Hallowe'en Party

"Oh, they're saying so," said Nicholas.

"I didn't hear her. I suppose I wasn't in the room when she said it.

Where was she when she said that, I mean?"

"In the drawing-room."

"Yes, well, most of the people were in there unless they were doing something special. Of course Nick and I," said Desmond, "were mostly in the room where the girls were going to look for their true loves in mirrors. Fixing up wires and various things like that. Or else we were out on the stairs fixing fairy lights. We were in the drawing-room once or twice putting the pumpkins up and hanging up one or two that had been hollowed out to hold lights in them. But I didn't hear anything of that kind when we were there.

What about you. Nick?"

"I didn't," said Nick. He added with some interest, "Did Joyce really say that she'd seen a murder committed? Jolly interesting, you know, if she did, isn't it?"

"Why is it so interesting?" asked Desmond.

"Well, it's ESP, isn't it? I mean there you are. She saw a murder committed and within an hour or two she herself was murdered. I suppose she had a sort of vision of it. Makes you think a bit. You know these last experiments they've been having seems as though there is something you can do to help it by getting an electrode, or something of that kind, fixed up to your jugular vein. I've read about it somewhere."

"They've never got very far with this ESP stuff," said Nicholas, scornfully.

"People sit in different rooms looking at cards in a pack or words with squares and geometrical figures on them. But they never see the right things, or hardly ever."

"Well, you've got to be pretty young to do it. Adolescents are much better than older people."

Hercule Poirot, who had no wish to listen to this high-level scientific discussion, broke in.

"As far as you can remember, nothing occurred during your presence in the house which seemed to you sinister or significant in any way.

Something which probably nobody else would have noticed, but which might have come to your attention."

Nicholas and Desmond frowned hard, obviously racking their brains to produce some incident of importance.

"No, it was just a lot of clacking and arranging and doing things."

"Have you any theories yourself?"

Poirot addressed himself to Nicholas.

"What, theories as to who did Joyce in?"

"Yes. I mean something that you might have noticed that could lead you to a suspicion on perhaps purely psychological grounds."

"Yes. I can see what you mean. There might be something in that."

"Whittaker for my money," said Desmond, breaking into Nicholas's absorption in thought.

"The school-mistress?" asked Poirot.

"Yes. Real old spinster, you know. Sex starved. And all that teaching, bottled up among a lot of women. You remember, one of the teachers got strangled a year or two ago. She was a bit queer, they say."

"Lesbian?" asked Nicholas, in a man of the world voice.

"I shouldn't wonder. D'you remember Nora Ambrose, the girl she lived with?

She wasn't a bad looker. She had a boy friend or two, so they said, and the girl she lived with got mad with her about it.

Someone said she was an unmarried mother. She was away for two terms with some illness and then came back. They'd say anything in this nest of gossip."

"Well, anyway, Whittaker was in the drawing-room most of the morning.

She probably heard what Joyce said. Might have put it into her head, mightn't it?"

"Look here," said Nicholas, "supposing Whittaker what age is she, do you think?

Forty odd? Getting on for fifty Women do go a bit queer at that age."

They both looked at Poirot with the air of contented dogs who have retrieved something useful which master has asked for.

"I bet Miss Ernlyn knows if it is so.

There's not much she doesn't know, about what goes on in her school."

"Wouldn't she say?"

"Perhaps she feels she has to be loyal and shield her."

"Oh, I don't think she'd do that. If she thought Elizabeth Whittaker was going off her head, well then, I mean, a lot of the pupils at the school might get done in."

"What about the curate?" said Desmond hopefully.

"He might be a bit off his nut. You know, original sin perhaps, and all that, and the water and the apples and the things and then look here, I've got a good idea now. Suppose he is a bit barmy. Not been here very long. Nobody knows much about him.

Supposing it's the Snapdragon put it into his head. Hell fire! All those flames going up! Then, you see, he took hold of Joyce and he said 'come along with me and I'll show you something," and he took her to the apple room and he said 'kneel down'.

He said 'this is baptism," and pushed her head in. See? It would all fit. Adam and Eve and the apple and hell fire and the Snapdragon and being baptised again to cure you of sin."

"Perhaps he exposed himself to her first," said Nicholas hopefully.

"I mean, there's always got to be a sex background to all these things."

They both looked with satisfied faces to Poirot.

"Well," said Poirot, "you've certainly given me something to think about."