Evil Under the Sun (Hercule Poirot 24)

Patrick Redfern did not go into the water. He sat about, frankly looking up towards the hotel. He was beginning to look a shade sulky.

Miss Brewster was brisk and cheerful when she arrived.

The conversation was much as it had been on a previous morning. Gentle yapping from Mrs. Gardener and short staccato barks from Miss Brewster.

She remarked at last: “Beach seems a bit empty. Everyone off on excursions?”

Mrs. Gardener said:

“I was saying to Mr. Gardener only this morning that we simply must make an excursion to Dartmoor. It’s quite near and the associations are all so romantic. And I’d like to see that convict prison—Princetown, isn’t it? I think we’d better fix up right away and go there tomorrow, Odell.”

Mr. Gardener said:

“Yes, darling.”

Hercule Poirot said to Miss Brewster.

“You are going to bathe, Mademoiselle?”

“Oh I’ve had my morning dip before breakfast. Somebody nearly brained me with a bottle, too. Chucked it out of one of the hotel windows.”

“Now that’s a very dangerous thing to do,” said Mrs. Gardener. “I had a very dear friend who got concussion by a toothpaste tin falling on him in the street—thrown out of a thirty-fifth storey window it was. A most dangerous thing to do. He got very substantial damages.” She began to hunt among her skeins of wool. “Why, Odell, I don’t believe I’ve got that second shade of purple wool. It’s in the second drawer of the bureau in our bedroom or it might be the third.”

“Yes, darling.”

Mr. Gardener rose obediently and departed on his search.

Mrs. Gardener went on:

“Sometimes, you know, I do think that maybe we’re going a little too far nowadays. What with all our great discoveries and all the electrical waves there must be in the atmosphere, I do think it leads to a great deal of mental unrest, and I just feel that maybe the time has come for a new message to humanity. I don’t know, M. Poirot, if you’ve ever interested yourself in the prophecies from the Pyramids.”

“I have not,” said Poirot.

“Well, I do assure you that they’re very, very interesting. What with Moscow being exactly a thousand miles due north of—now what was it?—would it be Nineveh?—but anyway you take a circle and it just shows the most surprising things—and one can just see that there must have been special guidance, and that those ancient Egyptians couldn’t have thought of what they did all by themselves. And wh

en you’ve gone into the theory of the numbers and their repetition, why it’s all just so clear that I can’t see how anyone can doubt the truth of it for a moment.”

Mrs. Gardener paused triumphantly but neither Poirot nor Miss Emily Brewster felt moved to argue the point.

Poirot studied his white suède shoes ruefully.

Emily Brewster said:

“You been paddling with your shoes on, M. Poirot?”

Poirot murmured:

“Alas! I was precipitate.”

Emily Brewster lowered her voice. She said:

“Where’s our vamp this morning? She’s late.”

Mrs. Gardener, raising her eyes from her knitting to study Patrick Redfern, murmured:

“He looks just like a thundercloud. Oh dear, I do feel the whole thing is such a pity. I wonder what Captain Marshall thinks about it all. He’s such a nice quiet man—very British and unassuming. You just never know what he’s thinking about things.”

Patrick Redfern rose and began to pace up and down the beach.