Elephants Can Remember

"Oh. And are you going to find out what it is?" "Naturally, if I can," said Poirot. "It may not be easy. She is in retreat. She was in retreat when she left us here. She was afraid of what questions I was going to ask her. Yes. It is interesting." He sighed. "One will have to go back, you know, even further than one thought." "What, back into the past again?" "Yes. Somewhere in the past, in more cases than one, there is something that one will have to know before we can come back again to what happened-what is it now?-fifteen years ago, twenty years ago, at a house called Overcliffe. Yes. One will have to go back again." "Well, that's that," said Mrs. Oliver. "And now, what is there to do? What is this list of yours?" "I have heard a certain amount of information through police records on what was found in the house. You will remember that among the things there were four wigs." "Yes," said Mrs. Oliver, "you said that four wigs were too many." "It seemed to be a little excessive," said Poirot. "I have also got certain useful addresses. The address of a doctor that might be helpful." "The doctor? You mean, the family doctor?" "No, not the family doctor. The doctor who gave evidence at an inquest on a child who met with an accident. Either pushed by an older child or possibly by someone else." "You mean by the mother?" "Possibly the mother, possibly by someone else who was in the house at the time. I know the part of England where that happened, and Superintendent Garroway has been able, through sources known to him and also through journalistic friends of mine, who were interested in this particular case, to get some information about the doctor." "And you're going to see him. He must be a very old man by now." "It is not him I shall go to see. It is his son. His son is also qualified as a specialist in various forms of mental disorders.

I have an introduction to him and he might be able to tell me something interesting. There have also been inquiries into a case of money." "What do you mean by money?" "Well, there are certain things we have to find out. That is one of the things in anything which might be a crime. Money.

Who has money to lose by some happening, who has money to gain by something happening. That, one has to find out." "Well, they must have found out in the case of the Ravenscrofts." "Yes, that was all quite natural, it seems. They had both made normal wills leaving, in each case, the money to the other partner. The wife left her money to the husband and the husband left his money to his wife. Neither of them benefited by what happened because they both died. So that the people who did profit were the daughter, Celia, and a younger child, Edward, who I gather is now at a university abroad." "Well, that won't help. Neither of the children were there or could have had anything to do with it." "Oh, no, that is quite true. One must go further-further back, further forward, further sideways, to find out if there is some financial motive somewhere that is-well, shall we say, significant." "Well, don't ask me to do that sort of thing," said Mrs.

Oliver. "I've no real qualifications for that. I mean, that's come up, I suppose, fairly reasonably in the-well, in the elephants that I've talked to." "No. I think the best thing for you to do would be to, shall we say, take on the subject of the wigs." "Wigs?" "There had been a note made in the careful police report at the time of the suppliers of the wigs, who were a very expensive firm of hairdressers and wigmakers in London, in Bond Street. Later, that particular shop closed and the business was transferred somewhere else. Two of the original partners continued to run it and I understand it has now been given up, but I have here an address of one of the principal fitters and hairdressers, and I thought perhaps that it would come more easily if inquiries were made by a woman." "Ah," said Mrs. Oliver, "me?" "Yes, you." "All right. What do you want me to do?" "Pay a visit to Cheltenham to an address I shall give you and there you will find a Madame Rosentelle. A woman no longer young but who was a very fashionable maker of ladies' hair adornments of all kinds, and who was married, I understand, to another in the same profession, a hairdresser who specialized in surmounting the problems of gentlemen's baldness. Toupees and other things." "Oh, dear," said Mrs. Oliver, "the jobs you do give me to do. Do you think they'll remember anything about it?" "Elephants remember," said Hercule Poirot.