Sad Cypress (Hercule Poirot 22)

“I’m not one to be talking of what doesn’t concern me.”

Watching her very closely, Poirot went on:

“You and Nurse Hopkins, you have agreed together, have you not, that there are some things which are best not brought out into the light of day.”

Nurse O’Brien said:

“What would you be meaning by that?”

Poirot said quickly:

“Nothing to do with the crime—or crimes. I mean—the other matter.”

Nurse O’Brien said, nodding her head:

“What would be the use of raking up mud and an old story, and she a decent elderly woman with never a breath of scandal about her, and dying respected and looked up to by everybody.”

Hercule Poirot nodded in assent. He said cautiously:

“As you say, Mrs. Welman was much respected in Maidensford.”

The conversation had taken an unexpected turn, but his face expressed no surprise or puzzlement.

Nurse O’Brien went on:

“It’s so long ago, too. All dead and forgotten. I’ve a soft heart for a romance myself, and I do say and I always have said that it’s hard for a man who’s got a wife in an asylum to be tied all his life with nothing but death that can free him.”

Poirot murmured, still in bewilderment:

“Yes, it is hard….”

Nurse O’Brien said:

“Did Nurse Hopkins tell you how her letter crossed mine?”

Poirot said truthfully:

“She did not tell me that.”

“’Twas an odd coincidence. But there, that’s always the way of it! Once you hear a name, maybe, and a day or two later you’ll come across it again, and so on and so on. That I should be seeing the selfsame photograph on the piano and at the same minute Nurse Hopkins was hearing all about it from the doctor’s housekeeper.”

“That,” said Poirot, “is very interesting.”

He murmured tentatively:

“Did Mary Gerrard know—about this?”

“Who’d be telling her?” said Nurse O’Brien. “Not I—and not Hopkins. After all, what good would it be to her?”

She flung up her red head and gazed at him steadily.

Poirot said with a sigh:

“What, indeed?”

Eleven

Elinor Carlisle….