Agatha Christie’s Poirot. Anne Hart

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СКАЧАТЬ ‘Apparently one learns nothing but economics – and how to set Intelligence Tests!’

It is not easy to imagine Poirot as a youth, his moustache in mere infancy, but bits and pieces emerge in the kindness he later showed to injudicious and awkward young men. ‘I cannot overcome my shyness. I say always the wrong thing. I upset water jugs,’ confessed one of them in Murder in Mesopotamia. ‘“We all do these things when we are young,” said Poirot, smiling. “The poise, the savoir faire, it comes later”’; and ‘It is the time for follies, when one is young,’ he said encouragingly to another in ‘Christmas Adventure’.⁵

      An endearing glimpse of Poirot himself as a youth is provided in Evil Under the Sun:

      ‘When I was young (and that, Mademoiselle, is indeed a long time ago) there was a game entitled “If not yourself, who would you be?” One wrote the answer in young ladies’ albums. They had gold edges and were bound in blue leather.’

      From an early age Poirot knew exactly who he would be:

      ‘To most of us the test comes early in life. A man is confronted quite soon with the necessity to stand on his own feet, to face dangers and difficulties and to take his own line of dealing with them.’

And here we have it, the surprising lure to this tidy and diminutive young man of a life of dangers and difficulties. ‘I entered the police force,’ he told Mr Satterthwaite.⁶

      In police circles, in Poirot’s day, Belgium, which claimed to have an almost perfect statute book, was considered one of the least policed countries in Europe, so law-abiding were her citizens. Nevertheless, Poirot – who quickly became attached to the judicial police whose duties were to investigate crimes and apprehend offenders – had at least one combative moment. A reminiscence in Curtain recalls him in a startling role – Poirot, the Sharpshooter:

      ‘As a young man in the Belgian police force I shot down a desperate criminal who sat on a roof and fired at people below.’

      In a few laconic sentences, Poirot, many years later, summed up perhaps forty to forty-five years he spent with the Belgian police:

      ‘I worked hard. Slowly I rose in that force. I began to make a name for myself. I made a name for myself. I began to acquire an international reputation.’

      Poirot’s career was brilliant. In time he became head of the force. As Hastings described him in The Mysterious Affair at Styles:

      … this quaint dandified little man … had been in his time one of the most celebrated members of the Belgian police. As a detective, his flair had been extraordinary, and he had achieved triumphs by unravelling some of the most baffling cases of the day.

      In his English life Poirot occasionally spoke of these Belgian days, and when he did it was almost always of the one case in which he had been utterly fooled.

This dreadful experience was recounted one stormy night as Poirot and Hastings traded confidences before the fire (‘Outside, the wind howled malevolently, and the rain beat against the windows in great gusts’). ‘You ask me if I have ever made the complete ass of myself, as you say over here?’ said Poirot, and there followed the story of ‘The Chocolate Box’,⁷ a case of a political murder in Brussels in which, outfoxed by a most unlikely killer, he had completely misread the evidence and nearly arrested the wrong person. ‘Sapristi! It does not bear thinking of!’ he cried (but what a consolation for Hastings, one can’t help thinking).

      Another case Poirot recalled from time to time – ‘one of my early successes’ – was the affair of the soap manufacturer of Liège, a man of porcine appearance who was found guilty of poisoning his wife in order to marry his secretary. In ‘The Nemean Lion’, while gazing upon ‘the swelling jowl, the small pig eyes, the bulbous nose, and the close-lipped mouth’ of his client, Sir Joseph Hoggin, ‘a memory stirred dimly. A long time ago … in Belgium … something, surely, to do with soap …’ On a hunch that his client was up to no good, Poirot immediately recounted the story of The Soapmaker of Liège to Sir Joseph, who went quite pale. Before long his wife, Lady Hoggin, was saying to her husband: ‘Funny, this tonic tastes quite different. It hasn’t got that bitter taste any more. I wonder why?’ Poirot was especially proud of this case. ‘Prevention, always, is better than cure,’ he said of it in Hickory Dickory Dock.

      Two collaborations with the British police in these earlier days (Poirot spoke a tolerable, if mannered, English) were to have important consequences as it was through them that he met the ebullient Inspector Jimmy Japp of Scotland Yard. In 1916, in The Mysterious Affair at Styles – Poirot’s first case as a private detective in England – he encountered Japp again:

      ‘I fear you do not remember me, Inspector Japp.’

      ‘Why, if it isn’t Mr Poirot!’ cried the Inspector. He turned to the other man. ‘You’ve heard me speak of Mr Poirot? It was in 1904 he and I worked together – the Abercrombie forgery case – you remember, he was run down in Brussels. Ah, those were great days, moosier. Then, do you remember “Baron” Altara? There was a pretty rogue for you! He eluded the clutches of half the police in Europe. But we nailed him in Antwerp – thanks to Mr Poirot here.’

      After this, Japp took Poirot under his wing – or was it the other way around? No matter, in England their guarded friendship would flourish for years.

      In the long run, the most significant link Poirot forged with England in his Belgian days was the assistance he gave to Arthur Hastings, a young employee of Lloyd’s. The nature of the business that brought Hastings from London to Brussels is not recorded, but through it he met Poirot and fell hopelessly under his spell. Hastings was ripe for this. ‘Well, I’ve always had a secret hankering to be a detective!’ he confessed to a new friend in The Mysterious Affair at Styles.

      ‘The real thing – Scotland Yard? Or Sherlock Holmes?’

      ‘Oh, Sherlock Holmes by all means. But really, seriously, I am awfully drawn to it.’

      Hastings came back from Belgium inspired and reciting, at every opportunity, ‘the various exploits and triumphs of Hercule Poirot’. That in a few years he would be permitted to work under the tutelage of this great man would have been, at that time, the stuff of his wildest dreams.

      As we have seen, Poirot was due to retire in about 1914. Perhaps he had already begun to plan a quiet new life amidst ‘les dunes impeccables’ of Knocke-sur-Mer? In August of 1914, however, catastrophe struck with the invasion of neutral Belgium by Germany. The Great War had begun.

      The years of German occupation were a period of great suffering for Belgium. Under a German governor, many Belgians who refused to collaborate were executed or deported. In defiance workers withdrew their services, universities voluntarily closed, and newspapers ceased publication. A British heroine, Edith Cavell, the Matron of the Belgian School of Nursing, was shot for aiding escaped Allied soldiers. Countless patriots went underground.

      Somewhere in this resistance, we may be sure, was Poirot. As chief of a police force that declined to co-operate, he would have been a prime target for imprisonment by les Bosches – or worse, for under the occupation the penalty for those in the Belgian intelligence service was death. For almost two years Poirot dropped from sight. Evidence of his importance to the resistance СКАЧАТЬ