Evil Under the Sun (Hercule Poirot 24)

“And she? What does she feel about him?”

Rosamund stared at him.

She said:

“She? She’s the world’s first gold digger. And a man-eater as well! If anything personable in trousers comes within a hundred yards of her, it’s fresh sport for Arlena! She’s that kind.”

Poirot nodded his head slowly in complete agreement.

“Yes,” he said. “That is true what you say… Her eyes look for one thing only—men.”

Rosamund said:

“She’s got her eye on Patrick Redfern now. He’s a good-looking man—and rather the simple kind—you know, fond of his wife, and not a philanderer. That’s the kind that’s meat and drink to Arlena. I like little Mrs. Redfern—she’s nice looking in her fair washed-out way—but I don’t think she’ll stand a dog’s chance against that man-eating tiger, Arlena.”

Poirot said:

“No, it is as you say.”

He looked distressed.

Rosamund said:

“Christine Redfern was a school teacher, I believe. She’s the kind that thinks that mind has a pull over matter. She’s got a rude shock coming to her.”

Poirot shook his head vexedly.

Rosamund got up. She said:

“It’s a shame, you know.” She added vaguely: “Somebody ought to do something about it.”

II

Linda Marshall was examining her face dispassionately in her bedroom mirror. She disliked her face very much. At this minute it seemed to her to be mostly bones and freckles. She noted with distaste her heavy bush of soft brown hair (mouse, she called it in her own mind), her greenish-grey eyes, her high cheekbones and the long aggressive line of the chin. Her mouth and teeth weren’t perhaps quite so bad—but what were teeth after all? And was that a spot coming on the side of her nose?

She decided with relief that it wasn’t a spot. She thought to herself:

“It’s awful to be sixteen—simply awful.”

One didn’t, somehow, know where one was. Linda was as awkward as a young colt and as prickly as a hedgehog. She was conscious the whole time of her ungainliness and of the fact that she was neither one thing nor the other. It hadn’t been so bad at school. But now she had left school. Nobody seemed to know quite what she was going to do next. Her father talked vaguely of sending her to Paris next winter. Linda didn’t want to go to Paris—but then she didn’t want to be at home either. She’d never realized properly, somehow, until now, how very much she disliked Arlena.

Linda’s young face grew tense, her green eyes hardened.

Arlena…

She thought to herself:

“She’s a beast—a beast….”

Stepmothers! It was rotten to have a stepmother, everybody said so. And it was true! Not that Arlena was unkind to her. Most of the time she hardly noticed the girl. But when she did, there was a contemptuous amusement in her glance, in her words. The finished grace and poise of Arlena’s movements emphasized Linda’s own adolescent clumsiness. With Arlena about, one felt, shamingly, just how immature and crude one was.

But it wasn’t that only. No, it wasn’t only that.

Linda groped haltingly in the recess of her mind. She wasn’t very good at sorting out her emotions and labelling them. It was something that Arlena did to people—to the house—

“She’s bad,” thought Linda with decision. “She’s quite, quite bad.”

But you couldn’t even leave it at that. You couldn’t just elevate your nose with a sniff of moral superiority and dismiss her from your mind.