“Madame—”
“Oh, and you might perhaps let him in on some of your crime-solving process. He would simply adore that—though he mustn’t go anywhere near that hospital, not while the killer is still lurking. Still, as long as he is safe at home, there is absolutely no reason why you shouldn’t confide in him a little as you go along.” Mother smiled. “Consult him now and then, allow him to feel helpful. Rather like you do with Edward,” she said.
Chapter 3
We Arrive in Munby
The wind in Norfolk when we arrived that evening was severe enough to blow a man off his feet. It struck me as likely that, having once done battle with it, I would forever think of its London counterpart as an amateur. As soon as I stepped down from the train, tears started to stream from my eyes. Poirot dabbed at his with his handkerchief.
I planted my feet firmly on the solid ground. It would not do to be buffeted away in a landscape of this kind; there was almost nothing upright that one could grasp hold of, nothing but flat fields and the smell of wet earth for miles around.
We were met at the railway station by two men who introduced themselves as Robert Osgood and Felix Rawcliffe. Rawcliffe, the younger of the two by around thirty years, extended his hand and said, “Monsieur Poirot, Inspector Catchpool. Welcome to Munby! What a delight to have you with us for Christmas!”
“Merci, mais...we intend to leave well before Christmas,” Poirot corrected him.
“Well before?” said Rawcliffe. “You are rather late for that. Today is the nineteenth. Christmas is just around the corner.” He spoke in an inelegant manner; one had the sense that a struggle between words and teeth was taking place, with no clear winner emerging. Rawcliffe looked to be a little older than thirty. He had a lean, triangular face and a forward-tilting stance that suggested he might topple over. His green scarf, lumpy in some parts and distended in others, reached almost to his knees.
“It is Christmas already,” Mother declared. I told her that her position was at odds with the Christian calendar, to which she replied, “I am speaking of the social calendar, Edward, and so was Felix. You are surely not accusing this exemplary young curate of heresy?”
“He meant to do nothing of the sort,” said Rawcliffe with good humor. “Whatever the calendar, we could not be more delighted to welcome you both.” To me in particular he said, “It warms my heart to meet a fellow who is willing to travel so far in such inclement weather to spend Christmas with his mother. I would have done the same for my dear late mama, God rest her soul.”
He would have been described as conventionally handsome by a great many. His teeth neither protruded, nor were they too large or untidily arranged; it was simply that every word he spoke made one keenly aware of their presence.
Felix Rawcliffe, then, was the curate lodger at FrellingsloeHouse. He introduced the older man, Dr. Robert Osgood: a sturdy fellow of around sixty, with curly hair the color of iron filings and a forehead slightly higher on one side than the other. He looked important—almost monumental. He was not wearing a hat, which, in this weather, made me question his sanity and added to his air of being, in the manner of a statue, immune to the elements. Dr. Osgood, I recalled, was Arnold Laurier’s doctor and also a lodger in his home.
It struck me as peculiar that these two gentlemen had been sent to collect us—almost rude, even. One did not send guests to fetch guests, though of course lodgers were not guests in the strictest sense. As far as I could recall, everyone else spending Christmas at Frellingsloe House, apart from Osgood and Rawcliffe, was either a Surtees or a Laurier. Now, what did I know about Mr. and Mrs. Surtees? They were not lodgers. They were guests, I thought, though not in the conventional sense. There was something about them...
I wished I had paid more attention to Mother’s lengthy descriptions of everybody when she had first told me about them. How naïve I had been to assume I would never meet any of them. I was fairly sure she had said that the Surteeses were an elderly couple, and the parents of... somebody else in the house, could it be? Or was Mrs. Surtees—Enid—the sister of Vivienne Laurier and sister-in-law of the dying Arnold? Somewhere in the picture were two sisters who had once been the best of friends but now loathed one another.
I had put it off for as long as I could, but the time had come for me to smile, shake hands with Osgood and Rawcliffe and comport myself as politeness required. It took some effort. I was aware that these two men had done me no harm; still, I viewed them as captor-collaborators, and Rawcliffe’s remark about my traveling a great distance in order to spend Christmas with Mother had irked me. I was here because Poirot had set himself the task of solving the murder of Stanley Niven, and for that reason alone. Assisting him in his work had been the greatest honor of my life so far. Never would there come a day when I would refuse his request for my help, no matter what hardships it might entail. Christmas with Mother, far from being the purpose of my visit to Norfolk, was an unpleasant side effect that I was willing to endure if necessary but still very much hoped to avoid.
To my great relief, I was roundly ignored by everybody as soon as we were inside the motorcar. Mother, seated between Poirot and me, assailed him with more facts than he could ever need to know about the village of Munby-on-Sea: which houses had been in the same family for many generations, which smallholdings had recently sold off land, which streets had been graced briefly by the presence of people who sounded royal, of whom I had never heard.
Meanwhile, in lowered voices, Rawcliffe and Dr. Osgood were discussing Rosaline from the Shakespeare playRomeo and Juliet. This must have been the continuation of a conversation that had started before Poirot and I alighted from the train, or else it made no sense. I had missed its firstpremise and was finding the second instalment unintelligible. Wasn’t Rosaline Romeo’s first love, the one he had dropped like a heavy stone the moment he had set eyes on Juliet? That seemed to be the point that Felix Rawcliffe was trying to make—that one could change one’s love object if one so desired—though his teeth were doing their best to foil his effort.
Dr. Osgood replied that Rawcliffe did not understand “the way these things work” and that he ought to talk to somebody called Father Peter about it. Father Peter, apparently, was considerably older and had more experience than Rawcliffe. I pictured a wise, elderly priest of the parish with snow-white, windswept hair and a white beard clogged and stiffened by sea salt, who, in his spare time, proselytized about Shakespeare’s tragedies.
Then it struck me: how had Dr. Osgood and Rawcliffe known which train we would be on? Mother had made no telephone call between her first appearance in Poirot’s drawing room and now. There was only one possibility, therefore: she had not doubted that we would fall in with her orders. She was quite the most enraging person I had ever known.
As an accompaniment to my resentment, I had a small anxiety to contend with as Rawcliffe drove us along tiny, winding roads and wind and rain assaulted the car windows. I could hardly raise the matter now, with two other conversations still in progress, but I was acutely aware that Poirot knew nothing of the imperiled status of Frellingsloe House, and I felt I ought to have told him. Surely he would wishto know that we were about to spend the night in a house that would soon be under the sea.
Dr. Osgood turned in his seat and addressed Poirot. “Mrs. Catchpool has assured us that you will be able to solve the murder of Stanley Niven where the police have failed.”
“Oh, do please call me Cynthia, doctor,” said Mother. “I keep reminding you and you keep forgetting.”
“I shall do my best to resolve the matter, monsieur. You have perhaps heard that my best is of the highest level of excellence?”
“I have.” Both disapproval and suspicion were present in Osgood’s voice. I had tried several times to explain to Poirot that being quite so vocal about one’s own prowess is not something that sits well with many of us English folk. But perhaps the doctor was not offended in the slightest by my Belgian friend’s confidence; he had sounded equally stony when talking to Felix Rawcliffe about Romeo’s rejected Rosaline.
“I hope you are as talented a detective as we have been led to believe,” he told Poirot. “I have more faith in you than I do in our local police, but even so... I fear this will not be an easy case to solve, even for the most agile mind.”
“Why do you think so?” Poirot asked him.
“Only because of the facts of the case, which, were they not firmly established, I would call impossible,” said Osgood. “Stanley Niven, the murder victim, was in his hospital bed in a private room on Ward 6. He was seen alive at two o’clock. Between then and twenty minutes aftertwo, I was standing in the ward corridor talking to various people, and I can tell you for certain that no one entered or left Mr. Niven’s room. Even after that, I was in and out of the ward, and so were other doctors and nurses.”
I had the sense that Osgood had repeated these facts to himself many times, trying to make sense of them.
“No one noticed anything out of place or suspicious,” he continued. “Nobody who should not have been there was seen. It therefore seems unlikely, verging on impossible, that an intruder could have entered Mr. Niven’s room, killed him, and exited again during the brief period of time in which all of that must have happened. Inspector Mackle is convinced the killer is a close relation of Niven’s, but he has been unable to prove it and I for one think he is wrong. No one saw any of the family members on the ward that day—and they would have. I personally have met all four of the relatives whom Inspector Mackle suspects. To a man and a woman, they are good Christian people who loved Stanley Niven dearly and would not dream of murdering him nor anybody else. One cannot always say that of patients’ relatives, incidentally. And... it is hard to convey this to those who did not know him, but Mr. Niven was really such delightful company, and so considerate of others. I cannot believe that anyone would want him dead—yet plainly someone did, and nothing can be done about it.” The doctor sighed.
