Hallowe'en Party

Why don't you get yourself a nice pair of suede shoes? Or the things all the hippy-looking boys wear nowadays? You know, the sort of shoes that slip on, and you never have to clean them-apparently they clean themselves by some extraordinary process or other. One of these labour-saving gimmicks."

"I would not care for that at all," said Poirot severely.

"No, indeed!"

"The trouble with you is," said Mrs.

Oliver, beginning to unwrap a package on the table which she had obviously recently purchased, "the trouble with you is that you insist on being smart. You mind more about your clothes and your moustaches and how you look and what you wear than comfort. Now comfort is really the great thing. Once you've passed, say, fifty, comfort is the only thing that matters."

"Madame, chere Madame, I do not know that I agree with you."

"Well, you'd better," said Mrs. Oliver.

"If not, you will suffer a great deal, and it will be worse year after year."

Mrs. Oliver fished a gaily covered box from its paper bag. Removing the lids of this, she picked up a small portion of its contents and transferred it to her mouth.

She then licked her fingers, wiped them on a handkerchief, and murmured, rather indistinctly:

"Sticky."

"Do you no longer eat apples? I have always seen you with a bag of apples in your hand, or eating them, or on occasions the bag breaks and they tumble out on the road."

"I told you," said Mrs. Oliver, "I told you that I never want to see an apple again. No. I hate apples. I suppose I shall get over it some day and eat them again, but well, I don't like the associations of apples."

"And what is it that you eat now?"

Poirot picked up the gaily coloured lid decorated with a picture of a palm tree.

"Tunis dates," he read.

"Ah, dates now."

"That's right," said Mrs. Oliver.

"Dates."

She took another date and put it in her mouth, removed a stone which she threw into a bush and continued to munch.

"Dates," said Poirot.

"It is extraordinary."

"What is extraordinary about eating dates? People do."

"No, no, I do not mean that. Not eating them. It is extraordinary that you should say to me like that dates."

"Why?" asked Mrs. Oliver.

"Because," said Poirot, "again and again you indicate to me the path, the how do you say, the chemin that I should take or that I should have already taken. You show me the way that I should go. Dates.

Till this moment I did not realise how important dates were."

"I can't see that dates have anything to do with what's happened here.

I mean, there's no real time involved. The whole thing took place what-only five days ago."

"That event took place four days ago.

Yes, that is very true. But to everything that happens there has to be a past. A past which is by now incorporated in today, but which existed yesterday or last month or last year. The present is nearly always rooted in the past. A year, two years, perhaps even three years ago, a murder was committed. A child saw that murder.

Because that child saw that murder on a certain date now long gone by, that child died four days ago. Is not that so?"

"Yes. That's so. At least, I suppose it is. It mightn't have been at all. It might be just some mentally disturbed nut who likes killing people and whose idea of playing with water is to push somebody's head under it and hold it there. It might have been described as a mental delinquent's bit of fun at a party."

"It was not that belief that brought you to me, Madame."

"No," said Mrs. Oliver, "no, it wasn't.

I didn't like the feel of things. I still don't like the feel of things."

"And I agree with you. I think you are quite right. If one does not like the feel of things, one must learn why. I am trying very hard, though you may not think so, to learn why."

"By going around and talking to people, finding out if they are nice or not and then asking them questions?"

"Exactly."

"And what have you lea mt

"Facts," said Poirot.

"Facts which will have in due course to be anchored in their place by dates, shall we say."

"Is that all? What else have you learnt?"

"That nobody believes in the veracity of Joyce Reynolds."

"When she said she saw someone killed?

But I heard her."

"Yes, she said it. But nobody believes it is true. The probability is, therefore, that it was not true. That she saw no such thing."

"It seems to me," said Mrs. Oliver, "as though your facts were leading you backwards instead of remaining on the spot or going forward."

"Things have to be made to accord.

Take forgery, for instance. The fact of forgery. Everybody says that a foreign girl, the au pair girl, so endeared herself to an elderly and very rich widow that that rich widow left a Will, or a codicil to a Will, leaving all her money to this girl. Did the girl forge that Will or did somebody else forge it?"

"Who else could have forged it?"

"There was another forger in this village. Someone, that is, who had once been accused of forgery but had got off lightly as a first offender and with extenuating circumstances."

"Is that a new character? One I know?"