"What did you say?"
Elsa laughed.
She said, "What do you think I said?
After Amyas - Meredith? It would have been ridiculous!
It was stupid of him.
He always was rather stupid." She smiled suddenly. "He, wanted, you know, to protect me - to 'look after me,' that's how he put it! He thought, like everybody else, that the assizes had been a terrible ordeal for me.
And the reporters!
And the booing crowds!
And all the mud that was slung at me." She brooded a minute. Then she said, "Poor old Meredith!
Such an ass!"
And laughed again.
Once again Hercule Poirot encountered the shrewd, penetrating glance of Miss Williams, and once again felt the years falling away and himself a meek and apprehensive little boy.
There was, he explained, a question he wished to ask.
Miss Williams intimated her willingness to hear what the question was.
Poirot said slowly, picking his words carefully: "Angela Warren was injured as a very young child. Mrs Crale threw a paperweight at her.
Is that right?"
Miss Williams replied,
"Yes." "Who was your informant?"
"Angela herself.
She volunteered the information quite early."
"What did she say exactly?"
"She touched her cheek and said,
'Caroline did this when I was a baby.
She threw a paperweight at me.
Never refer to it - will you? - because it upsets her dreadfully.'"
"Did Mrs Crale herself ever mention the matter to you?"
"Only obliquely.
She assumed that I knew the story.
I remember her saying once,
'I know you think I spoil Angela, but, you see, I always feel there is nothing I can do to make up to her for what I did.' And on another occasion she said,
'To know you have permanently injured another human being is the heaviest burden anyone could have to bear.'"
"Thank you, Miss Williams.
That is all I wanted to know."
Poirot slowed up a little as he approached the big block of flats overlooking Regent's Park.
Really, when he came to think of it, he did not want to ask Angela Warren any questions at all.
The only question he did want to ask her could wait...
No, it was really only his insatiable passion for symmetry that was bringing him here.
Five people - there should be five questions! It was neater so. It rounded off the thing better.
Angela Warren greeted him with something closely approaching eagerness.
She said: "Have you found out anything?
Have you got anywhere?"
Slowly Poirot nodded his head in his best China mandarin manner.
"At last I make progress," he said.
"Philip Blake?"
It was halfway between statement and a question.
"Mademoiselle, I do not wish to say anything at present.
The moment has not yet come.
What I will ask of you is to be so good as to come down to Handcross Manor. The others have consented."
She said, with a slight frown,
"What do you propose to do?