She started. ‘I beg your pardon?’
Her voice was attractive, with a faint, agreeable huskiness in it.
‘You are making up your mind, are you not, whether I am a mere mountebank, or the man you need?’
She smiled. She said:
‘Well, yes—something of that kind. You see, M. Poirot, you—you don’t look exactly the way I pictured you.’
‘And I am old, am I not? Older than you imagined?’
‘Yes, that too.’ She hesitated. ‘I’m being frank, you see. I want—I’ve got to have—the best.’
‘Rest assured,’ said Hercule Poirot. ‘I am the best!’
Carla said: ‘You’re not modest…All the same, I’m inclined to take you at your word.’
Poirot said placidly:
‘One does not, you know, employ merely the muscles. I do not need to bend and measure the footprints and pick up the cigarette ends and examine the bent blades of grass. It is enough for me to sit back in my chair and think. It is this’—he tapped his egg-shaped head—‘this that functions!’
‘I know,’ said Carla Lemarchant. ‘That’s why I’ve come to you. I want you, you see, to do something fantastic!’
‘That,’ said Hercule Poirot, ‘promises well!’
He looked at her in encouragement.
Carla Lemarchant drew a deep breath.
‘My name,’ she said, ‘isn’t Carla. It’s Caroline. The same as my mother’s. I was called after her.’ She paused. ‘And though I’ve always gone by the name of Lemarchant—my real name is Crale.’
Hercule Poirot’s forehead creased a moment perplexedly. He murmured: ‘Crale—I seem to remember…’
She said:
‘My father was a painter—rather a well-known painter. Some people say he was a great painter. I think he was.’
Hercule Poirot said: ‘Amyas Crale?’
‘Yes.’ She paused, then she went on: ‘And my mother, Caroline Crale, was tried for murdering him!’
‘Aha,’ said Hercule Poirot. ‘I remember now—but only vaguely. I was abroad at the time. It was a long time ago.’
‘Sixteen years,’ said the girl.
Her face was very white now and her eyes two burning lights.
She said:
‘Do you understand? She was tried and convicted…She wasn’t hanged because they felt that there were extenuating circumstances—so the sentence was commuted to penal servitude for life. But she died only a year after the trial. You see? It’s all over—done—finished with…’
Poirot said quietly: ‘And so?’
The girl called Carla Lemarchant pressed her hands together. She spoke slowly and haltingly but with an odd, pointed emphasis.
She said:
‘You’ve got to understand—exactly—where I come in. I was five years old at the time it—happened. Too young to know anything about it. I remember my mother and my father, of course, and I remember leaving home suddenly—being taken to the country. I remember the pigs and a nice fat farmer’s wife—and everybody being very kind—and I remember, quite clearly, the funny way they used to look at me—everybody—a sort of furtive look. I knew, of course, children do, that there was something wrong—but I didn’t know what.
‘And then I went on a ship—it was exciting—it went on for days, and then I was in Canada and Uncle Simon met me, and I lived in Montreal with him and with Aunt Louise, and when I asked about Mummy and Daddy they said they’d be coming soon. And then—and then I think I forgot—only I sort of knew that they were dead without remembering any one actually telling me so. Because by that time, you see, I didn’t think about them any more. I was very happy, you know. Uncle Simon and Aunt Louise were sweet to me, and I went to school and had a lot of friends, and I’d quite forgotten that I’d ever had another name, not Lemarchant. Aunt Louise, you see, told me that that was my name in Canada and that seemed quite sensible to me at the time—it was just my Canadian name—but as I say I forgot in the end that I’d ever had any other.’
She flung up her defiant chin. She said:
‘Look at me. You’d say—wouldn’t you? if you met me: “There goes a girl who’s got nothing to worry about!” I’m well off, I’ve got splendid health, I’m sufficiently good to look at, I can enjoy life. At twenty, there wasn’t a girl anywhere I’d have changed places with.
‘But already, you know, I’d begun to ask questions. About my own mother and father. Who they were and what they did? I’d have been bound to find out in the end—
‘As it was, they told me the truth. When I was twenty-one. They had to then, because for one thing I came into my own money. And then, you see, there was the letter. The letter my mother left for me when she died.’
Her expression changed, dimmed. Her eyes were no longer two burning points, they were dark dim pools. She said:
‘That’s when I learnt the truth. That my mother had been convicted of murder. It was—rather horrible.’
She paused.
‘There’s something else I must tell you. I was engaged to be married. They said we must wait—that we couldn’t be married until I was twenty-one. When I knew, I understood why.’
Poirot stirred and spoke for the first time. He said:
‘And what was your fiancé’s reaction?’
‘John? John didn’t care. He said it made no difference—not to him. He and I were John and Carla—and the past didn’t matter.’
She leaned forward.
‘We’re still engaged. But all the same, you know, it does matter. It matters to me. And it matters to John too…It isn’t the past that matters to us—it’s the future.’ She clenched her hands. ‘We want children, you see. We both want children. And we don’t want to watch our children growing up and be afraid.’
Poirot said:
‘Do you not realize that amongst every one’s ancestors there has been violence and evil?’
‘You don’t understand. That’s so, of course. But then, one doesn’t usually know about it. We do. It’s very near to us. And sometimes—I’ve seen John just look at me. Such a quick glance—just a flash. Supposing we were married and we’d quarrelled—and I saw him look at me and—and wonder?’
Hercule Poirot said: ‘How was your father killed?’
Carla’s voice came clear and firm.
