Five Little Pigs

‘He wanted, you know, to protect me – to “look after me” – that’s how he put it! He thought like everybody else that the Assizes had been a terrible ordeal for me. And the reporters! And the booing crowds! And all the mud that was slung at me.’

She brooded a minute. Then said:

‘Poor old Meredith! Such an ass!’ And laughed again.

IV

Once again Hercule Poirot encountered the shrewd penetrating glance of Miss Williams, and once again felt the years falling away and himself a meek and apprehensive little boy.

There was, he explained, a question he wished to ask.

Miss Williams intimated her willingness to hear what the question was.

Poirot said slowly, picking his words carefully:

‘Angela Warren was injured as a very young child. In my notes I find two references to that fact. In one of them it is stated that Mrs Crale threw a paperweight at the child. In the other that she attacked the baby with a crowbar. Which of those versions is the right one?’

Miss Williams replied briskly:

‘I never heard anything about a crowbar. The paperweight is the correct story.’

‘Who was your own informant?’

‘Angela herself. She volunteered the information quite early.’

‘What did she say exactly?’

‘She touched her cheek and said: “Caroline did this when I was a baby. She threw a paperweight at me. Never refer to it, will you, because it upsets her dreadfully.” ’

‘Did Mrs Crale herself ever mention the matter to you?’

‘Only obliquely. She assumed that I knew the story. I remember her saying once: “I know you think I spoil Angela, but you see, I always feel there is nothing I can do to make up to her for what I did.” And on another occasion she said: “To know you have permanently injured another human being is the heaviest burden any one could have to bear.” ’

‘Thank you, Miss Williams. That is all I wanted to know.’

Cecilia Williams said sharply:

‘I don’t understand you, M. Poirot. You showed Carla my account of the tragedy?’

Poirot nodded.

‘And yet you are still-’ She stopped.

Poirot said:

‘Reflect a minute. If you were to pass a fishmonger’s and saw twelve fish laid out on his slab, you would think they were all real fish, would you not? But one of them might be stuffed fish.’

Miss Williams replied with spirit:

‘Most unlikely and anyway-’

‘Ah, unlikely, yes, but not impossible – because a friend of mine once took down a stuffed fish (it was his trade, you comprehend) to compare it with the real thing! And if you saw a bowl of innias in a drawing-room in December you would say that they were false – but they might be real ones flown home from Baghdad.’

‘What is the meaning of all this nonsense?’ demanded Miss Williams.

‘It is to show you that it is the eyes of the mind with which one really sees…’

V

Poirot slowed up a little as he approached the big block of flats overlooking Regent’s Park.

Really, when he came to think of it, he did not want to ask Angela Warren any questions at all. The only question he did want to ask her could wait…

No, it was really only his insatiable passion for symmetry that was bringing him here. Five people – there should be five questions! It was neater so. It rounded off the thing better.

Ah well – he would think of something.

Angela Warren greeted him with something closely approaching eagerness. She said:

‘Have you found out anything? Have you got anywhere?’

Slowly Poirot nodded his head in his best China mandarin manner. He said:

‘At last I make progress.’

‘Philip Blake?’ It was halfway between statement and a question.

‘Mademoiselle, I do not wish to say anything at present. The moment has not yet come. What I will ask of you is to be so good as to come down to Handcross Manor. The others have consented.’

She said with a slight frown:

‘What do you propose to do? Reconstruct something that happened sixteen years ago?’

‘See it, perhaps, from a clearer angle. You will come?’

Angela Warren said slowly:

‘Oh, yes, I’ll come. It will be interesting to see all those people again. I shall see them now, perhaps, from a clearer angle (as you put it) than I did then.’

‘And you will bring with you the letter that you showed me?’

Angela Warren frowned.

‘That letter is my own. I showed it to you for a good and sufficient reason, but I have no intention of allowing it to be read by strange and unsympathetic persons.’

‘But you will allow yourself to be guided by me in this matter?’

‘I will do nothing of the kind. I will bring the letter with me, but I shall use my own judgement which I venture to think is quite as good as yours.’

Poirot spread out his hands in a gesture of resignation. He got up to go. He said:

‘You permit that I ask one little question?’

‘What is it?’

‘At the time of the tragedy, you had lately read, had you not, Somerset Maugham’s The Moon and Sixpence?’

Angela stared at him. Then she said:

‘I believe – why, yes, that is quite true.’ She looked at him with frank curiosity. ‘How did you know?’

‘I want to show you, mademoiselle, that even in a small unimportant matter, I am something of a magician. There are things I know without having to be told.’