Читать книгу The Killings at Kingfisher Hill онлайн | страница 4

The coach departed promptly at two o’clock, and I cannot think that the events which took place before the driver called out his cheery ‘Away we sally, ladies and gents!’ occupied as much as a quarter of an hour. I can therefore confidently locate at ten minutes before two the moment that I noticed her: the unhappy woman with the unfinished face.

I might as well tell you that my first title for this chapter was ‘An Unfinished Face’. Poirot preferred the original and protested when I told him I had changed it.

‘Catchpool, you have in you the tendency of unreasoning contrariness.’ He glared at me. ‘Why give this most important chapter a name that will create confusion? Nothing significant occurred at midnight, on that day or any other! It was the broad light of the day when we waited in the cold, nearly freezing to blocks of ice and receiving no explanation of why the doors of that char-a-banc could not be opened to us.’ Poirot stopped and frowned. I waited while he disentangled two separate sources of annoyance that he had unintentionally woven together in his invective. ‘It was decidedly not midnight.’

‘I do say that in my—’

‘Yes, you do say so. It is your duty, n’est-ce pas? You have invented, from no necessity, the requirement to state immediatement that a particular condition did not pertain. It is illogical, non?’

I merely nodded. It would have sounded pompous to offer the answer that was in my mind. Poirot is the finest detective at work anywhere in the world, but he is not an experienced teller of stories in written form, and he is, very occasionally, wrong. Broad daylight was an unfair description of that particular afternoon, as I have already said, and midnight—not the hour but the word—has everything to do with the matter at hand. If the words ‘Midnight Gathering’ on the cover of a book had not caught my eye before we set off on our travels that day, it is possible that no one would ever have known who was responsible for the killings at Kingfisher Hill.

But I am getting ahead of myself and must return us all to the cold outdoors. I understood why we were being made to wait in the relentless headwind, even if Poirot did not. Vanity, as so often where people are concerned, was the explanation—specifically, the vanity of Alfred Bixby Esquire. Bixby was the owner of the newly minted Kingfisher Coach Company and wished us all to observe the beauty of the vehicle that was about to transport us. Since Poirot and I had arrived, Bixby had been attached to our side as if by a gravitational force. So tickled pink was he to have the great Hercule Poirot among his patrons, he was prepared to ignore everybody else. This was a circumstance of which I could not count myself among the beneficiaries; my proximity to my friend ensured that every word addressed to him was also endured by me.