Agatha Christie’s Poirot. Anne Hart

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ a comic play!

      And this was the man who was going to find out who killed Mrs Leidner!

      Some years later Nurse Leatheran neatly settled her starched cuffs and wrote an excellent account of how Poirot solved the murder. As she neared her conclusion she observed laconically: ‘M. Poirot went back to Syria and about a week later he went home on the Orient Express and got himself mixed up in another murder.’

      At the outset of this next adventure we glimpse Poirot, ‘of whom nothing was visible but a pink-tipped nose and the two points of an upward-curled moustache’, in danger of freezing to death on a winter morning on the platform of a Syrian railway station. Just behind him lay The Syrian Army Case (‘“You have saved us, mon cher,” said the General emotionally … “You have saved the honour of the French Army”’) and the crime passionnel of the Mesopotamian Murder Case. Just ahead a telegram awaited him in Stamboul recalling him to England on important business. And just beyond that, all unforeseen as he stamped his galoshes on the railway platform, lay an immobilization in snowdrifts aboard the most fabled train in detective literature.

Murder on the Orient Express⁶, published in 1934, was a lovely romp for Poirot – no outside interferences, no police, no need to rush elsewhere, and all set amidst the most comfortable of surroundings with excellent food and absorbing witnesses at hand. In this agreeable milieu Poirot solved one of his most famous cases, the stabbing in the next compartment of a notorious criminal recently acquitted in the United States of the kidnapping and death of little Daisy Armstrong, the child of famous parents. How grateful was the Compagnie Internationale des Wagons Lits to Poirot for rescuing it from a potential embarrassment! And how grateful was Poirot for his snowbound diversion: ‘I was reflecting … that many hours of boredom lay ahead whilst we are stuck here.’

Three Act Tragedy,⁷ published in 1934, was a very sociable case. With an eye to the audience its cast busied itself with all sorts of camaraderie and hospitality (even Poirot rose to the occasion and gave a sherry party), while the nicotine which in turn dispatched three victims was neatly administered in an excellent martini, a glass of port, and a box of chocolates.

Tiens! Though pretending yet again to be semi-retired, how could Poirot resist rushing home from the Riviera when he heard all this? In this case, however, Poirot was at times gently upstaged by another small elderly man, Mr Satterthwaite:⁸

      A dried-up little pipkin of a man, Mr Satterthwaite, a patron of art and the drama, a determined but pleasant snob, always included in the more important house parties and social functions – the words ‘and Mr Satterthwaite’ appeared invariably at the tail of a list of guests. Withal, a man of considerable intelligence and a very shrewd observer of people and things.

      Poirot came to have a high regard for Mr Satterthwaite’s acute observation of the social scene, but in the end, the murderer in Three Act Tragedy unmasked, he insisted on having the last word. Said Mr Satterthwaite:

      ‘My goodness … I’ve only just realized it! That rascal, with his poisoned cocktail! Anyone might have drunk it! It might have been me!’

      ‘There is an even more terrible possibility that you have not considered,’ said Poirot.

      ‘Eh?’

      ‘It might have been me’.

      ‘If anyone had told me a week ago,’ said Inspector Japp, in September of 1934, ‘that I should be investigating a crime where a woman was killed with a poisoned dart with snake venom on it – well, I’d have laughed in his face!’ Poor Japp! He had come in all innocence to Croydon Aerodrome on the off-chance of catching a smuggler and had found himself confronted with the airliner ‘Prometheus’ just landed from Paris with the body of a French passenger murdered en route. Also on board, as a further annoyance, was an airsick Hercule Poirot who, although claiming to be the greatest detective in the world, had slept through the whole thing. ‘Luckily,’ said Japp, breathing heavily, ‘it’s one of those semiforeign cases.’

But who could the murderer be? wondered Japp, Poirot, and M. Fournier of the French Sûreté as they pondered the list of passengers. Could it be the chatty English mystery writer, whose most recent whodunit, The Clue of the Scarlet Petal, hinged on poisoned darts? Could it be Japp’s favourite suspects, two seedy-looking Frenchmen? (‘What you say is possible, certainly,’ murmured Poirot tactfully, ‘but as regards some of your points, you are in error, my friend. Those two men are not toughs or cutthroats, as you suggest. They are, on the contrary, two distinguished and learned archaeologists.’) Could it be – as initially decided by a xenophobic coroner’s jury – Hercule Poirot? (‘The coroner frowned. “Nonsense, I can’t accept this verdict.”’) And so on. There was no doubt that a very clever murder had been committed in mid air. ‘Our Irish stew’ was one more of the things Japp called Death in the Clouds,⁹ published in 1935. Poirot, once he had recovered from his airsickness, had a splendid time solving it.

A short story which first appeared in 1935 is ‘How Does Your Garden Grow?’, in which Miss Amelia Barrowby of Charman’s Green in Buckinghamshire wrote to request a consultation with Poirot, on ‘a very delicate family matter’, just before succumbing to strychnine poisoning. Besides the mystery of Miss Barrowby’s sad death, this story is memorable as landmark evidence of Poirot’s mounting press of business, for in it we are introduced for the first time to a very formidable person, Miss Lemon, who rejoices for the rest of this saga in the title of Confidential Secretary to Hercule Poirot.¹⁰ Like George the valet, Felicity Lemon fully met all her employer’s fanatical specifications for neatness and order (‘Her real passion in life was the perfection of a filing system beside which all other filing systems should sink into oblivion’) and, like George, while overlooked in the excitement of a number of cases, she served faithfully in the background for many more years.

      Back from Argentina in June of 1935 came Arthur Hastings to find Poirot established in Whitehaven Mansions, ‘an outstanding building of modern flats’. Taking stock, the two men immediately began talking about each other’s hair. Inspector Japp, dropping by, had something to add. ‘Just a little bit thin on top, eh?’ he remarked tactlessly to Hastings, and Poirot made things even worse:

      ‘You know, Hastings, there is a little device – my hairdresser is a man of great ingenuity – one attaches it to the scalp and brushes one’s own hair over it – it is not a wig, you comprehend – but – ’

      ‘Poirot,’ I roared. ‘Once and for all I will have nothing to do with the beastly inventions of your confounded hairdresser’

      and added, testily, that Japp – for whom Hastings had never had much affection – was ‘getting as grey as a badger’ and looking much older.

      Poirot, of course, was secure with his hairdresser and a black bottle of REVIVIT.

      But more important matters were soon at hand – the extraordinarily senseless serial murders recounted in The ABC Murders, published in 1936. Poirot had been hoping for just such a case to enliven Hastings’s visit:

      ‘As soon as I heard you were coming over I said to myself: Something will arise. As in former days we will hunt together, we two. But if so it must be no common affair. It must be something’ – he waved his hands excitedly – ‘something recherché СКАЧАТЬ