Murder in the Mews (Hercule Poirot 18)

Major Riddle’s left shoulder twitched slightly. He looked at Lady Chevenix-Gore rather doubtfully.

She smiled at him, a vague, happy smile.

“You don’t believe, of course! So few people will. To me, the spirit world is quite as real as this one. But please ask me anything you like, and don’t worry about distressing me. I’m not in the least distressed. Everything, you see, is Fate. One cannot escape one’s Karma. It all fits in—the mirror—everything.”

“The mirror, madame?” asked Poirot.

She nodded her head towards it vaguely.

“Yes. It’s splintered, you see. A symbol! You know Tennyson’s poem? I used to read it as a girl—though, of course, I didn’t realise then the esoteric side of it. ‘The mirror cracked from side to side. “The curse is come upon me!” cried the Lady of Shalott.’ That’s what happened to Gervase. The Curse came upon him suddenly. I think, you know, most very old families have a curse . . . the mirror cracked. He knew that he was doomed! The Curse had come!”

“But, madame, it was not a curse that cracked the mirror—it was a bullet!”

Lady Chevenix-Gore said, still in the same sweet vague manner:

“It’s all the same thing, really . . . It was Fate.”

“But your husband shot himself.”

Lady Chevenix-Gore smiled indulgently.

“He shouldn’t have done that, of course. But Gervase was always impatient. He could never wait. His hour had come—he went forward to meet it. It’s all so simple, really.”

Major Riddle, clearing his throat in exasperation, said sharply:

“Then you weren’t surprised at your husband’s taking his own life? Had you been expecting such a thing to happen?”

“Oh, no.” Her eyes opened wide. “One can’t always foresee the future. Gervase, of course, was a very strange man, a very unusual man. He was quite unlike anyone else. He was one of the Great Ones born again. I’ve known that for some time. I think he knew it himself. He found it very hard to conform to the silly little standards of the everyday world.” She added, looking over Major Riddle’s shoulder, “He’s smiling now. He’s thinking how foolish we all are. So we are really. Just like children. Pretending that life is real and that it matters . . . Life is only one of the Great

Illusions.”

Feeling that he was fighting a losing battle, Major Riddle asked desperately:

“You can’t help us at all as to why your husband should have taken his life?”

She shrugged her thin shoulders.

“Forces move us—they move us . . . You cannot understand. You move only on the material plane.”

Poirot coughed.

“Talking of the material plane, have you any idea, madame, as to how your husband has left his money?”

“Money?” she stared at him. “I never think of money.”

Her tone was disdainful.

Poirot switched to another point.

“At what time did you come downstairs to dinner tonight?”

“Time? What is Time? Infinite, that is the answer. Time is infinite.”

Poirot murmured:

“But your husband, madame, was rather particular about time—especially, so I have been told, as regards the dinner hour.”

“Dear Gervase,” she smiled indulgently. “He was very foolish about that. But it made him happy. So we were never late.”