“Regrettably, Mr. Prarrow, there has been another murder.”
“It is Arnold.” Rawcliffe’s voice shook. “Arnold is dead.”
Chapter 27
The Deaths of Happy Men
“Arnold has been murdered.” Felix Rawcliffe could barely speak. “It is too dreadful. Vivienne is... We are all...” His sentence finished in a strangled moan.
“I’m afraid it is true, Mr. Prarrow,” said Mackle. “The murderer has, unfortunately, struck again. This time the victim is Arnold Laurier.”
Poirot bowed his head and stood completely still. I could almost feel the ache he must have felt at that moment, though he said nothing. He gathered himself, then said to Mackle in a tone of crisp impatience, “Struck again? How do you know that the same person killed both Stanley Niven and Arnold Laurier?”
“Well—” Mackle began.
“Wait. Do not answer,” said Poirot. “I do not wish to conduct this conversation outside in the cold. Take me to a room where we can talk in private. The three of us only—you, me and Catchpool.” He turned to Rawcliffe. “Where is everybody else?”
The curate’s eyes darted around, as if uncertain of where to look. “I... I don’t know,” he said. “I have not seen anyone for a while. As soon as I heard what had happened, I went to telephone to the police station, and then I waited in the hall for Inspector Mackle to arrive. I have been by his side since he got here.”
“I asked Dr. Osgood to gather everybody together in the drawing room,” Mackle told Poirot. “We could talk in the study—the scene of the crime—though I am afraid Mr. Laurier’s body is still there. You might find it an unpleasant sight, Mr. Prarrow.”
“I must see it. I must look at it in all its disturbing detail and not turn away. I owe Monsieur Laurier that and more. It is my fault he is dead. If I had worked more quickly—”
“It is absolutely not your fault,” I said firmly as we followed Inspector Mackle through Frellingsloe House. “You had no way of knowing—”
“But Ididknow, Catchpool. I knew in my bones that Vivienne Laurier’s fears for her husband’s safety meant something, and the similarity of character between Monsieur Laurier and Monsieur Niven was clear. As for my suspicion as to the culprit...” He made a noise of disgust. “How wrong I was! I could not have been more so.”
“There is nothing to be gained by berating yourself,” I told him.
“I do berate, Catchpool. Forever, I will berate.”
“I have given instructions for Clarence Niven to be questioned,” said Inspector Mackle, coming to a halt outside the closed door of Arnold Laurier’s study. “Though thatblackguard will have furnished himself with an even more impressive alibi this time, I’ll wager. Fifty people will doubtless swear they were with him when Arnold Laurier was killed, and we will find it impossible to prove otherwise. It will be a travesty, Mr. Prarrow.Anothertravesty, I should say.”
“Open the door, please, inspector. And,je vous en supplie, do not mention again the name of Clarence Niven. He killed neither his brother nor Arnold Laurier.”
Murder scenes are never a pleasant sight, but I found this one particularly upsetting to behold. Now that his lively soul had departed from his body, Arnold Laurier’s frailty was painfully apparent. We sometimes say that people are “merely skin and bones,” but as I stared at the dead body in front of me, I reflected that this was more a case of “barely” than “merely.” The bones were so thin they made me wince as I pictured how easily they might be snapped in half. And the skin, particularly, on the face and neck, looked no more resilient than a spider’s web.
I wondered what sort of monster could have wished to cause additional pain and harm to a man who was plainly in such an enfeebled state. This led me to a realization: whoever murdered Arnold cannot simply have wanted him dead; they must have wanted him out of the way now, immediately, or else they would surely have waited for his illness to take its course.
Inspector Mackle had started to describe to us the cause of death, which he said Dr. Osgood had confirmed—though really no explanation was necessary. It was quite apparentwhat had happened. The visible details all told the same story: the wound at the back of the head; the body collapsed over the desk; the white vase with an ominous stain on its side, close to the bottom; the pool of water on the floor; the large paper flowers made out of smaller paper snowflakes, which of course I recognized at once. I had made them myself to hang on a Christmas tree only days earlier.
I noted with interest that Arnold Laurier’s lifeless head and upper body were not resting on an empty desk. It seemed that he had been looking at photographs when he was killed; dozens of them were spread out on either side of him and, I guessed, beneath him.
“Exactly the same murder method as for Stanley Niven,” Mackle said. “Blows to the back of the head, made by that vase which the murderer then dropped or placed on the floor before leaving the room. It is a similar shape to the vase used to commit the first murder.”
“No,” said Poirot. “It is not the same at all. Catchpool, tell the inspector what is the difference. You cannot have failed to notice, given your recent decorative work in this house.”
“I made those paper-snowflake flowers for the Christmas tree in the library,” I told Mackle. “That is where they were as recently as yesterday. They certainly were not in a vase full of water. Why would anybody put paper flowers in water?”
“They would not,” said Poirot. “As you see, inspector, these flowers are dry from top to bottom, the paper unblemished. At no point have they been in water.”
“Which means we have a big difference between murder scenes one and two,” I said.
“At the first murder scene, the flowers and water on the floor had an explanation that made sense: the murderer wanted to use the vase as a weapon, so he or she emptied it of its contents, which would otherwise have got in the way and made a mess. Here, the flowers were never in the vase in the first place. They were on a Christmas tree.”
“And this vase was in my bedroom on the top floor of the house,” said Poirot. “The killer went up there to fetch it, knowing I was at St. Walstan’s. He filled the vase with water, brought it here, then went to get the paper flowers from the library...” Poirot shook his head. “Why go to all of that effort when he could have used this brass poker here to achieve the same effect?” He pointed to the fireplace, which boasted a variety of potential murder weapons.
“It is a deliberate reference to the first murder scene,” I stated the obvious. “Are we supposed to think, ‘This must be the same person who killed Stanley Niven’? If so... well, I am not convinced that I do think that. This strikes me more as... as a parody of a murder method, and people rarely parody themselves.”
