“Not immediately. I mean, not tonight, or even tomorrow, so it hardly affects us—”
“What fantastical story do you tell me, Catchpool? And where is somebody to show us to our rooms? Where are our hosts?” He peered in the direction of the stairs, then looked over his shoulder at the open front door. Then he turned back to me. “Continue, please.”
I told him about the coastal erosion problem and that it represented a death sentence for Frellingsloe House. I added some touches of absurdity for the sake of light relief: Mother’s annoyance at the lack of initiative shown by Munby’s inhabitants; their failure to track down superior clay and “put it” in the cliffs here.
As I spoke, I wondered how, precisely, the house would meet its end. I pictured it tumbling off the cliff top, wholly intact, spinning round and round as it hurtled toward the ocean—but of course that was ludicrous. To Poirot, I emphasized that for one or two nights we would be perfectly safe here. The chances of us ending up underwater while in our pajamas were minimal.
“That is sad for the Laurier family,” he said, “but why do you tell me with such urgency?”
“I thought you might not want to stay here.”
“I do not. Neither do you wish to spend any more time than is necessary in Munby-sur-la-mer,” he reminded me. “My preference has nothing to do with coastal erosion, however.”
“And everything to do with my mother?”
He chuckled. “Pas du tout. I have greatly enjoyed meeting Madame Catchpool. What an excellent mother for you to have,mon ami—the very one that you needed, I have no doubt.”
I was about to protest, but a tall, buxom young woman had appeared from the corridor and was striding toward us, carrying a cup and saucer in each hand. They clinked as she moved: one was curved and decorated with pink and gold details; the other was plain white. The person carrying them was dressed in the most astonishing miscellany of garments: muddy riding boots with a skirt that looked as if it was made of fine green silk, a lumpy maroon hat, and a pink blazer over a blue jumper. Around her neck she wore a thick black cord to which two brown shoes were tied by their laces. One knocked against a tea-cup as she strode toward us, splashing liquid on her clothes.
Next to my ear, Poirot said quietly, “If only the most puzzling murders could be committed in the more fashionable districts of London—that would please me. Never mind. Let us hope at least that this personage will close the front door.”
“Hello,” she said. “I’m Madeline Laurier, but please call me Maddie. Everyone does apart from my enemies, declared and covert, so if you address me as Madeline I shall know that you mean me harm. Haha!” She caught me scrutinizing her strange blazer, which had a greenish stain on one lapel. “Oh, and please excuse my appearance,” she said. “My real clothes are underneath. When you next see me, I shan’t look anywhere near as strange as I do now. Blame this house! It is quite unreasonably large, and I am not prepared to trudge back and forth and up and down stairs all day long. I have had to devise some ingenious methods for transporting anything I want to carry. Everyone else aroundhere is willing to make more than one trip, but I am not. All this lot is going in the rubbish.” She indicated her clothing. “Apart from the shoes, which I’ll be wearing as soon as I’ve chucked out these decaying boots. Oh, and I’ve brought you each a cup of tea. Cynthia said you’d want one. Drink them quickly. They’re probably sepulchrally cold already. The fancy cup is for you, Monsieur Poirot. French china, from some fancy-sounding shop in Paris, according to Cynthia. Though you are not French, are you? You’re from Belgium. I have told Cynthia that, and so has Vivienne, but she doesn’t seem to listen. I think she wants you to be French, for some reason. Now, has anybody told you that we are eating in twenty minutes?”
This was welcome news indeed.
“We delayed the evening meal in your honor.” Maddie smiled. “That means everyone will be extra ravenous and bad tempered. You might as well see us at our worst on the first night, though, eh?”
I told her that we were very much looking forward to dinner. My stomach had been grumbling about its emptiness for some time.
“Don’t look forward to it too much,” Maddie said. “Enid is the cook. I did not use the word ‘dinner,’ did you spot that? If you are expecting what that word usually means, you will be disappointed. Enid is my mother. She is a terrible cook, as terrible as Terence is at gardening. Oh—Terence is Enid’s husband, my father.”
It struck me then that Mother had said something about this when she first told me about her Norfolk Christmasplans. That was right: friends who were living at the house and paying nothing for the privilege, but instead contributing their labor to the running of the household. Mother had expressed disapproval. The Laurier family had plenty of money, apparently, but Arnold Laurier, the patriarch, no longer wished to spend any of it on employing the excellent cook who had worked for the family for many years.
Poirot took a sip of his tea, then another. He winced. “This beverage is... I cannot drink it, I am afraid.”
“I warned you it would be cold.” Maddie looked over her shoulder, then lowered her voice to a whisper. “Do not expect standards to be high here. It’s barmy on the crumpet, the way things are done in this house. Sometimes I think Douglas and I are the only ones with a grip on reality. Douglas is my husband. And why is the front door open?” Maddie marched over and slammed it shut, then bolted it at the top and bottom. “Has anyone shown you where your rooms are? Of course they have not. I shall point you in the right direction and you can find them yourselves. I would take you, but then all this rubbish I’m wearing would have to come upstairs with me and that is an intolerable prospect.”
She told us where to find our quarters, which, mercifully, were on a floor that contained no other bedrooms, the top floor of the house. The more distance I could keep between myself and any “barmy on the crumpet” Laurier or Surtees family members, the better.
Maddie instructed us to discard our hats, coats and gloves on the hall floor—“Someone will find them soon and putthem somewhere, probably”—and marched off to dispose of the unwanted items draped about her person.
“I shall certainly not discard my overcoat on the—” Poirot had started to say when we heard an exclamation, then footsteps.
Maddie reappeared. “I forgot the most important thing of all,” she said. “Has anyone told you about the Morality Game?”
“Non,madame.”
“It’s a game we’re going to play on Christmas Day—all my idea! I couldn’t bear to spend another year playing Jonathan’s ancient ‘Mansion of Happiness’ game.”
“Poirot and I will have left before Chri—” I started to say.
Maddie spoke over me. “As you unpack, think about villains from history,” she said. “Who is the very worst person you can think of, from a moral point of view? Who is the absolute last word in evil? You will each need to choose a person.”
She hurried away without clarifying what we would need to do with or about whichever miscreant we picked.
“Quelle femme extraordinaire,” Poirot murmured.
I told him about the two Laurier sons’ wives being sisters and, according to Mother, their hating one another. He did not seem to find it particularly interesting. I suspected he was disturbed by what Maddie Laurier had told us about the evening meal. An inadequate dinner was a fate that Poirot believed to be “insupportable,” and even more so after a long journey.
