“Have you just come down from London?”
“Yes. Dad phoned me.”
“By the 9:30, I suppose?” said Donald Fraser.
His mind, shrinking from reality, ran for safety along these unimportant details.
“Yes.”
There was silence fo
r a minute or two, then Fraser said:
“The police? Are they doing anything?”
“They’re upstairs now. Looking through Betty’s things, I suppose.”
“They’ve no idea who—? They don’t know—?”
He stopped.
He had all a sensitive, shy person’s dislike of putting violent facts into words.
Poirot moved forward a little and asked a question. He spoke in a businesslike, matter-of-fact voice as though what he asked was an unimportant detail.
“Did Miss Barnard tell you where she was going last night?”
Fraser replied to the question. He seemed to be speaking mechanically:
“She told me she was going with a girl friend to St. Leonards.”
“Did you believe her?”
“I—” Suddenly the automaton came to life. “What the devil do you mean?”
His face then, menacing, convulsed by sudden passion, made me understand that a girl might well be afraid of rousing his anger.
Poirot said crisply:
“Betty Barnard was killed by a homicidal murderer. Only by speaking the exact truth can you help us to get on his track.”
His glance for a minute turned to Megan.
“That’s right, Don,” she said. “It isn’t a time for considering one’s own feelings or anyone else’s. You’ve got to come clean.”
Donald Fraser looked suspiciously at Poirot.
“Who are you? You don’t belong to the police?”
“I am better than the police,” said Poirot. He said it without conscious arrogance. It was, to him, a simple statement of fact.
“Tell him,” said Megan.
Donald Fraser capitulated.
“I—wasn’t sure,” he said. “I believed her when she said it. Never thought of doing anything else. Afterwards—perhaps it was something in her manner. I—I, well, I began to wonder.”
“Yes?” said Poirot.