The Adventure of the Christmas Pudding

"Madame, when I asked you if you noticed anything out of place that evening at the party, you frowned, as though you remembered something — and then it escaped you. Would it have been the position of the screen that night?"

"The screen? Why, of course, yes. It was not quite in its usual place."

"Did you dance that night?"

"Part of the time."

"Who did you dance with mostly?"

"Jeremy Spence. He's a wonderful dancer. Charles is good but not spectacular. He and Linda danced, and now and then we changed. Jock McLaren doesn't dance. He got out the records and sorted them and arranged what we'd have."

"You had serious music later?"

"Yes."

There was a pause. Then Margharita said:

"M. Poirot, what is — all this? Have you — is there — hope?"

"Do you ever know, madame, what the people around you are feeling?"

Her voice, faintly surprised, said:

"I — suppose so."

"I suppose not. I think you have no idea. I think that is the tragedy of your life. But the tragedy is for other people — not for you.

"Someone today mentioned to me Othello. I asked you if your husband was jealous, and you said you thought he must be. But you said it quite lightly. You said it as Desdemona might have said it, not realizing danger. She, too, recognized jealousy, but she did not understand it, because she herself never had, and never could, experience jealousy. She was, I think, quite unaware of the force of acute physical passion. She loved her husband with the romantic fervor of hero worship, she loved her friend Cassio, quite innocently, as a close companion. I think that because of her immunity to passion, she herself drove men mad. Am I making sense to you, madame?"

There was a pause — and then Margharita's voice answered. Cool, sweet, a little bewildered:

"I don't — I don't really understand what you are saying —"

Poirot sighed.

He spoke in matter-of-fact tones. "This evening," he said, "I pay you a visit."

IX

Inspector Miller was not an easy man to persuade. But equally Hercule Poirot was not an easy man to shake off until he had got his way. Inspector Miller grumbled, but capitulated.

"— though what Lady Chatterton's got to do with this —"

"Nothing, really. She has provided asylum for a friend, that is all."

"About those Spences — how did you know?"

"That stiletto came from there? It was a mere guess. Something Jeremy Spence said gave me the idea. I suggested that the stiletto belonged to Margharita Clayton. He showed that he knew positively that it did not." He paused. "What did they say?" he asked with some curiosity.

"Admitted that it was very like a toy dagger they'd once had. But it had been mislaid some weeks ago, and they had really forgotten about it. I suppose Rich pinched it from there."

"A man who likes to play safe, Mr Jeremy Spence," said Hercule Poirot. He muttered to himself: "Some weeks ago. Oh yes, the planning began a long time ago."

"Eh, what's that?"

"We arrive," said Poirot. The taxi drew up at Lady Chatterton's house in Cheriton Street. Poirot paid the fare.

Margharita Clayton was waiting for them in the room upstairs. Her face hardened when she saw Miller.

"I didn't know —"

"You did not know who the friend was I proposed to bring?"

"Inspector Miller is not a friend of mine."

"That rather depends on whether you want to see justice done or not, Mrs Clayton. Your husband was murdered —"

"And now we have to talk of who killed him," said Poirot quickly. "May we sit down, madame?"

Slowly Margharita sat down in a high-backed chair facing the two men.

"I ask," said Poirot, addressing both his hearers, "to listen to me patiently. I think I now know what happened on that fatal evening at Major Rich's flat. We started, all of us, by an assumption that was not true — the assumption that there were only two persons who had the opportunity of putting the body in the chest — that is to say, Major Rich or William Burgess. But we were wrong — there was a third person at the flat that evening who had an equally good opportunity to do so."

"And who was that?" demanded Miller sceptically. "The lift boy?"

"No. Arnold Clayton."

"What? Concealed his own dead body? You're crazy."

"Naturally not a dead body — a live one. In simple terms, he hid himself in the chest. A thing that has often been done throughout the course of history. The dead bride in the Mistletoe Bough, Iachimo with designs on the virtue of Imogen, and so on. I thought of it as soon as I saw that there had been holes bored in the chest quite recently. Why? They were made so that there might be a sufficiency of air in the chest. Why was the screen moved from its usual position that evening? So as to hide the chest from the people in the room. So that the hidden man could lift the lid from time to time and relieve his cramp, and hear better what went on."

"But why," demanded Margharita wide-eyed with astonishment. "Why should Arnold want to hide in the chest?"