Five Little Pigs (Hercule Poirot 25)

She said:

“It’s so bewildering all this.” She touched the pile of manuscripts. “Because the angle’s different every time! Everybody sees my mother differently. But the facts are the same. Everyone agrees on the facts.”

“It has discouraged you, reading them?”

“Yes. Hasn’t it discouraged you?”

“No, I have found those documents very valuable—very informative.”

Poirot spoke slowly and reflectively.

Carla said:

“I wish I’d never read them!”

Poirot looked across at her.

“Ah—so it makes you feel that way?”

Carla said bitterly:

“They all think she did it—all of them except Aunt Angela and what she thinks doesn’t count. She hasn’t got any reason for it. She’s just one of those loyal people who’ll stick to a thing through thick and thin. She just goes on saying: “Caroline couldn’t have done it.”

“It strikes you like that?”

“How else should it strike me? I’ve realized, you know, that if my mother didn’t do it, then one of these five people must have done it. I’ve even had theories as to why.”

“Ah! That is interesting. Tell me.”

“Oh, they were only theories. Philip Blake, for instance. He’s a stockbroker, he was my father’s best friend—probably my father trusted him. And artists are usually careless about money matters. Perhaps Philip Blake was in a jam and used my father’s money. He may have got my father to sign something. Then the whole thing may have been on the point of coming out—and only my father’s death could have saved him. That’s one of the things I thought of.”

“Not badly imagined at all. What else?”

“Well, there’s Elsa. Philip Blake says here she had her head screwed on too well to meddle with po

ison, but I don’t think that’s true at all. Supposing my mother had gone to her and told her that she wouldn’t divorce my father—that nothing would induce her to divorce him. You may say what you like, but I think Elsa had a bourgeois mind—she wanted to be respectably married. I think that then Elsa would have been perfectly capable of pinching the stuff—she had just as good a chance that afternoon—and might have tried to get my mother out of the way by poisoning her. I think that would be quite like Elsa. And then, possibly, by some awful accident, Amyas got the stuff instead of Caroline.”

“Again it is not badly imagined. What else?”

Carla said slowly:

“Well, I thought—perhaps—Meredith!”

“Ah—Meredith Blake?”

“Yes. You see, he sounds to me just the sort of person who would do a murder. I mean, he was the slow dithering one the others laughed at, and underneath, perhaps, he resented that. Then my father married the girl he wanted to marry. And my father was successful and rich. And he did make all those poisons! Perhaps he really made them because he liked the idea of being able to kill someone one day. He had to call attention to the stuff being taken, so as to divert suspicion from himself. But he himself was far the most likely person to have taken it. He might, even, have liked getting Caroline hanged—because she turned him down long ago. I think, you know, it’s rather fishy what he says in his account of it all—how people do things that aren’t characteristic of them. Supposing he meant himself when he wrote that?”

Hercule Poirot said:

“You are at least right in this—not to take what has been written down as necessarily a true narrative. What has been written may have been written deliberately to mislead.”

“Oh, I know. I’ve kept that in mind.”

“Any other ideas?”

Carla said slowly:

“I wondered—before I’d read this—about Miss Williams. She lost her job, you see, when Angela went to school. And if Amyas had died suddenly, Angela probably wouldn’t have gone after all. I mean if it passed off as a natural death—which it easily might have done, I suppose, if Meredith hadn’t missed the coniine. I read up coniine, and it hasn’t got any distinctive postmortem appearances. It might have been thought to be sunstroke. I know that just losing a job doesn’t sound a very adequate motive for murder. But murders have been committed again and again for what seem ridiculously inadequate motives. Tiny sums of money sometimes. And a middle-aged, perhaps rather incompetent governess might have got the wind up and just seen no future ahead of her.