Louise? Why was the name Louise familiar ? Some casual mention? — a phrase?
— his fingers rimed neatly through typewritten pages. Ah! there it was! Just that one reference. The girl for whom Andrew Restarick had left his wife had been a girl named Louise Birell. Someone who had proved to be of little significance in Restarick’s later life. They had quarrelled and parted after about a year. The same pattern, Poirot thought. The same thing obtaining that had probably obtained all through this particular woman’s life. To love a man violently, to break up his home, perhaps, to live with him, and then to quarrel with him and leave him. He felt sure, absolutely sure, that this Louise Charpentier was the same Louise.
Even so, how did it tie up with the girl Norma? Had Restarick and Louise Charpentier come together again when he returned to England? Poirot doubted it.
Their lives had parted years ago. That they had by any chance come together again seemed unlikely to the point of impossibility I It had been a brief and in reality unimportant infatuation. His present wife would hardly be jealous enough of her husband’s past to wish to push his former mistress out of a window. Ridiculous! The only person so far as he could see who might have been the type to harbour a grudge over many long years, and wish to execute revenge upon the woman who had broken up her home, might have been the first Mrs. Restarick. And that sounded wildly impossible also, and anyway, the first Mrs. Restarick was dead!
The telephone rang. Poirot did not move.
At this particular moment he did not want to be disturbed. He had a feeling of being on a trail of some kind… He wanted to pursue it… The telephone stopped.
Good. Miss Lemon would be coping with it.
The door opened and Miss Lemon entered.
“Mrs. Oliver wants to speak to you,” she said.
Poirot waved a hand. “Not now, not now, I pray you \ I cannot speak to her now.” “She says there is something that she has just thought of — something she forget to tell you. About a piece of paper — an unfinished letter, which seems to have fallen out of a blotter in a desk in a furniture van. A rather incoherent story,” added Miss Lemon, allowing a note of disapproval to enter her voice.
Poirot waved more frantically.
“Not now,” he urged. “I beg of you, not «. now.” “I will tell her you are busy.” Miss Lemon retreated.
Peace descended once more upon the room. Poirot felt waves of fatigue creeping over him. Too much thinking. One must relax. Yes, one must relax. One must let tension go — in relaxation the pattern would come. He closed his eyes. There were all the components there. He was sure of that now, there was nothing more he could learn from outside. It must come from inside.
And quite suddenly — just as his eyelids were relaxing in sleep — it came.
It was all there — waiting for him! He would have to work it all out. But he knew now. All the bits were there, disconnected bits and pieces, all fitting in. A wig, a picture, 5 a.m., women and their hair dos, the Peacock Boy — all leading to the phrase with which it had begun: Third Girl.
“I may have committed a murder…” Of course!
A ridiculous nursery rhyme came into his mind. He repeated it aloud.
Rub a dub dub, three men in a tub And who do you think they be?
A butcher, a baker, a candlestick maker.
Too bad, he couldn’t remember the last line.
A baker, yes, and in a far-fetched way, a butcher — He tried out a feminine parody: Pat a cake, pat, three girls in aflat And who do you think they be?
A Personal Aide and a girl from the Slade And the Third is a — Miss Lemon came in.
“Ah — I remember now — ‘And they all came out of a weenie potato.’ ” Miss Lemon looked at him in anxiety.
“Dr. Stillingfleet insists on speaking to you at once. He says it is urgent.^ “Tell Dr. Stillingfleet he can—Dr.