Appointment With Death (Hercule Poirot 19)

For Sarah, without being unduly conceited, had a fairly good opinion of herself. She knew herself to be definitely attractive to the opposite sex, and she was not one to take a snubbing lying down!

She had been, perhaps, a shade over-friendly to this boy because, for some obscure reason, she had felt sorry for him.

But now, it was apparent, he was merely a rude, stuck-up, boorish young American!

Instead of writing the letters she had mentioned, Sarah King sat down in front of her dressing-table, combed the hair back from her forehead, looked into a pair of troubled hazel eyes in the glass, and took stock of her situation in life.

She had just passed through a difficult emotional crisis. A month ago she had broken off her engagement to a young doctor some four years her senior. They had been very much attracted to each other, but had been too much alike in temperament. Disagreements and quarrels had been of common occurrence. Sarah was of too imperious a temperament herself to brook a calm assertion of autocracy. Like many high-spirited women, Sarah believed herself to admire strength. She had always told herself that she wanted to be mastered. When she met a man capable of mastering her she found that she did not like it at all! To break off her engagement had cost her a good deal of heart-burning, but she was clear-sighted enough to realize that mere mutual attraction was not a sufficient basis on which to build a lifetime of happiness. She had treated herself deliberately to an interesting holiday abroad in order to help on forgetfulness before she went back to start working in earnest.

Sarah’s thoughts came back from the past to the present.

‘I wonder,’ she thought, ‘if Dr Gerard will let me talk to him about his work. He’s done such marvelous work. If only he’ll take me seriously…Perhaps—if he comes to Petra—’

Then she thought again of the strange boorish young American.

She had no doubt that it was the presence of his family which had caused him to react in such a peculiar manner, but she felt slightly scornful of him, nevertheless. To be under the thumb of one’s family like that—it was really rather ridiculous—especially for a man!

And yet…

A queer feeling passed over her. Surely there was something a little odd about it all?

She said suddenly out loud: ‘That boy wants rescuing! I’m going to see to it!’

Chapter 3

When Sarah had left the lounge, Dr Gerard sat where he was for some minutes. Then he strolled to the table, picked up the latest number of Le Matin and strolled with it to a chair a few yards away from the Boynton family. His curiosity was aroused.

He had at first been amused by the English girl’s interest in this American family, shrewdly diagnosing that it was inspired by interest in one particular member of the family. But now something out of the ordinary about this family party awakened in him the deeper, more impartial interest of the scientist. He sensed that there was something here of definite psychological interest.

Very discreetly, under the cover of his paper, he took stock of them. First the boy in whom that attractive English girl took such a decided interest. Yes, thought Gerard, definitely the type to appeal to her temperamentally. Sarah King had strength—she possessed well-balanced nerves, cool wits and a resolute will. Dr Gerard judged the young man to be sensitive, perceptive, diffident and intensely suggestible. He noted with a physician’s eye the obvious fact that the boy was at the moment in a state of high nervous tension. Dr Gerard wondered why. He was puzzled. Why should a young man whose physical health was obviously good, who was abroad ostensibly enjoying himself, be in such a condition that nervous breakdown was imminent?

The doctor turned his attention to the other members of the party. The girl with the chestnut hair was obviously Raymond’s sister. They were of the same racial type, small-boned, well-shaped, aristocratic looking. They had the same slender well-formed hands, the same clean line of jaw, and the same poise of the head on a long, slender neck. And the girl, too, was nervous…She made slight involuntary nervous movements, her eyes were deeply shadowed underneath and over bright. Her voice, when she spoke, was too quick and a shade breathless. She was watchful—alert—unable to relax.

‘And she is afraid, too,’ decided Dr Gerard. ‘Yes, she is afraid!’

He overheard scraps of conversation—a very ordinary normal conversation.

‘We might go to Solomon’s Stables?’ ‘Would that be too much for Mother?’ ‘The Wailing Wall in the morning?’ ‘The Temple, of course—the Mosque of Omar they call it—I wonder why?’ ‘Because it’s been made into a Moslem mosque, of course, Lennox.’

Ordinary commonplace tourist’s talk. And yet, somehow, Dr Gerard felt a queer conviction that these overheard scraps of dialogue were all singularly unreal. They were a mask—a cover for something that surged and eddied underneath—something too deep and formless for words…Again he shot a covert glance from behind the shelter of Le Matin.

Lennox? That was the elder brother. The same family likeness could be traced, but there was a difference. Lennox was not so highly strung; he was, Gerard decided, of a less nervous temperament. But about him, too, there seemed something odd. There was no sign of muscular tension about him as there was about the other two. He sat relaxed, limp. Puzzling, searching among memories of patients he had seen sitting like that in hospital wards, Gerard thought:

‘He is exhausted—yes, exhausted with suffering. That look in the eyes—the look you see in a wounded dog or a sick horse—dumb bestial endurance…It is odd, that…Physically there seems nothing wrong with him…Yet there is no doubt that lately he has been through much suffering—mental suffering—now he no longer suffers—he endures dumbly—waiting, I think, for the blow to fall…What blow? Am I fancying all this? No, the man is waiting for something, for the end to come. So cancer patients lie and wait, thankful that an anodyne dulls the pain a little…’

Lennox Boynton got up and retrieved a ball of wool that the old lady had dropped.

‘Here you are, Mother.’

‘Thank you.’

What was she knitting, this monumental impassive old woman? Something thick and coarse. Gerard thought: ‘Mittens for inhabitants of a workhouse!’ And smiled at his own fantasy.

He turned his attention to the youngest member of the party—the girl with the golden-red hair. She was, perhaps, nineteen. Her skin had the exquisite clearness that often goes with red hair. Although over thin, it was a beautiful face. She was sitting smiling to herself—smiling into space. There was

something a little curious about that smile. It was so far removed from the Solomon Hotel, from Jerusalem…It reminded Dr Gerard of something…Presently it came to him in a flash. It was the strange unearthly smile that lifts the lips of the Maidens in the Acropolis at Athens—something remote and lovely and a little inhuman…The magic of the smile, her exquisite stillness gave him a little pang.

And then with a shock, Dr Gerard noticed her hands. They were concealed from the group round her by the table, but he could see them clearly from where he sat. In the shelter of her lap they were picking—picking—tearing a delicate handkerchief into tiny shreds.