Elephants Can Remember

"The trouble is that I couldn't think. Looking back, I say 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. On 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 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 husband really hate his wife, and had hated her for a long time? 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 as a peaceful life. But then I thought, but how much did I know of that 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 India 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." "Yes," said Poirot thoughtfully. "People forget." "They're not like elephants," said Superintendent Garroway, giving a faint smile. "Elephants, they always say, remember everything." "It is odd that you should say that," said Poirot.