“From the overnight bag of Miss Frances Cary from which she had as yet no opportunity of removing it. Shall we see how it becomes her?” With a deft movement, he swept aside the black hair that masked Frances’s face so effectively. Crowned with a golden aureole before she could defend herself, she glared at them.
Mrs. Oliver exclaimed: “Good gracious — it is Mary Restarick.” Frances was twisting like an angry snake. Restarick jumped from his seat to come to her — but Neele’s strong grip retrained him.
“No. We don’t want any violence from you. The game’s up, you know, Mr.
Restarick — or shall I call you Robert Orwell — ” A stream of profanity came from the man’s lips. Frances’s voice was raised sharply: “Shut up, you damned fool!” she said.
Poirot had abandoned his trophy, the wig.
He had gone to Norma, and taken her hand gently in his.
“Your ordeal is over, my child. The victim will not be sacrificed. You are neither mad, nor have you killed anyone.
There are two cruel and heartless creatures who plotted against you, with cunningly administered drugs, with lies, doing their best to drive you either to suicide or to belief in your own guilt and madness.” Norma was staring with horror at the other plotter.
“My father. My father? He could think of doing that to me. His daughter. My father who loved me — ” “Not your father, mon enfant — a man who came here after your father’s death, to impersonate him and lay hands on an enormous fortune. Only one person was likely to recognise him — or rather to recognise that this man was not Andrew Restarick, the woman who had been Andrew Restarick’s mistress fifteen years ago.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
FOUR people sat in Poirot’s room.
Poirot in his square chair was drinking a glass of sirop de cassis. Norma and Mrs. Oliver sat on the sofa. Mrs. Oliver was looking particularly festive in unbecoming apple green brocade, surmounted by one of her more painstaking coiffures. Dr. Stillingfleet was sprawled out in a chair with his long legs stretched out, so that they seemed to reach half across the room.
“Now then there are lots of things I want to know,” said Mrs. Oliver. Her voice was accusatory.
Poirot hastened to pour oil on troubled waters.
“But, chere Madame, consider. What I owe to you I can hardly express. All, but all, my good ideas were suggested to me by you.” Mrs. Oliver looked at him doubtfully.
“Was it not you who introduced to me the phrase Third Girl’? It is there that I started — and there, too, that I ended — at the third girl of three living in a flat.
Norma was always technically, I suppose, the Third Girl—but when I looked at things the right way round it all fell into place. The missing answer, the lost piece of the puzzle, every time it was the same — the third girl.
“It was always, if you comprehend me, the person who was not there. She was a name to me, no more.” “I wonder I never connected her with Mary Restarick,” said Mrs. Oliver. “I’d seen Mary Restarick at Crosshedges, talked to her. Of course the first time I saw Frances Cary, she had black hair hanging all over her face. That would have put anyone off!” “Again it was you, Madame, who drew my attention to how easily a woman’s appearance is altered by the way she arranges her hair. Frances Cary, remember, had had dramatic training. She knew all about the art of swift make-up. She could alter her voice at need. As Frances, she had long black hair, framing her face and half hiding it, heavy dead white maquillage, dark pencilled eyebrows and mascara, with a drawling husky voice. Mary Restarick, with her wig of formally arranged golden hair with crimped waves, her conventional clothes, her slight Colonial accent, her brisk way of talking, presented a complete contrast. Yet one felt, from the beginning, that she was not quite real. What kind of a woman was she? I did not know.
“I was not clever about her — No — I, Hercule Poirot, was not clever at all.” “Hear, hear,” said Dr. Stillingfleet.