Third Girl

‘To French people, you mean? Oh yes. I believe that Mrs Oliver mentioned that you were once with the Belgian Police Force?’

‘That is so. Me, I am an old Belgian police dog.’ He gave a polite little laugh and said, waving his hands, ‘But your gardens, you English, I admire. I sit at your feet! The Latin races, they like the formal garden, the gardens of the château, the Château of Versailles in miniature, and also of course they invented the potager. Very important, the potager. Here in England you have the potager, but you got it from France and you do not love your potager as much as you love your flowers. Hein? That is so?’

‘Yes, I think you are right,’ said Mary Restarick. ‘Do come into the house. You came to see my uncle.’

‘I came, as you say, to pay homage to Sir Roderick, but I pay homage to you also, Madame. Always I pay homage to beauty when I meet it.’ He bowed.

She laughed with slight embarrassment. ‘You mustn’t pay me so many compliments.’

She led the way through an open french window and he followed her.

‘I knew your uncle slightly in 1944.’

‘Poor dear, he’s getting quite an old man now. He’s very deaf, I’m afraid.’

‘It was long ago that I encountered him. He will probably have forgotten. It was a matter of espionage and of scientific developments of a certain invention. We owed that invention to the ingenuity of Sir Roderick. He will be willing, I hope, to receive me.’

‘Oh, I’m sure he’ll love it,’ said Mrs Restarick. ‘He has rather a dull life in some ways nowadays. I have to be so much in London—we are looking for a suitable house there.’ She sighed and said, ‘Elderly people can be very difficult sometimes.’

‘I know,’ said Poirot. ‘Frequently I, too, am difficult.’

She laughed. ‘Ah no, M. Poirot, come now, you mustn’t pretend you’re old.’

‘Sometimes I am told so,’ said Poirot. He sighed. ‘By young girls,’ he added mournfully.

‘That’s very unkind of them. It’s probably the sort of thing that our daughter would do,’ she added.

‘Ah, you have a daughter?’

‘Yes. At least, she is my stepdaughter.’

‘I shall have much pleasure in meeting her,’ said Poirot politely.

‘Oh well, I’m afraid she is not here. She’s in London. She works there.’

‘The young girls, they all do jobs nowadays.’

‘Everybody’s supposed to do a job,’ said Mrs Restarick vaguely. ‘Even when they get married they’re always being persuaded back into industry or back into teaching.’

‘Have they persuaded you, Madame, to come back into anything?’

‘No. I was brought up in South Africa. I only came here with my husband a short time ago—It’s all—rather strange to me still.’

She looked round her with what Poirot judged to be an absence of enthusiasm. It was a handsomely furnished room of a conventional type—without personality. Two large portraits hung on the walls—the only personal touch. The first was that of a thin lipped woman in a grey velvet evening dress. Facing her on the opposite wall was a man of about thirty-odd with an air of repressed energy about him.

‘Your daughter, I suppose, finds it dull in the country?’

‘Yes, it is much better for her to be in London. She doesn’t like it here.’ She paused abruptly, and then as though the last words were almost dragged out of her, she said, ‘—and she doesn’t like me.’

‘Impossible,’ said Hercule Poirot, with Gallic politeness.

‘Not at all impossible! Oh well, I suppose it often happens. I suppose it’s hard for girls to accept a stepmother.’

‘Was your daughter very fond of her own mother?’

‘I suppose she must have been. She’s a difficult girl. I suppose most girls are.’

Poirot sighed and said, ‘Mothers and fathers have much less control over daughters nowadays. It is not as it used to be in the old good-fashioned days.’

‘No indeed.’

‘One dare not say so, Madame, but I must confess I regret that they show so very little discrimination in choosing their—how do you say it?—their boy friends?’

‘Norma has been a great worry to her father in that way. However, I suppose it is no good complaining. People must make their own experiments. But I must take you up to Uncle Roddy—he has his own rooms upstairs.’

She led the way out of the room. Poirot looked back over his shoulder. A dull room, a room without character—except perhaps for the two portraits. By the style of the woman’s dress, Poirot judged that they dated from some years back. If that was the first Mrs Restarick, Poirot did not think that he would have liked her.

He said, ‘Those are fine portraits, Madame.’

‘Yes. Lansberger did them.’

It was the name of a famous and exceedingly expensive fashionable portrait painter of twenty years ago. His meticulous naturalism had now gone out of fashion, and since his death, he was little spoken of. His sitters were sometimes sneeringly spoken of as ‘clothes props’, but Poirot thought they were a good deal more than that. He suspected that there was a carefully concealed mockery behind the smooth exteriors that Lansberger executed so effortlessly.

Mary Restarick said as she went up the stairs ahead of him:

‘They have just come out of storage—and been cleaned up and—’

She stopped abruptly—coming to a dead halt, one hand on the stair-rail.

Above her, a figure had just turned the corner of the staircase on its way down. It was a figure that seemed strangely incongruous. It might have been someone in fancy dress, someone who certainly did not match with this house.

He was a figure familiar enough to Poirot in different conditions, a figure often met in the streets of London or even at parties. A representative of the youth of today. He wore a black coat, an elaborate velvet waistcoat, skin tight pants, and rich curls of chestnut hair hung down on his neck. He looked exotic and rather beautiful, and it needed a few moments to be certain of his sex.

‘David!’ Mary Restarick spoke sharply. ‘What on earth are you doing here?’

The young man was by no means taken aback. ‘Startled you?’ he asked. ‘So sorry.’

‘What are you doing here—in this house? You—have you come down here with Norma?’

‘Norma? No, I hoped to find her here.’

‘Find her here—what do you mean? She’s in London.’

‘Oh, but my dear, she isn’t. At any rate, she’s not at 67 Borodene Mansions.’

‘What do you mean, she isn’t there?’

‘Well, since she didn’t come back this weekend, I thought she was probably here with you. I came down to see what she was up to.’