Hallowe'en Party

"But I understood that there was an accident. That the vase slipped out of your hand and it fell to the hall below and was shattered to pieces."

"Oh yes," said Rowena.

"Broken to smithereens. I was rather upset about it because as I've said, it had been one of our wedding presents, and it was really a perfect flower vase, heavy enough to hold big autumn bouquets and things like that.

It was very stupid of me. One of those things. My fingers just slipped. It went out of my hand and crashed on the hall floor below.

Elizabeth Whittaker was standing there. She helped me pick up the pieces and sweep some of the broken glass out of the way in case someone stepped on it. We just swept it into a corner by the Grandfather clock to be cleared up later."

She looked inquiringly at Poirot.

"Is that the incident you mean?" she asked.

"Yes," said Poirot.

"Miss Whittaker wondered, I think, how you had come to drop the vase.

She thought that something perhaps had startled you."

"Startled me?" Rowena Drake looked at him, then frowned as she tried to think again.

"No, I don't think I was startled, anyway. It was just one of those ways things do slip out of your hands. Sometimes when you're washing up. I think, really, it's a result of being tired. I was pretty tired by that time, what with the preparations for the party and running the party and all the rest of it. It went very well, I must say. I think it was-oh, just one of those clumsy actions that you can't help when you're tired."

"There was nothing-you are sure-that startled you? Something unexpected that you saw."

"Saw? Where? In the hall below? I didn't see anything in the hall below. It was empty at the moment because everyone was in at the Snapdragon excepting, of course, for Miss Whittaker.

And I don't think I even noticed her until she came forward to help when I ran down."

"Did you see someone, perhaps, leaving the library door?"

"The library door… I see what you mean. Yes, I could have seen that." She paused for quite a long time, then she looked at Poirot with a very straight, firm glance.

"I didn't see anyone leave the library," she said.

"Nobody at all…"

He wondered. The way in which she said it was what aroused the belief in his mind that she was not speaking the truth, that instead she had seen someone or something, perhaps the door just opening a little, a mere glance perhaps of a figure inside. But she was quite firm in her denial. Why, he wondered, had she been so firm? Because the person she had seen was a person she did not want to believe for one moment had had anything to do with the crime committed on the other side of the door? Someone she cared about, or someone which seemed more likely, he thought-someone whom she wished to protect. Someone, perhaps, who had not long passed beyond childhood, someone whom she might feel was not truly conscious of the awful thing they had just done.

He thought her a hard creature but a person of integrity. He thought that she was, like many women of the same type, women who were often magistrates, or who ran councils or charities, or interested themselves in what used to be called "good works". Women who had an inordinate belief in extenuating circumstances, who were ready, strangely enough, to make excuses for the young criminal. An adolescent boy, a mentally retarded girl.

Someone perhaps who had already been-what is the phrase-"in care". If that had been the type of person she had seen coming out of the library, then he thought it possible that Rowena Drake's protective instinct might have come into play. It was not unknown in the present age for children to commit crimes, quite young children.

Children of seven, of nine and so on, and it was often difficult to know how to dispose of these natural, it seemed, young criminals who came before the juvenile courts. Excuses had to be brought for them.

Broken homes. Negligent and unsuitable parents. But the people who spoke the most vehemently for them, the people who sought to bring forth every excuse for them, were usually the type of Rowena Drake. A stern and censorious woman, except in such cases.

For himself, Poirot did not agree. He was a man who thought first always of justice. He was suspicious, had always been suspicious, of mercy-too much mercy, that is to say. Too much mercy, as he knew from former experience both in Belgium and this country, often resulted in further crimes which were fatal to innocent victims who need not have been victims if justice had been put first and mercy second.

"I see," said Poirot.

"I see."

"You don't think it's possible that Miss Whittaker might have seen someone go into the library?" suggested Mrs. Drake.

Poirot was interested.

"Ah, you think that that might have been so?"

"It seemed to me merely a possibility.