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“Thank you, mesdames et messieurs, for giving me a moment of your so valuable time. Please to sit. Ah, and look before you sit, of course! Those of us with the little daemons, we must be very careful, hein?” Poirot smiled his most ingratiating smile at Japp, whose fancy rat, Edith, twitched her whiskers at him and Astraea in annoyance; but Jeremy Caldwell patted the breast pocket of his morning suit as the other houseguests—and suspects—streamed past him into the parlor.
“Very true, Mr. Poirot,” he said quietly, and looked fondly at the single beetle leg protruding from the pocket.
Light streamed in from the arched window that stretched nearly to the full height of the unusually tall parlor; beyond, the west lawn was visible, as green and fresh as it had been when old Mr. Caldwell was alive. The world rolled on perfectly well without him, it appeared.
Grumbling and mildly protesting to cover their nosiness, one by one, the guests filled the parlor and stretched themselves variously on expensive divans, silk couches, and overstuffed armchairs, while their daemons settled themselves on rugs and pillows. A few guests lit cigarettes or pipes; Madam Rose, the spiritualist, made a show of drawing out an opera-length cigarette holder carved from bone, and her serval, Mungojerrie, closed her eyes with pleasure as Madam Rose’s missionary sister Adela gasped with judgmental horror at the sight.
Last of all came an elderly woman with a pinafore over her dress, trailed by a turkey vulture whose claws tapped a soft rhythm on the wooden floor. “Nanny Linton,” Poirot said, “how good of you to join us.” Poirot took her hand and raised it once to his lips before helping her to a nearby chair. She looked faintly embarrassed, but her vulture, Clarence, leaned over to Astraea and gently groomed one of her iridescent neck-feathers back into neatness. “I’ll be,” said Twizzleton, the hapless stockbroker; “she’s gotten to him too, has she? Caldwell’s favorite servant. I’ve said it before—“
“Please, Monsieur Twizzleton,” Poirot interrupted. “You have all been so patient in the mystery of Caldwell’s death and the matter of his will; please to indulge me just a few moments longer.” He made to reach for his suit pocket, but halted when Hastings arrived. Astraea, delighted, flapped her grey wings and settled immediately on the shoulders of Hastings’ wolfhound, Beatrice. “Yes, Hastings?”
“Oh, sorry, Poirot, didn’t mean to interrupt,” he said; “I, erm, just wanted to tell you we’ll be outside. Always makes me a bit nervy, this part. And Beatrice could use a run.”
“Not at all, Hastings, please enjoy the good English airs.”
Hastings nodded, still looking stiffer than usual, and turned to go; Jeremy clapped him on the shoulder as he passed, and Hastings patted him a bit awkwardly before whistling for Beatrice and sidling out through the arched doorway. A few moments later, they appeared outside, and the gathered party watched them through the window until their figures diminished across the expanse of emerald lawn.
“Now,” said Poirot to the settled room, “I can solve this case with two envelopes.”
He reached into his inner suit pocket.
“One,” he said, laying it delicately on the central table; it bore the address of Caldwell’s lawyer and had FILE carelessly stamped on it. Astraea, ever watchful, circuited the room and glided to the table as Poirot laid the second envelope, buttery yellow in color, face down. “Two.” Poirot chucked Astraea under her chin; she cooed with that melody unique to pigeons, settling herself across a portion of each envelope. The message was clear: no one but Poirot would touch them.
“At the beginning this case seemed very simple. Nanny Linton came to me and said, in Monsieur Caldwell’s will, he has made provision for everyone but me. He has forgotten my cottage. And so, she said, it cannot be the right will.” Poirot shook his finger emphatically, pacing. “Ordinarily this little oversight would cause no trouble for anyone else. But in this case, there is an extraordinary thing: the word of Nanny Linton.” Poirot turned to her; her eyes were watery. “Oh yes. Nanny Linton is no ordinary person. Au contraire: everyone in the village knows her. Including Monsieur Upshaw, the late Monsieur Caldwell’s lawyer. And Monsieur Upshaw says that Nanny Linton’s word is as good as law. He will extend the probate and investigate the legitimacy of the will.”
“Tosh and piffle,” grumbled Mr. Warne, the neighbor, immediately drawing an elbow from Mrs. Warne and a hiss from her tomcat to his opossum, who returned it.
“And what does Mr. Upshaw find? That Nanny Linton is absolutely right: the witnesses to the will are invented. Fake! The will has been forged!” Astraea cooed loudly for emphasis, and the vicar, Mr. Yarbrough, rolled his eyes. Behind the couch, the vicar’s caiman snapped his jaws once or twice, eyeing Astraea with sluggish menace.
“Enter Poirot.” He made a grand gesture with his hands, as if he had completed some feat of prestidigitation. “Of course the forgery of the will raises suspicion but immediately that Monsieur Caldwell’s death, it is not a natural one. The police report says that the body was found in a bedroom of the east wing, and this at first raises no alarm, because Monsieur Caldwell, he is known to be dying. He has simply died in his sleep. But if one walks into the east wing of the house, one of course notices at once—“
“The doorway,” Adela said suddenly, with shock. Her ferret stuck a nose out from under her cardigan and sniffed. “Of course. Gajasura.”
“Précisément, mademoiselle,” Poirot replied. “Monsieur Caldwell’s daemon, the elephant Gajasura, had caused him slowly to renovate this house over many years, so that he could return to all the places he had enjoyed as a boy. See this beautiful arched doorway.” Poirot pointed to the doorway behind him, through which Hastings had departed; it was exceptionally tall, much larger than necessary to admit mere humans. “But these renovations had not yet reached the east wing. Every doorway remains at the original height. It would have been impossible that Monsieur Cadlwell should go to sleep in the east wing, because it was impossible for Gajasura to join him.”
“I’ll be damned,” Mr. Yarbrough said, as many of the guests gasped. “It really was murder.”
“Oui, monsieur, it was murder. This would be no surprise to you, who hated him so deeply; who hated him, indeed, all his life, and had once even considered abandoning him to drown in his own well—“
“Now look here—” Mr. Yarbrough growled, but Poirot held up a hand.
“But of course, on the evening of Monsieur Caldwell’s death, you were dining with one of your parishioners and her beautiful young daughter, I think. So it appears murder, it is not among your sins.”
Yarbrough’s face reddened, but he puffed out a cough of dismissal. “Quite right,” he said, and sank back into the couch.
“Indeed,” Poirot said, rounding on the silk divan, “it seems those who knew Monsieur Caldwell longest hated him most.” He peered down significantly at Mr. and Mrs. Warne, the latter of whom puffed her chest out and said, “And just what is that supposed to mean?”
“Oh come now, Madame Warne, let us not play games, hein? You were seen taking leaves from a hemlock plant in your garden on the very day of Monsieur Caldwell’s demise. And your husband, no doubt still seething with anger from nearly being evicted by Monsieur Caldwell not six months since, was among the dinner party that night. It would have been easy, would it not, so very easy to slip a titration into his whisky glass. All your problems, they would disappear.” Mrs. Warne’s tomcat, Henry, was now growling loudly at her feet. But Poirot and Astraea both appeared entirely unruffled; Poirot clasped his hands behind his back as tidily as Astraea folded her wings. “But fortunately for you both, Monsieur Twizzleton, who can no longer afford, as you call it, ‘the good stuff,’ took the remains of Monsieur Caldwell’s drink and his dinner and consumed them. And as you can see, he is in the best of health.”
“Too bloody right,” Mr. Warne said, sweating. “Have to be stupid to poison him in front of a whole dinner party. Bloody live next door, don’t I. Could’ve done it anytime.” Mrs. Warne swatted him and hissed him into silence.
“Now that is interesting, Monsieur Warne,” Poirot said. “Indeed no one in this room was short on opportunity. So we must ask: why that night? Was it the moment serendipitous for our murderer, the lucky chance to hide his crime? Perhaps. But if so, then why make such a clumsy mistake—to move the body?”
Poirot turned back toward the doorway, drawing his captive audience’s gaze. “You know this house is so grand, you can barely see the east wing from here,” he said. “I wonder if our murderer, he was trying to distance his crime from the one thing that might incriminate him. Because of course what is here next door in the west wing is the library.” He turned around. “And the library is where Monsieur Caldwell kept his will.”
“So?” sniffed Madam Rose. “We all knew the will was in there.”
“Exactement, Madame,” Poirot said. “If the body was found in the library, of course suspicion immediately goes to the will. The police will ask the one question our murderer does not want asked: cui bono? Who benefits?”
“I would advise you to tread very carefully,” Twizzleton said. “You’re on family territory now, Poirot, and I don’t think you know what that means.” Behind him, shadowed by the chair he sat in, a hyena began a humorless laugh, and the hair on its spine stood on end.
“Oh but yes, Monsieur Twizzleton, the Caldwell family, it is not a happy one, hein? The great-nephew taken to the far east when he was but a boy and was orphaned, who fell in with the wrong crowd,” Poirot said, gesturing at Jeremy Caldwell, who blushed; “the missionary niece who is determined to leave for Africa; her sister who has become a spiritualist so that she can move beyond the things of this world, and never return her family’s phone calls—” (“Not that they ever call,” Madam Rose said, and Adela huffed loudly;) “—and you, the stockbroker who has not a penny to his name, returned from America only to convince your twice-removed cousin to invest in your hare-brained scheme, which of course he did not. There was no love lost between you, was there, monsieur? Did he not turn you down that very night, when you stayed after the other guests had left to press your idea, alone?”
“All right!” bellowed Twizzleton, and behind him, the hyena shrieked. He reached a hand into the shadow, stilling her gently. “All right,” he said more quietly. “I did stay late to get him alone.” His eyes were fixed on Poirot. “I did. And he did turn me down, damn him. And yes, before you ask, I did hope the money he left me in the will might cover some bad investments, including that one.” He took a shuddering breath. “But I didn’t kill him, Mr. Poirot. Whatever you might think, I did have fond memories of him once. It’s why I thought he might say yes.”
His eyes shifted. “And I wasn’t the last person to leave the house.”
“Ah.” At this, Poirot’s eyelids dropped almost imperceptibly, and a brief expression of pleasure crossed his face. “How do you know this?”
Twizzleton looked around the room, as if measuring whether he had any dignity left to lose, and apparently decided he hadn’t. “I went to the kitchen,” he said. “After we argued. I went to eat the leftovers. I haven’t been eating much recently, and—well, watching all that go to waste was more than I could stand, even after I took Caldwell’s plate and glass from the dining table. So I was in the kitchen chatting with Mrs. Keene, the cook, when I heard someone shuffling down the hall.”
“Could it not have been Monsieur Caldwell?”
“No, I’d just left him in here.”
“Remind me please, Monsieur Twizzleton, when the gentlemen came into this parlor for the whisky and cigars, where did the ladies go?”
“My turn,” Adela whispered. Her ferret skittered up her arm and wrapped itself protectively around her neck.
“Mademoiselle Adela,” Poirot said, “where did you go after dinner?”
“Up to my room,” Adela said primly; but the ferret was trembling.
“And did anyone see you do this?”
“No,” she said tightly.
Poirot turned. “And you, Madam Rose?”
She blew a stream of smoke out before answering, as languid as her serval. “I went to my room, too,” she said. “That’s what one does after dinner when the company is bad. And no, no one saw me.”
“Same for me, I’m afraid,” Jeremy chimed in. “Though I went to my hotel; I wasn’t staying in the house. And the hotel porter wasn’t on duty when arrived, so you’ll just have to take my word for it.”
“Why don’t you come to the point,” Twizzleton said, with a rough undertone that perhaps was meant to sound threatening but came off quite desperate.
“Yes, why don’t you, Poirot, so we can get on with the inheritances from the will, and then we can all go home?” Japp said, a bit lower in tone, but obviously annoyed.
“Thank you, Inspector Japp, you are quite correct.” Poirot reached down toward the table and stroked Astraea’s neck feathers; she cooed, ruffling her wings over the two envelopes beneath her. “I digress. It is most important, that will. Everyone in this room is mentioned in it except Nanny Linton, but there are four primary beneficiaries: Adela, the niece determined to become a missionary; her sister Rose, the spiritualist with no clients who will come to her anymore; James Twizzleton, who as we know is in very great need of money, and will get it; and the great-nephew Jeremy Caldwell, who his great-uncle had feared perhaps had turned to crime in a faraway land, as rumors came to him of his friendship with thieves, even with the notorious assassin Farley and his snake daemon Oriax, and yet who receives the lion’s share of the money, though he does not get the house.”
Here Poirot paused. He had crossed to the mantelpiece and begun straightening the items atop it; now he took in the whole room.
“Now that is curious, hein? Why does he not get the house? Even though the real will is missing, it can barely be imagined that even in the original, the house should be left to someone else. Why would the house go to someone with money problems—” he gestured at Twizzleton— “someone who would sell it—” he looked at Adela, who looked away— “someone who would ruin its reputation, this so magnificent house?” He looked at last at Rose, who laughed.
“He did care about the house more than any of us, that’s true,” she said. “I mean, look at it.”
They all did. A movement in the marvelous arched window drew their eyes; Hastings and Beatrice were just visible in the distance, jogging happily toward the topiary.
“Nanny Linton,” Poirot said, “I wonder if you remember that letter you wrote to me?”
“I’ll try,” she said, barely audible even in the stillness of the room.
“You wrote to me in your letter something that I did not at first understand. You said you knew the will that was read aloud was a forgery not merely because Monsieur Caldwell did not leave for you the cottage, but also because it was missing something.”
“That’s right, sir,” she said. “It had no feet.”
A murmur went around the room.
“Thank you, Madame,” Poirot said, his eyes crinkling. “Yes. The will had no feet. Of course I assumed this was some English idiom I simply did not understand. But then one afternoon I found Monsieur Warne outside. Do you remember that, Monsieur Warne? What were you doing?”
Mr. Warne looked around uncertainly, but seeming to draw strength from the fact that the possibility of his being the murderer had already been raised and dismissed, he said: “Well, I was walking the bounds, Mr. Poirot.”
“And what is this walking of the bounds?”
“Old tradition,” Mr. Warne said. “Usually the whole parish’d do it. Walk the land so’s everyone knows where the boundaries are and all.”
“That’s so,” the vicar piped up. “Caldwell liked to gather everyone for it. Gave him a kick to rub everyone’s nose in how much land he had, how many people rented from him.”
“And what made you think to do this?”
Mr. Warne shrugged uncomfortably. “Well... at dinner, Caldwell mentioned it. Said we’d all get what we deserved and no more, and none of us could do anything about it because of the feet.” He looked at his wife. “We figured it was something hidden in the bounds. Some trick. Never did find anything.”
“No, you would not have,” Poirot said. “Because the feet were not human.” He leaned down and picked up the first envelope. Astraea nibbled his fingers amiably and then settled more fully onto the second envelope.
“It was Hastings who explained this to me,” he went on, holding the envelope up now and showing it, slowly, so that everyone could see. “Monsieur Caldwell so loved the old English tradition because it made him feel important, including the tradition of the feet of fines. It used to be that when land was passed on, the document of the transfer would contain one copy here—” he pointed at the top of the envelope— “and one copy at the bottom.” He pointed at the air below it. “The second copy was called the foot. It would be cut off and sent to Westminster Abbey for safekeeping. Imagine having your will stored in Westminster Abbey. It would have seemed most agreeable to Monsieur Caldwell, who cared so much for his own importance. And Nanny Linton, who had heard him talk all the time about the will, of course knew of this plan. So when she saw the will held in the lawyer’s hands, at once she knew it was not the real will, because it had not been cut. It had never had feet.”
Poirot smiled. He dipped his fingers into the envelope. “Unfortunately for Monsieur Caldwell, he had not bothered to check whether this tradition was still in practice at Westminster before sending his foot, and since they no longer accept the little feet, they sent it back. But not to Monsieur Caldwell. It went to the return address—to Monsieur Upshaw, his lawyer. And since it was returned post, bien, ce n’est pas important, it was marked with a stamp and waited so patiently in the filing for us.”
He pulled the document from the envelope. A collective gasp went up.
“Voila—the foot. The original will. I have taken the time to compare it to the forgery. It is very good, hein? But soon you notice the words are not quite the same, as if someone was trying to remember. And most significantly, in the original, great-nephew Jeremy, he does indeed get the house. But in the new will, the house goes to Mademoiselle Adela Northcott, the one person who does not want it.” He tapped his finger on the paper to underscore these final words.
“Why this change? Is it perhaps an attempt to frame Mademoiselle Northcott, to suggest that she has changed the will in her favor? But no one could possibly think this. The forger must not have known Mademoiselle Northcott at all. She was about to leave for Africa; she seemed most anxious to be on her way. Everyone said she was nervous all evening at dinner, even checking her watch. Hastings, he said to me something about her that was most enlightening: it was as if she wanted to take the money and run.”
“How dare you,” Adela said. Her face was flushed. “Must you excoriate us all like this?”
“But my dear Mademoiselle Northcott, it is just the opposite. This is most illuminating, especially in light of Nanny Linton’s testimony. When I sat in her cottage so charming, she talked to me of all of you, and she said it was the one item everyone wants, this beautiful house, with so many memories, good or bad. She said it was the reason she had never left her cottage in all those years. No one who had lived here, even as a child, could possibly want to give away the house.”
Jeremy Caldwell’s eyes had turned cold. Poirot turned to him.
“And no one did.”
“What?” Twizzleton exclaimed. “What do you mean no one did? No one forged the will?”
“Non non non, mon ami. The person who gave away the house... had never lived here.”
The room was absolutely silent.
Astraea bent down and, with some effort, picked up the second envelope in her beak. She flew to Poirot’s shoulder. “Merci, Astraea,” Poirot said, and he opened the envelope.
“I have in my hands a telegram,” Poirot said, “from Cairo. It is confirming that Monsieur Jeremy Caldwell will return by boat to England in four months. He is still out on a dig. It is dated yesterday.” He looked coolly at Jeremy. “Who are you, monsieur?”
“This is absurd,” Jeremy said, his voice low. “My great-uncle and I were on excellent terms. I had no wish to speed his death. I only regret that after dinner I couldn’t save him, that I went back immediately to my hotel—”
“No you did not!” Poirot cried. “Non, monsieur. You did not return to your hotel. You waited here, in this house, for your opportunity, and then you snuck into the library to read the will. Because it is most important, that will. Your plan of impersonating the long-lost Jeremy Caldwell is going well. Too well. Monsieur Caldwell has become too fond of you. He is likely to leave you the house, this magnificent house, the one thing you cannot accept, because it will mean you have to stay. And the longer you stay, the more questions will be asked; the more likely it is that someone who should recognize you will not, or that the real Jeremy Caldwell will return from his dig. You cannot even sell the house because that will require papers you do not have. So it is very important you discover the contents of the will.”
As Poirot spoke, the images seemed to flash before his audience’s eyes; the young man hiding in a nearby room, waiting until the lights were low to sneak into the library and examine the will by firelight.
“You find it. It is as you feared. Your great-uncle discovers you. He is angry, and Gajasura is angry, all six tons of him. And they are even angrier when you try to dissuade Monsieur Caldwell from giving you the house. It is an affront to all that he holds dear—his legacy.
“And here we must guess, but I think I have it right, hein? There is a struggle; the old man declares he will cut you out of the will entirely and hurls it into the fireplace; the young man tries to save it, and gives the old man a shove. Too hard a shove. The old man clutches at his chest. He falls. Gajasura disappears. You know he is dead.
“Even in your panic you realize you must move the body from the library so that there will be nothing connecting this death to the will. He was an old, sick man, he could have died in his sleep, and so after you drag the body as far away from the library as you can, you put him in the nearest bedroom. And because you did not grow up in this house with its endless renovations, because Jeremy never mentioned them to you, because he did not trust you, his not very good friend James Farley... you did not stop to think whether Gajasura could fit through the door.” Poirot nodded grimly.
“And then you rush back. You create the forgery, and oh, yes, it is very good. You have a good memory for things like this. You give the house to Mademoiselle Northcott and to yourself, the cash. You will ‘take the money and run.’”
Poirot stepped toward the young man. On his shoulder, Astraea was alert, eyes bright.
“But you forget that the house comes with the grounds, and it matters very much, those little grounds. To most of you they are not at all important. But to Nanny Linton, they are everything.” Poirot turned his head to smile at her, and she smiled back in relief. He looked back at Farley. “That is why it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God.”
Farley stood silent for a moment, panting. In the corner, Twizzleton’s hyena could be heard whimpering in fear.
“That’s far enough, Poirot,” he said, menacingly. Then he swallowed, seeming to collect himself. “You have no real proof.”
Poirot tsked. “Perhaps. You seem remarkably calm, it is true. After so long an interrogation, one might expect more agitation. Oh, Hastings is back!” Poirot said brightly. Everyone turned in surprise. Hastings stood in the window, nose almost touching the panes of glass, with one hand on Beatrice and the other cupped in a loose fist. “What a long run that was. Perhaps a half hour.”
Farley sputtered. “What on earth does Hastings’ run have to do with—”
Poirot’s gaze hardened. “Where is your beetle, monsieur?”
Farley’s face drained white in shock. He touched his breast pocket—empty.
On the other side of the window, Hastings held up the beetle.
“It’s not his daemon!” cried Adela; “It’s a fake!” gasped the vicar; and “God! Oh my God!” came another cry as the room erupted.
The young man snarled.
Lightning fast, from his lower coat pocket, fangs bared, an adder leapt—directly at Astraea.
“No!” cried Twizzleton, hurling himself at the assassin as his hyena roared and pounced on the snake, not a second too soon. A storm of feathers swirled about the room as Astraea escaped into the high ceiling and Poirot fell backward to the floor, startled, breathless.
Then it was over.
“James Farley,” Inspector Japp said stoically as his sergeants handcuffed the seething man, “you are under arrest for the murder of Stuart Caldwell. Anything you say...” his patter blended with the noises of Farley swearing and Oriax hissing as they were dragged away. Behind them in the parlor, surrounded by tumult, Poirot sat on the floor, clutching Astraea to his chest with shaking hands.