Five Little Pigs (Hercule Poirot 25)
Page 11
Poirot rose and George Mayhew, rising too, added:
“You might like to have a word with Edmunds, our managing clerk. He was with the firm then and took a great interest in the case.”
Edmunds was a man of slow speech. His eyes gleamed with legal caution. He took his time in sizing up Poirot before he let himself be betrayed into speech. He said:
“Ay, I mind the Crale case.”
He added severely: “It was a disgraceful business.”
His shrewd eyes rested appraisingly on Hercule Poirot.
He said:
“It’s a long time since to be raking things up again.”
“A court verdict is not always an ending.”
Edmunds’s square head nodded slowly.
“I’d not say that you weren’t in the right of it there.”
Hercule Poirot went on: “Mrs. Crale left a daughter.”
“Ay, I mind there was a child. Sent abroad to relatives, was she not?”
Poirot went on:
“That daughter believes firm
ly in her mother’s innocence.”
The huge bushy eyebrows of Mr. Edmunds rose.
“That’s the way of it, is it?”
Poirot asked:
“Is there anything you can tell me to support that belief?”
Edmunds reflected. Then, slowly, he shook his head.
“I could not conscientiously say there was. I admired Mrs. Crale. Whatever else she was, she was a lady! Not like the other. A hussy—no more, no less. Bold as brass! Jumped-up trash—that’s what she was—and showed it! Mrs. Crale was quality.”
“But none the less a murderess?”
Edmunds frowned. He said, with more spontaneity than he had yet shown:
“That’s what I used to ask myself, day after day. Sitting there in the dock so calm and gentle. ‘I’ll not believe it,’ I used to say to myself. But, if you take my meaning, Mr. Poirot, there wasn’t anything else to believe. That hemlock didn’t get into Mr. Crale’s beer by accident. It was put there. And if Mrs. Crale didn’t put it there, who did?”
“That is the question,” said Poirot. “Who did?”
Again those shrewd old eyes searched his face.
“So that’s your idea?” said Mr. Edmunds.
“What do you think yourself?”
There was a pause before the officer answered. Then he said: