Third Girl

Having got as far as that Mrs. Oliver felt as though she did not quite know what to do next. She had found Norma's father's place of business and the place where Claudia worked, but now, slightly disabused, she felt that this was not so much of a discovery as it might have been.

Frankly, did it help? Probably it didn't.

She waited around a few moments, walking from one end to the other of the corridor looking to see if anybody else interesting went in at the door of Restarick Enterprises. Two or three girls did but they did not look particularly interesting.

Mrs. Oliver went down again in the lift and walked rather disconsolately out of the building. She couldn't quite think what to do next. She took a walk round the adjacent streets, she meditated a visit to St. Paul's.

"I might go up in the Whispering Gallery and whisper," thought Mrs. Oliver.

"I wonder now how the Whispering Gallery would do for the scene of a murder?" "No," she decided, "too profane, I'm afraid. No, I don't think that would be quite nice." She walked thoughtfully towards the Mermaid Theatre. That, she thought, had far more possibilities.

She walked back in the direction of the various new buildings. Then, feeling the lack of a more substantial breakfast than she had had, she turned into a local cafe.

It was moderately well filled with people having extra late breakfast or else early "elevenses". Mrs. Oliver, looking round vaguely for a suitable table, gave a gasp.

At a table near the wall the girl Norma was sitting, and opposite her was sitting a young man with lavish chestnut hair curled on his shoulders, wearing a red velvet waistcoat and a very fancy jacket.

"David," said Mrs. Oliver under her breath. "It must be David." He and the girl Norma were talking excitedly together.

Mrs. Oliver considered a plan of campaign, made up her mind, and nodding her head in satisfaction, crossed the floor of the cafe to a discreet door marked "Ladies".

Mrs. Oliver was not quite sure whether Norma was likely to recognise her or not. It was not always the vaguest looking people who proved the vaguest in fact. At the moment Norma did not look as though she was likely to look at anybody but David, but who knows?

"I expect I can do something to myself anyway," thought Mrs. Oliver. She looked at herself in a small fly-blown mirror provided by the cafe's management, studying particularly what she considered to be the focal point of a woman's appearance, her hair. No one knew this better than Mrs.

Oliver, owing to the innumerable times that she had changed her mode of hairdressing, and had failed to be recognised by her friends in consequence. Giving her head an appraising eye she started work.

Out came the pins, she took off several coils of hair, wrapped them up in her handkerchief and stuffed them into her handbag, parted her hair in the middle, combed it sternly back from her face and rolled it up into a modest bun at the back of her neck. She also took out a pair of spectacles and put them on her nose. There was a really earnest look about her now!

"Almost intellectual," Mrs. Oliver thought approvingly. She altered the shape of her mouth by an application of lipstick, and emerged once more into the cafe, moving carefully since the spectacles were only for reading and in consequence that landscape was blurred. She crossed the cafe, and made her way to an empty table next to that occupied by Norma and David. She sat down so that she was facing David.

Norma, on the near side, sat with her back to her. Norma, therefore, would not see her unless she turned her head right round. The waitress drifted up. Mrs.

Oliver ordered coffee and a Bath bun and settled down to be inconspicuous.

Norma and David did not even notice her. They were deeply in the middle of a passionate discussion. It took Mrs. Oliver just a minute or two to tune in to them.

"… But you only fancy these things," David was saying. "You imagine them.

They're all utter, utter nonsense, my dear girl." "I don't know. I can't tell." Norma's voice had a queer lack of resonance in it.

Mrs. Oliver could not hear her as well as she heard David, since Norma's back was turned to her, but the dullness of the girl's tone struck her disagreeably. There was something wrong here, she thought.

Very wrong. She remembered the story as Poirot had first told it to her. "She thinks she may have committed a murder." What was the matter with the girl. Hallucinations? Was her mind really slightly affected, or was it no more and no less than truth, and in consequence the girl had suffered a bad shock?