You are a detective yourself, aren’t you — a real one?” “I am all that there is of the most real,” said Hercule Poirot.
He noticed that she repressed a smile.
He studied her more closely. She was handsome in a rather artificial fashion.
Her golden hair was stiffly arranged. He wondered whether she might not at heart be secretly unsure of herself, whether she were not carefully playing the part of the English lady absorbed in her garden. He wondered a little what her social background might have been.
“You have a very fine garden here,” he said.
“You like gardens?” “Not as the English like gardens. You have for a garden a special talent in England. It means something to you that it does not to us.” “To French people, you mean?” “I am not French. I am Belgian.” “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 chateau 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,3′ 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 thirtyodd 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.