, really—at least he is. Too terribly friendly for words. She’s a cripple, poor thing, and lies on a sofa all day. Anyway they pay the rent and that’s the great thing.’
‘How long have they been here?’
‘Oh! about six months.’
‘I see. Now, beyond this cousin of yours—on yo
ur father’s side or your mother’s, by the way?’
‘Mother’s. My mother was Amy Vyse.’
‘Bien! Now, beyond this cousin, as I was saying, have you any other relatives?’
‘Some very distant cousins in Yorkshire—Buckleys.’
‘No one else?’
‘No.’
‘That is lonely.’
Nick stared at him.
‘Lonely? What a funny idea. I’m not down here much, you know. I’m usually in London. Relations are too devastating as a rule. They fuss and interfere. It’s much more fun to be on one’s own.’
‘I will not waste the sympathy. You are a modern, I see, Mademoiselle. Now—your household.’
‘How grand that sounds! Ellen’s the household. And her husband, who’s a sort of gardener—not a very good one. I pay them frightfully little because I let them have the child here. Ellen does for me when I’m down here and if I have a party we get in who and what we can to help. I’m giving a party on Monday. It’s Regatta week, you know.’
