“Then we are going to the hospital?” This was acceptable, thought Poirot; it was on his list of places he planned to visit today.
“No, we are not going there either,” said Mackle. “We are going to Nurse Haskins” home, where Nurse Hunt also lives. She is Nurse Haskins’ second cousin, you see. That’s how she got her job at St. Walstan’s. Lovely girls they are, both of them. Well, Bee Haskins is hardly a girl. She’s my mother’s age if she’s a day, but she has a girlish quality. Laughs a lot. Nurse Hunt is young, and very attractive indeed. Big lips that seem to be begging a fellow to kiss them, if you catch my drift, Mr. Prarrow. If I were not a happily married man...” Inspector Mackle turned to wink at his passenger, who gripped the sides of his seat with both hands as the car narrowly missed a tree.
“I would like to visit Ward 6 of St. Walstan’s Hospital,” said Poirot, once the immediate danger was past.
“And you will,” Mackle promised. “All in good time. I shall drive you there myself. But first I want you to hear what Nurses Haskins and Hunt have to say. They agree with me, you see, that the killer must be one of the Niven relatives.”
At last, the motorcar emerged from the tunnel of trees and into the light again. It was unusually bright for a day in December.
“Inspector, I must ask you to cease, immediately, all attempts to influence my opinion,” said Poirot. “I intend to ask my own questions and form my own conclusions.”
“Understood, Mr. Prarrow. Understood. Though do keep in mind, please, that one of the four Nivens must have done it. The deceased’s wife, Audrey, is my least favorite for the role of murderer. She seems far too sad about her husband’s death to have killed him—though I suppose she might be pretending. The son and daughter, Daniel and Rebecca, are both more likely culprits than their mother, I think. They are the beneficiaries of the will—not that Mr. Niven left anything to speak of. His parents are both still alive, you see—both nearly a hundred years old, if you can credit it—and all his money went toward looking after them. His brother, Clarence, is most likely the one who killed him. He is also the one whose alibi is the hardest to put a dent in.”
“Do any of these people have a motive for the murder?” Poirot asked.
“Yes, one of them does,” said Mackle. “Whichever of them did it, they must have had a motive. Stands to reason.”
Poirot took a deep breath. “Why do you believe that Monsieur Niven’s brother Clarence is the most likely to be guilty?”
“Ah! A very good question.” Mackle chuckled to himself. “I think you will appreciate my reasoning here, Mr. Prarrow.You of all people will understand the logical path I followed, and I expect you will say that you’d have come to the same conclusion yourself. Quite simply: thirty-two people say they were at Clarence Niven’s London club, in the same room as him during the hour in which his brother Stanley was killed.Thirty-two people.”
“He appears to be eliminated from suspicion most conclusively, then.”
“By my reckoning, his supposedly solid alibi is the main point against him,” said Mackle. “I think he fancies himself as an intellectual, and he has gone to elaborate extremes on the false alibi front, hoping it will cause us to make certain assumptions.”
“Such as?” said Poirot.
“Why, the assumption that he must be innocent—for surely no man could persuade thirty-two people to lie for him,” Mackle declared triumphantly. “Think about it: persuading one acquaintance to lie for you is easier than persuading thirty-two, is it not? Eh? A solver of crimes might calculate that a guilty man would surely offer an alibi that requires the cooperation ofonly one person, since one is all he needs. Once he has that one safely in the bag, he’s in the clear, so why the blazes would he go to the trouble of lining up a further thirty-one? No murderer would. Do you see what I mean, Mr. Prarrow? That is what Clarence Niven believes I will think. It is why he arranged for such a large number of people to give him an alibi—but he did not reckon with the ingenious brain of Inspector Gerald Mackle! I apologize for blowing my own horn, butsome things cannot be denied. Now, if you and I can convince just one of those thirty-two dishonest alibi-suppliers to break the pact and tell the truth—”
“Are the thirty-two a group of some sort?” Poirot asked. “Do they know each other? Do they all know Clarence Niven personally?”
“Aha! You are asking all the right questions, Mr. Prarrow. They say not. Only two of them will admit that they know him at all. The rest are all members of the same club, but claim never to have spoken to Clarence Niven. If only one of them would tell me the truth, I could—”
“Do not call it ‘the truth,’ inspector.” Poirot was unable to contain his impatience any longer. “You offer nothing to substantiate your belief that one of the four Nivens must be the killer.Noneof them has a motive,n’est-ce pas? And they all have alibis.”
“But... one of the alibis must be a lie.” Mackle sounded confused, as if he distinctly remembered having explained this clearly already but was now wondering if he had merely imagined doing so. “It is the lack of motive that tells me I am on the right track,” he told Poirot.
“How so?”
“There is nobody in the world, as far as I can see, who has an actual motive for murdering Mr. Niven. Therefore it must be one of the four favorites, as I like to call them: Audrey, Daniel, Rebecca or Clarence Niven. One of his family.”
“Sacré tonnerre. Why must it be so, inspector?”
“Why, it hardly needs to be said, Mr. Prarrow. This case has got ‘nearest and dearest’ written all over it. Who but the very closest of kin would hit a person over the head with an enormous vase—more than once—for no reason at all?”
Chapter 14
Decorating Two Christmas Trees
I shall always remember 20 December 1931 as the day I made a valuable discovery: if you want to find out more about a person connected with a murder case, the traditional method of asking them questions about all the usual things—their relationship to the victim, for instance, or their whereabouts when the crime was committed—is significantly less effective than this lesser-known method: begin to decorate a Christmas tree in their vicinity.
This is what will happen. First, your quarry will approach and make casual conversation along the lines of “Good to see someone tackling the tree at last!” Then they will start to suggest what you might do differently—“Oh, you’re putting that there? I would place it higher up, myself.” Next, once you have implemented at least two of their recommendations (this part will require you to ignore your own aesthetic wisdom), they will start to talk freely about other matters, especially if you are mostly on your handsand knees, surrounded by paper garlands and tinsel and not looking in their direction.
I feel duty-bound to add a caveat, since I have just referred to a person “connected with a murder case’: it was not at all clear to me at this stage whether the Lauriers, their houseguests and their lodgers were or were not connected to the murder of Stanley Niven. I had no reason to believe they were, and would have thought it unlikely were it not for the fact that Poirot, for reasons I could not fathom, seemed to be operating on the assumption that there was a definite link.
One further explanatory note: the conversations that follow have been abridged only in a very specific way—I have trimmed to the bare minimum all references to the tree decoration side of things. If anyone is eager to hear about how Janet Laurier would hang gewgaws on a Christmas tree differently from how I, left to my own devices, would have arranged them, I am afraid you will be disappointed. I will, however, offer this summary: I was right in every particular and she was wrong.
“How about that, then?” I said to her once most of the work had been done. I stood back so that she could see the results of our joint labor. The drawing room, though it looked a thousand times better than it had yesterday, was still too long and thin, and its windows were still too few and small.
