“Damn you, Poirot, must you always twist everything round so that it comes back to that girl?”
“It is not I that twist things round: they come round of themselves. It is like the pointer at the fair. It swings round, and when it comes to rest it points always at the same name—Elinor Carlisle.”
Peter Lord said:
“No!”
Hercule Poirot shook hi
s head sadly.
Then he said:
“Has she relations, this Elinor Carlisle? Sisters, cousins? A father or mother?”
“No. She’s an orphan—alone in the world….”
“How pathetic it sounds! Bulmer, I am sure, will make great play with that! Who, then, inherits her money if she dies?”
“I don’t know. I haven’t thought.”
Poirot said reprovingly:
“One should always think of these things. Has she made a will, for instance?”
Peter Lord flushed. He said uncertainly:
“I—I don’t know.”
Hercule Poirot looked at the ceiling and joined his fingertips.
He remarked:
“It would be well, you know, to tell me.”
“Tell you what?”
“Exactly what is in your mind—no matter how damaging it may happen to be to Elinor Carlisle.”
“How do you know—?”
“Yes, yes, I know. There is something—some incident in your mind! It will be as well to tell me, otherwise I shall imagine it is something worse than it is!”
“It’s nothing, really—”
“We will agree it is nothing. But let me hear what it is.”
Slowly, unwillingly, Peter Lord allowed the story to be dragged from him—that scene of Elinor leaning in at the window of Nurse Hopkins’ cottage, and of her laughter.
Poirot said thoughtfully:
“She said that, did she, ‘So you’re making your will, Mary? That’s funny—that’s very funny.’ And it was very clear to you what was in her mind…She had been thinking, perhaps, that Mary Gerrard was not going to live long….”
Peter Lord said:
“I only imagined that. I don’t know.”
Poirot said: