‘American husbands are wonderful!’
III
Mrs Gardener’s place was taken by the Reverend Stephen Lane.
Mr Lane was a tall vigorous clergyman of fifty-odd. His face was tanned and his dark grey flannel trousers were holidayfied and disreputable.
He said with enthusiasm:
‘Marvellous country! I’ve been from Leathercombe Bay to Harford and back over the cliffs.’
‘Warm work walking today,’ said Major Barry, who never walked.
‘Good exercise,’ said Miss Brewster. ‘I haven’t been for my row yet. Nothing like rowing for your stomach muscles.’
The eyes of Hercule Poirot dropped somewhat ruefully to a certain protuberance in his middle.
Miss Brewster, noting the glance, said kindly:
‘You’d soon get that off, M. Poirot, if you took a rowing boat out every day.’
‘Merci, Mademoiselle. I detest boats!’
‘You mean small boats?’
‘Boats of all sizes!’ He closed his eyes and shuddered. ‘The movement of the sea, it is not pleasant.’
‘Bless the man, the sea is as calm as a mill pond today.’
Poirot replied with conviction:
‘There is no such thing as a really calm sea. Always, always, there is motion.’
‘If you ask me,’ said Major Barry, ‘seasickness is nine-tenths nerves.’
‘There,’ said the clergyman, smiling a little, ‘speaks the good sailor—eh, Major?’
‘Only been ill once—and that was crossing the Channel! Don’t think about it, that’s my motto.’
‘Seasickness is really a very odd thing,’ mused Miss Brewster. ‘Why should some people be subject to it and not others? It seems so unfair. And nothing to do with one’s ordinary health. Quite sickly people are good sailors. Someone told me once it was something to do with one’s spine. Then there’s the way some people can’t stand heights. I’m not very good myself, but Mrs Redfern is far worse. The other day, on the cliff path to Harford, she turned quite giddy and simply clung to me. She told me she once got stuck halfway down that outside staircase on Milan Cathedral. She’d gone up without thinking but coming down did for her.’
‘She’d better not go down the ladder to Pixy Cove, then,’ observed Lane.
Miss Brewster made a face.
‘I funk that myself. It’s all right for the young. The Cowan boys and the young Mastermans, they run up and down and enjoy it.’
Lane said:
‘Here comes Mrs Redfern now, coming up from her bathe.’
Miss Brewster remarked:
‘M. Poirot ought to approve of her. She’s no sunbather.’
Young Mrs Redfern had taken off her rubber cap and was shaking out her hair. She was an ash blonde and her skin was of that dead fairness that goes with that colouring. Her legs and arms were very white.
With a hoarse chuckle, Major Barry said:
‘Looks a bit uncooked among the others, doesn’t she?’
Wrapping herself in a long bathrobe Christine Redfern came up the beach and mounted the steps towards them.
She had a fair serious face, pretty in a negative way, and small dainty hands and feet.
She smiled at them and dropped down beside them, tucking her bath-wrap round her.
Miss Brewster said:
‘You have earned M. Poirot’s good opinion. He doesn’t like the sun-tanning crowd. Says they’re like joints of butcher’s meat, or words to that effect.’
Christine Redfern smiled ruefully. She said:
‘I wish I could sunbathe! But I don’t go brown. I only blister and get the most frightful freckles all over my arms.’
‘Better than getting hair all over them like Mrs Gardener’s Irene,’ said Miss Brewster. In answer to Christine’s enquiring glance she went on: ‘Mrs Gardener’s been in grand form this morning. Absolutely non-stop. “Isn’t that so, Odell?” “Yes, darling.”’ She paused and then said: ‘I wish, though, M. Poirot, that you’d played up to her a bit. Why didn’t you? Why didn’t you tell her that you were down here investigating a particularly gruesome murder, and that the murderer, a homicidal maniac, was certainly to be found among the guests of the hotel?’
Hercule Poirot sighed. He said:
‘I very much fear she would have believed me.’
Major Barry gave a wheezy chuckle. He said:
‘She certainly would.’
Emily Brewster said:
‘No, I don’t believe even Mrs Gardener would have believed in a crime staged here. This isn’t the sort of place you’d get a body!’
Hercule Poirot stirred a little in his chair. He protested. He said:
‘But why not, Mademoiselle? Why should there not be what you call a “body” here on Smugglers’ Island?’
Emily Brewster said:
‘I don’t know. I suppose some places are more unlikely than others. This isn’t the kind of spot—’ She broke off, finding it difficult to explain her meaning.
‘It is romantic, yes,’ agreed Hercule Poirot. ‘It is peaceful. The sun shines. The sea is blue. But you forget, Miss Brewster, there is evil everywhere under the sun.’
The clergyman stirred in his chair. He leaned forward. His intensely blue eyes lighted up.
Miss Brewster shrugged her shoulders.
‘Oh! of course I realize that, but all the same—’
‘But all the same this still seems to you an unlikely setting for crime? You forget one thing, Mademoiselle.’
‘Human nature, I suppose?’
‘That, yes. That, always. But that was not what I was going to say. I was going to point out to you that here everyone is on holiday.’
Emily Brewster turned a puzzled face to him.
‘I don’t understand.’
Hercule Poirot beamed kindly at her. He made dabs in the air with an emphatic forefinger.
‘Let us say, you have an enemy. If you seek him out in his flat, in his office, in the street—eh bien, you must have a reason—you must account for yourself. But here at the seaside it is necessary for no one to account for himself. You are at Leathercombe Bay, why? Parbleu! it is August—one goes to the seaside in August—one is on one’s holiday. It is quite natural, you see, for you to be here and for Mr Lane to be here and for Major Barry to be here and for Mrs Redfern and her husband to be here. Because it is the custom in England to go to the seaside in August.’
‘Well,’ admitted Miss Brewster, ‘that’s certainly a very ingenious idea. But what about the Gardeners? They’re American.’
Poirot smiled.
‘Even Mrs Gardener, as she told us, feels the need to relax. Also, since she is “doing” England, she must certainly spend a fortnight at the seaside—as a good tourist, if nothing else. She enjoys watching people.’
Mrs