Third Girl

"She is an emotional but normal girl," said Miss Battersby. "Mental instability I As I said before - rubbish! She's probably run away with some young man to get married, and there's nothing more normal than that!"

Chapter Twenty-One

POIROT sat in his big square armchair.

His hands rested on the arms, his eyes looked at the chimney-piece in front of him without seeing it. By his elbow was a small table and on it, neatly clipped together, were various documents.

Reports from Mr. Goby, information obtained from his friend. Chief Inspector Neele, a series of separate pages under the heading of "Hearsay, gossip, rumour" and the sources from which it had been obtained.

At the moment he had no need to consult these documents. He had, in fact, read them through carefully and laid them there in case there was any particular point he wished to refer to once more. He wanted now to assemble together in his mind all that he knew and had learned because he was convinced that these things must form a pattern. There must be a pattern there. He was considering now, from what exact angle to approach it. He was not one to trust in enthusiasm for some particular intuition. He was not an intuitive person - but he did have feelings. The important thing was not the feelings themselves - but what might have caused them. It was the cause that was interesting, the cause was so often not what you thought it was.

You had often to work it out by logic, by sense and by knowledge.

What did he feel about this case - what kind of a case was it? Let him start from the general, then proceed to the particular.

What were the salient facts of this case?

Money was one of them, he thought, though he did not know how. Somehow or other, money… He also thought, increasingly so, that there was evil somewhere.

He knew evil. He had met it before. He knew the tang of it, the taste of it, the way it went. The trouble was that here he did not yet know exactly where it was. He had taken certain steps to combat evil. He hoped they would be sufficient. Something was happening, something was in progress, that was not yet accomplished. Someone, somewhere, was in danger.

The trouble was that the facts pointed both ways. If the person he thought was in danger was really in danger, there seemed so far as he could see no reason why. Why should that particular person be in danger?

There was no motive. If the person he thought was in danger was not in danger, then the whole approach might have to be completely reversed… Everything that pointed one way he must turn round and look at from the completely opposite point of view.

He left that for the moment in the balance, and he came from there to the personalities - to the people. What pattern did they make? What part were they playing?

First - Andrew Restarick. He had accumulated by now a fair amount of information about Andrew Restarick. A general picture of his life before and after going abroad. A restless man, never sticking to one place or purpose long, but generally liked. Nothing of the wastrel about him, nothing shoddy or tricky. Not, perhaps, a strong personality? Weak in many ways?

Poirot frowned, dissatisfied. That picture did not somehow fit the Andrew Restarick that he himself had met. Not weak surely, with that thrust-out chin, the steady eyes, the air of resolution. He had been a successful business man, too, apparently.

Good at his job in the earlier years, and he had put through good deals in South Africa and in South America. He had increased his holdings. It was a success story that he had brought home with him, not one of failure. How then could he be a weak personality? Weak, perhaps, only where women were concerned. He had made a mistake in his marriage-married the wrong woman… Pushed into it perhaps by his family? And then he had met the other woman. Just that one woman? Or had there been several women? It was hard to find a record of that kind after so many years. Certainly he had not been a notoriously unfaithful husband. He had had a normal home, he had been fond, by all accounts, of his small daughter. But then he had come across a woman whom he had cared for enough to leave his home and to leave his country. It had been a real love affair.

But had it, perhaps, matched up with any additional motive? Dislike of office work, the City, the daily routine of London? He thought it might. It matched the pattern. He seemed, too, to have been a solitary type. Everyone had liked him both here and abroad, but there seemed no intimate friends. Indeed, it would have been difficult for him to have intimate friends abroad because he had never stopped in any one spot long enough. He had plunged into some gamble, attempted a coup, had made good, then tired of the thing and gone on somewhere else. Nomadic I A wanderer.