From thoughts of Restarick, he went on to Claudia. Claudia and Andrew Restarick.
Was it chance, sheer chance, that she had come to be his secretary? There might be a link between them. Claudia. He considered her. Three girls in a flat, Claudia Reece-Holland’s flat. She had been the one who had taken the flat originally, and shared it first with a friend, a girl she already knew, and then with another girl, the third girl. The third girl, thought Poirot. Yes, it always came back to that.
The third girl. And that is where he had come in the end. Where he had had to come.
Where all this thinking out of patterns had led. To Norma Restarick.
A girl who had come to consult him as he sat at breakfast. A girl whom he had joined at a table in a cafe where she had recently been eating baked beans with the young man she loved. (He always seemed to see her at meal times, he noted!) And what did he think about her? First, what did other people think about her? Restarick cared for her and was desperately anxious about her, desperately frightened for her. He not only suspected — he was quite sure, apparently, that she had tried to poison his recently married wife. He had consulted a doctor about her. Poirot felt he would like dearly to talk to that doctor himself, but he doubted if he would get anywhere.
Doctors were very chary of parting with medical information to anyone but a duly accredited person such as the parents. But Poirot could imagine fairly well what the doctor had said. He had been cautious, Poirot thought, as doctors are apt to be.
He’d hemmed and hawed and spoken perhaps of medical treatment. He had not stressed too positively a mental angle, but had certainly suggested it or hinted at it.
In fact, the doctor probably was privately sure that that was what had happened. But he also knew a good deal about hysterical girls, and that they sometimes did things that were not really the result of mental causes, but merely of temper, jealousy, emotion, and hysteria. He would not be a psychiatrist himself nor a neurologist. He would be a G.P. who took no risks of making accusations about which he could not be sure, but suggested certain things out of caution. A job somewhere or other — a job in London, later perhaps treatment from a specialist?
What did anyone else think of Norma Restarick? Claudia Reece-Holland? He didn’t know. Certainly not from the little that he knew about her. She was capable of hiding any secret, she would certainly let nothing escape her which she did not mean to let escape. She had shown no signs of wanting to turn the girl out — which she might have done if she had been afraid of her mental condition. There could not have been much discussion between her and Frances on the subject since the other girl had so innocently let escape the fact that Norma had not returned to them after her weekend at home. Claudia had been annoyed about that. It was possible that Claudia was more in the pattern than she appeared. She had brains, Poirot thought, and efficiency… He came back to Norma, came back once again to the third girl. What was her place in the pattern? The place that would pull the whole thing together.
Ophelia, he thought? But there were two opinions to that, just as there were two opinions about Norma. Was Ophelia mad or was she pretending madness? Actresses had been variously divided as to how the part should be played — or perhaps, he should say, producers. They were the ones with ideas. Was Hamlet mad or sane? Take your choice. Was Ophelia mad or sane?
Restarick would not have used the word “mad” even in his thoughts about his daughter. Mentally disturbed was the term that everyone preferred to use. The other word that had been used of Norma had been “batty”. “She’s a bit batty”. “Not quite all there”. “A bit wanting, if you know what I mean”. Where “daily women” good judges? Poirot thought they might be. There was something odd about Norma, certainly, but she might be odd in a different way to what she seemed. He remembered the picture she had made slouching into his room, a girl of today, the modern type looking just as so many other girls looked. Limp hair hanging on her shoulders, the characterless shift dress, a skimpy look about the knees — all to his old-fashioned eyes looking like an adult girl pretending to be a child.