Hercule Poirot's Christmas: A Hercule Poirot Mystery (Hercule Poirot 20)

‘That didn’t upset you?’

Pilar’s great dark eyes opened very wide.

‘Everyone must die! That is so, is it not? If it comes quickly from the sky—bouff—like that, it is as well as any other way. One is alive for a time—yes, and then one is dead. That is what happens in this world.’

Stephen Farr laughed.

‘I don’t think you are a pacifist.’

‘You do not think I am what?’ Pilar seemed puzzled by a word which had not previously entered her vocabulary.

‘Do you forgive your enemies, señorita?’

Pilar shook her head.

‘I have no enemies. But if I had—’

‘Well?’

He was watching her, fascinated anew by the sweet, cruel upward-curving mouth.

Pilar said gravely:

‘If I had an enemy—if anyone hated me and I hated them—then I would cut my enemy’s throat like this…’

She made a graphic gesture.

It was so swift and so crude that Stephen Farr was momentarily taken aback. He said:

‘You are a bloodthirsty young woman!’

Pilar asked in a matter-of-fact tone:

‘What would you do to your enemy?’

He started—stared at her, then laughed aloud.

‘I wonder—’ he said. ‘I wonder!’

Pilar said disapprovingly:

‘But surely—you know.’

He checked his laughter, drew in his breath and said in a low voice:

‘Yes. I know…’

Then with a rapid change of manner, he asked:

‘What made you come to England?’

Pilar replied with a certain demureness.

‘I am going to stay with my relations—with my English relations.’

‘I see.’

He leaned back in his seat, studying her—wondering what these English relations of whom she spoke were like—wondering what they would make of this Spanish stranger…trying to picture her in the midst of some sober British family at Christmas time.