Then she looked quizzically at Poirot and said: ‘But has this any bearing on the crime, M. Poirot?’
M. Poirot threw up his hands in a very French fashion.
‘You make me blush, mademoiselle,’ he said. ‘You expose me as a mere gossip. But what will you, I am interested always in the love affairs of young people.’
‘Yes,’ said Miss Johnson with a little sigh. ‘It’s nice when the course of true love runs smooth.’
Poirot gave an answering sigh. I wondered if Miss Johnson was thinking of some love affair of her own when she was a girl. And I wondered if M. Poirot had a wife, and if he went on in the way you always hear foreigners do, with mistresses and things like that. He looked so comic I couldn’t imagine it.
‘Sheila Reilly has a lot of character,’ said Miss Johnson. ‘She’s young and she’s crude, but she’s the right sort.’
‘I take your word for it, mademoiselle,’ said Poirot.
He got up and said, ‘Are there any other members of the staff in the house?’
‘Marie Mercado is somewhere about. All the men are up on the dig today. I think they wanted to get out of the house. I don’t blame them. If you’d like to go up to the dig—’
She came out on the verandah and said, smiling to me: ‘Nurse Leatheran won’t mind taking you, I dare say.’
‘Oh, certainly, Miss Johnson,’ I said.
‘And you’ll come back to lunch, won’t you, M. Poirot?’
‘Enchanted, mademoiselle.’
Miss Johnson went back into the living-room where she was engaged in cataloguing.
‘Mrs Mercado’s on the roof,’ I said. ‘Do you want to see her first?’
‘It would be as well, I think. Let us go up.’
As we went up the stairs I said: ‘I did what you told me. Did you hear anything?’
‘Not a sound.’
‘That will be a weight off Miss Johnson’s mind at any rate,’ I said. ‘She’s been worrying that she might have done something about it.’
Mrs Mercado was sitting on the parapet, her head bent down, and she was so deep in thought that she never heard us till Poirot halted opposite her and bade her good morning.
Then she looked up with a start.
She looked ill this morning, I thought, her small face pinched and wizened and great dark circles under her eyes.
‘Encore moi,’ said Poirot. ‘I come today with a special object.’
And he went on much in the same way as he had done to Miss Johnson, explaining how necessary it was that he should get a true picture of Mrs Leidner.
Mrs Mercado, however, wasn’t as honest as Miss Johnson had been. She burst into fulsome praise which, I was pretty sure, was quite far removed from her real feelings.
‘Dear, dear Louise! It’s so hard to explain her to someone who didn’t know her. She was such an exotic creature. Quite different from anyone else. You felt that, I’m sure, nurse? A martyr to nerves, of course, and full of fancies, but one put up with things in her one wouldn’t from anyone else. And she was so sweet to us all, wasn’t she, nurse? And so humble about herself—I mean she didn’t know anything about archaeology, and she was so eager to learn. Always asking my husband about the chemical processes for treating the metal objects and helping Miss Johnson to mend pottery. Oh, we were all devoted to her.’
‘Then it is not true, madame, what I have heard, that there was a certain tenseness—an uncomfortable atmosphere—here?’
Mrs Mercado opened her opaque black eyes very wide.
‘Oh! who can have been telling you that? Nurse? Dr Leidner? I’m sure he would never notice anything, poor man.’
And she shot a thoroughly unfriendly glance at me.
Poirot smiled easily.
‘I have my spies, madame,’ he declared gaily. And just for a minute I saw her eyelids quiver and blink.
‘Don’t you think,’ asked Mrs Mercado with an air of great sweetness, ‘that after an event of this kind, everyone always pretends a lot of things that never were? You know—tension, atmosphere, a “feeling that something was going to happen”? I think people just make up these things afterwards.’