Hercule Poirot let the revolving1 door wind him round. Arresting the swing of it with one hand, hestepped forward into the small restaurant. There were not many people there. It was anunfashionable time of day, but his eyes soon saw the man he had come to meet. The square, solidbulk of Superintendent2 Spence rose from the table in one corner.
“Good,” he said. “You have arrived here. You had no difficulty in finding it?”
“None at all. Your instructions were most adequate.”
“Let me introduce you now. This is Chief Superintendent Garroway. Monsieur Hercule Poirot.”
Garroway was a tall, thin man with a lean, ascetic3 face, grey hair which left a small round spotlike a tonsure4, so that he had a faint resemblance to an ecclesiastic5.
“This is wonderful,” said Poirot.
“I am retired6 now, of course,” said Garroway, “but one remembers. Yes, certain things oneremembers, although they are past and gone, and the general public probably remembers nothingabout them. But yes.”
Hercule Poirot very nearly said “Elephants do remember,” but checked himself in time. Thatphrase was so associated in his mind now with Mrs. Ariadne Oliver that he found it difficult torestrain it from his tongue in many clearly unsuitable categories.
“I hope you have not been getting impatient,” said Superintendent Spence.
He pulled forward a chair, and the three men sat down. A menu was brought. SuperintendentSpence, who was clearly addicted7 to this particular restaurant, offered tentative words of advice.
Garroway and Poirot made their choice. Then, leaning back a little in their chairs and sippingglasses of sherry, they contemplated8 each other for some minutes in silence before speaking.
“I must apologize to you,” said Poirot, “I really must apologize to you for coming to you withmy demands about an affair which is over and done with.”
“What interests me,” said Spence, “is what has interested you. I thought first that it was unlikeyou to have this wish to delve9 in the past. It is connected with something that has occurrednowadays, or is it sudden curiosity about a rather inexplicable10, perhaps, case? Do you agree withthat?”
He looked across the table.
“Inspector Garroway,” he said, “as he was at that time, was the officer in charge of theinvestigations into the Ravenscroft shooting. He was an old friend of mine and so I had nodifficulty in getting in touch with him.”
“And he was kind enough to come here today,” said Poirot, “simply because I must admit to acuriosity which I am sure I have no right to feel about an affair that is past and done with.”
“Well, I wouldn’t say that,” said Garroway. “We all have interests in certain cases that are past.
Did Lizzie Borden really kill her father and mother with an axe11? There are people who still do notthink so. Who killed Charles Bravo and why? There are several different ideas, mostly not verywell founded. But still people try to find alternative explanations.”
His keen, shrewd eyes looked across at Poirot.
“And Monsieur Poirot, if I am not mistaken, has occasionally shown a leaning towards lookinginto cases, going back, shall we say, for murder, back into the past, twice, perhaps three times.”
“Three times, certainly,” said Superintendent Spence.
“Once, I think I am right, by request of a Canadian girl.”
“That is so,” said Poirot. “A Canadian girl, very vehement12, very passionate13, very forceful, whohad come here to investigate a murder for which her mother had been condemned14 to death,although she died before sentence was carried out. Her daughter was convinced that her motherhad been innocent.”
“And you agreed?” said Garroway.
“I did not agree,” said Poirot, “when she first told me of the matter. But she was very vehementand very sure.”
“It was natural for a daughter to wish her mother to have been innocent and to try and proveagainst all appearances that she was innocent,” said Spence.
“It was just a little more than that,” said Poirot. “She convinced me of the type of woman hermother was.”
“A woman incapable15 of murder?”
“No,” said Poirot, “it would be very difficult, and I am sure both of you agree with me, to thinkthere is anyone quite incapable of murder if one knows what kind of person they are, what led upto it. But in that particular case, the mother never protested her innocence16. She appeared to bequite content to be sentenced. That was curious to begin with. Was she a defeatist? It did not seemso. When I began to enquire17, it became clear that she was not a defeatist. She was, one would say,almost the opposite of it.”
Garroway looked interested. He leaned across the table, twisting a bit of bread off the roll on hisplate.
“And was she innocent?”
“Yes,” said Poirot. “She was innocent.”
“And that surprised you?”
“Not by the time I realized it,” said Poirot. “There were one or two things—one thing inparticular—that showed she could not have been guilty. One fact that nobody had appreciated atthe time. Knowing that one had only to look at what there was, shall we say, on the menu in theway of looking elsewhere.” 1
Grilled18 trout19 was put in front of them at this point.
“There was another case, too, where you looked into the past, not quite in the same way,”
continued Spence. “A girl who said at a party that she had once seen a murder committed.” 2“There again one had to—how shall I put it?—step backwards20 instead of forward,” said Poirot.
“Yes, that is very true.”
“And had the girl seen the murder committed?”
“No,” said Poirot, “because it was the wrong girl. This trout is delicious,” he added, withappreciation.
“They do all fish dishes very well here,” said Superintendent Spence.
He helped himself from the sauceboat proffered22 to him.
“A most delicious sauce,” he added.
Silent appreciation21 of food filled the next three minutes.
“When Spence came along to me,” said Superintendent Garroway, “asking if I rememberedanything about the Ravenscroft case, I was intrigued23 and delighted at once.”
“You haven’t forgotten all about it?”
“Not the Ravenscroft case. It wasn’t an easy case to forget about.”
“You agree,” said Poirot, “that there were discrepancies24 about it? Lack of proof, alternativesolutions?”
“No,” said Garroway, “nothing of that kind. All the evidence recorded the visible facts. Deathsof which there were several former examples, yes, all plain sailing. And yet—”
“Well?” said Poirot.
“And yet it was all wrong,” said Garroway.
“Ah,” said Spence. He looked interested.
“That’s what you felt once, isn’t it?” said Poirot, turning to him.
“In the case of Mrs. McGinty. Yes.” 3
“You weren’t satisfied,” said Poirot, “when that extremely difficult young man was arrested. Hehad every reason for doing it, he looked as though he had done it, everyone thought he had done it.
But you knew he hadn’t done it. You were so sure of it that you came to me and told me to goalong to see what I could find out.”
“See if you could help—and you did help, didn’t you?” said Spence.
Poirot sighed.
“Fortunately, yes. But what a tiresome25 young man he was. If ever a young man deserved to behanged, not because he had done a murder but because he wouldn’t help anyone to prove that hehadn’t. Now we have the Ravenscroft case. You say, Superintendent Garroway, something waswrong?”
“Yes, I felt quite sure of it if you understand what I mean.”
“I do understand,” said Poirot. “And so does Spence. One does come across these thingssometimes. The proofs are there, the motive26, the opportunity, the clues, the mise-en-scène, it’s allthere. A complete blueprint27, as you might say. But all the same, those whose profession it is,know. They know that it’s all wrong, just like a critic in the artistic28 world knows when a picture isall wrong. Knows when it’s a fake and not the real thing.”
“There wasn’t anything I could do about it, either,” said Superintendent Garroway. “I lookedinto it, around it, up above it and down below it, as you might say. I talked to the people. Therewas nothing there. It looked like a suicide pact29, it had all the marks of the suicide pact.
Alternatively, of course, it could be a husband who shot a wife and then himself, or a wife whoshot her husband and then herself. All those three things happen. When one comes across them,one knows they have happened. But in most cases one has some idea of why.”
“There wasn’t any real idea of why in this case, was that it?” said Poirot.
“Yes. That’s it. You see, the moment you begin to enquire into a case, to enquire about peopleand things, you get a very good picture as a rule of what their lives have been like. This was acouple, ageing, the husband with a good record, a wife affectionate, pleasant, on good termstogether. That’s a thing one soon finds out about. They were happy living together. They went forwalks, they played picquet, and poker30 patience with each other in the evenings, they had childrenwho caused them no particular anxiety. A boy in school in England and a girl in a pensionnat inSwitzerland. There was nothing wrong with their lives as far as one could tell. From such medicalevidence as one could obtain, there was nothing definitely wrong with their health. The husbandhad suffered from high blood pressure at one time, but was in good condition by the taking ofsuitable medicaments which kept him on an even keel. His wife was slightly deaf and had had alittle minor31 heart trouble, nothing to be worried about. Of course it could be, as does happensometimes, that one or other of them had fears for their health. There are a lot of people who are ingood health but are quite convinced they have cancer, are quite sure that they won’t live anotheryear. Sometimes that leads to their taking their own life. The Ravenscrofts didn’t seem that kind ofperson. They seemed well-balanced and placid32.”
“So what did you really think?” said Poirot.
“The trouble is that I couldn’t think. Looking back, I said to myself it was suicide. It could onlyhave been suicide. For some reason or other they decided33 that life was unbearable34 to them. Notthrough financial trouble, not through health difficulties, not because of unhappiness. And there,you see, I came to a full stop. It had all the marks of suicide. I cannot see any other thing thatcould have happened except suicide. They went for a walk. In that walk they took a revolver withthem. The revolver lay between the two bodies. There were blurred35 fingerprints36 of both of them.
Both of them in fact had handled it, but there was nothing to show who had fired it last. One tendsto think the husband perhaps shot his wife and then himself. That is only because it seems morelikely. Well, why? A great many years have passed. When something reminds me now and again,something I read in the papers of bodies, a husband’s and wife’s bodies somewhere, lying dead,having taken their own lives apparently37, I think back and then I wonder again what happened inthe Ravenscroft case. Twelve years ago or fourteen and I still remember the Ravenscroft case andwonder—well, just the one word, I think. Why—why—why? Did the wife really hate her husbandand want to get rid of him? Did they go on hating each other until they could bear it no longer?”
Garroway broke off another piece of bread and chewed at it.
“You got some idea, Monsieur Poirot? Has somebody come to you and told you something thathas awakened38 your interest particularly? Do you know something that might explain the ‘Why?’”
“No. All the same,” said Poirot, “you must have had a theory. Come now, you had a theory?”
“You’re quite right, of course. One does have theories. One expects them all, or one of them atleast, to work out, but they don’t usually. I think that my theory was in the end that you couldn’tlook for the cause, because one didn’t know enough. What did I know about them? GeneralRavenscroft was close on sixty, his wife was thirty-five. All I knew of them, strictly39 speaking, wasthe last five or six years of their lives. The General had retired on a pension. They had come backto England from abroad and all the evidence that came to me, all the knowledge, was of a briefperiod during which they had first a house at Bournemouth and then moved to where they lived inthe home where the tragedy took place. They had lived there peacefully, happily, their childrencame home there for school holidays. It was a peaceful period, I should say, at the end of what onepresumed was a peaceful life. I knew of their life after retirement40 in England, of their family.
There was no financial motive, no motive of hatred41, no motive of sexual involvement, of intrusivelove affairs. No. But there was a period before that. What did I know about that? What I knew wasa life spent mostly abroad with occasional visits home, a good record for the man, pleasantremembrances of her from friends of the wife’s. There was no outstanding tragedy, dispute,nothing that one knew of. But then I mightn’t have known. One doesn’t know. There was a periodof, say, twenty–thirty years, years from childhood to the time they married, the time they livedabroad in Malaya and other places. Perhaps the root of the tragedy was there. There is a proverbmy grandmother used to repeat: Old sins have long shadows. Was the cause of death some longshadow, a shadow from the past? That’s not an easy thing to find out about. You find out about aman’s record, what friends or acquaintances say, but you don’t know any inner details. Well, Ithink little by little the theory grew up in my mind that that would have been the place to look, if Icould have looked. Something that had happened then, in another country, perhaps. Somethingthat had been thought to be forgotten, to have passed out of existence, but which still perhapsexisted. A grudge42 from the past, some happening that nobody knew about, that had happenedelsewhere, not in their life in England, but which may have been there. If one had known where tolook for it.”
“Not the sort of thing, you mean,” said Poirot, “that anybody would remember. I mean,remember nowadays. Something that no friends of theirs in England, perhaps, would have knownabout.”
“Their friends in England seem to have been mostly made since retirement, though I supposeold friends did come and visit them or see them occasionally. But one doesn’t hear about thingsthat happened in the past. People forget.”
“Yes,” said Poirot, thoughtfully. “People forget.”
“They’re not like elephants,” said Superintendent Garroway, giving a faint smile. “Elephants,they always say, remember everything.”
“It is odd that you should say that,” said Poirot.
“That I should say that about long sins?”
“Not so much that. It was your mention of elephants that interested me.”
Superintendent Garroway looked at Poirot with some surprise. He seemed to be waiting formore. Spence also cast a quick glance at his old friend.
“Something that happened out East, perhaps,” he suggested. “I mean — well, that’s whereelephants come from, isn’t it? Or from Africa. Anyway, who’s been talking to you aboutelephants?” he added.
“A friend of mine happened to mention them,” said Poirot. “Someone you know,” he said toSuperintendent Spence. “Mrs. Oliver.”
“Oh, Mrs. Ariadne Oliver. Well!” He paused.
“Well what?” said Poirot.
“Well, does she know something, then?” he asked.
“I do not think so as yet,” said Poirot, “but she might know something before very long.” Headded thoughtfully, “She’s that kind of person. She gets around, if you know what I mean.”
“Yes,’ said Spence. “Yes. Has she got any ideas?” he asked.
“Do you mean Mrs. Ariadne Oliver, the writer?” asked Garroway with some interest.
“That’s the one,” said Spence.
“Does she know a good deal about crime? I know she writes crime stories. I’ve never knownwhere she got her ideas from or her facts.”
“Her ideas,” said Poirot, “come out of her head. Her facts—well, that’s more difficult.” Hepaused for a moment.
“What are you thinking of, Poirot, something in particular?”
“Yes,” said Poirot. “I ruined one of her stories once, or so she tells me. She had just had a verygood idea about a fact, something that had to do with a long-sleeved woollen vest. I asked hersomething over the telephone and it put the idea for the story out of her head. She reproaches meat intervals43.”
“Dear, dear,” said Spence. “Sounds rather like that parsley that sank into the butter on a hot day.
You know. Sherlock Holmes and the dog who did nothing in the nighttime.”
“Did they have a dog?” asked Poirot.
“I beg your pardon?”
“I said did they have a dog? General and Lady Ravenscroft. Did they take a dog for that walkwith them on the day they were shot? The Ravenscrofts.”
“They had a dog—yes,” said Garroway. “I suppose, I suppose they did take him for a walk mostdays.”
“If it had been one of Mrs. Oliver’s stories,” said Spence, “you ought to have found the doghowling over the two dead bodies. But that didn’t happen.”
Garroway shook his head.
“I wonder where the dog is now?” said Poirot.
“Buried in somebody’s garden, I expect,” said Garroway. “It’s fourteen years ago.”
“So we can’t go and ask the dog, can we?” said Poirot. He added thoughtfully, “A pity. It’sastonishing, you know, what dogs can know. Who was there exactly in the house? I mean on theday when the crime happened?”
“I brought you a list,” said Superintendent Garroway, “in case you like to consult it. Mrs.
Whittaker, the elderly cook-housekeeper. It was her day out so we couldn’t get much from her thatwas helpful. A visitor was staying there who had been governess to the Ravenscroft children once,I believe. Mrs. Whittaker was rather deaf and slightly blind. She couldn’t tell us anything ofinterest, except that recently Lady Ravenscroft had been in hospital or in a nursing home—fornerves but not illness, apparently. There was a gardener, too.”
“But a stranger might have come from outside. A stranger from the past. That’s your idea,Superintendent Garroway?”
“Not so much an idea as just a theory.”
Poirot was silent, he was thinking of a time when he had asked to go back into the past, hadstudied five people out of the past who had reminded him of the nursery rhyme “Five little pigs.”
Interesting it had been, and in the end rewarding, because he had found out the truth.
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收听单词发音
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1
revolving
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| adj.旋转的，轮转式的；循环的v.（使）旋转( revolve的现在分词 )；细想 | |
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2
superintendent
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| n.监督人，主管，总监；(英国)警务长 | |
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3
ascetic
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| adj.禁欲的；严肃的 | |
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tonsure
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| n.削发；v.剃 | |
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ecclesiastic
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| n.教士，基督教会；adj.神职者的，牧师的，教会的 | |
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6
retired
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| adj.隐退的，退休的，退役的 | |
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addicted
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| adj.沉溺于....的，对...上瘾的 | |
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8
contemplated
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| adj. 预期的 动词contemplate的过去分词形式 | |
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delve
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| v.深入探究，钻研 | |
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inexplicable
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| adj.无法解释的，难理解的 | |
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axe
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| n.斧子；v.用斧头砍，削减 | |
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vehement
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| adj.感情强烈的；热烈的；(人)有强烈感情的 | |
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passionate
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| adj.热情的，热烈的，激昂的，易动情的，易怒的，性情暴躁的 | |
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14
condemned
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| adj. 被责难的, 被宣告有罪的 动词condemn的过去式和过去分词 | |
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15
incapable
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| adj.无能力的，不能做某事的 | |
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innocence
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| n.无罪；天真；无害 | |
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17
enquire
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| v.打听，询问；调查，查问 | |
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grilled
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| adj. 烤的, 炙过的, 有格子的 动词grill的过去式和过去分词形式 | |
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trout
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| n.鳟鱼；鲑鱼(属) | |
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backwards
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| adv.往回地，向原处，倒，相反，前后倒置地 | |
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appreciation
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| n.评价；欣赏；感谢；领会，理解；价格上涨 | |
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proffered
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| v.提供，贡献，提出( proffer的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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intrigued
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| adj.好奇的，被迷住了的v.搞阴谋诡计(intrigue的过去式)；激起…的兴趣或好奇心；“intrigue”的过去式和过去分词 | |
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discrepancies
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| n.差异，不符合（之处），不一致（之处）( discrepancy的名词复数 ) | |
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tiresome
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| adj.令人疲劳的，令人厌倦的 | |
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motive
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| n.动机，目的；adv.发动的，运动的 | |
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blueprint
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| n.蓝图，设计图，计划；vt.制成蓝图，计划 | |
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28
artistic
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| adj.艺术(家)的，美术(家)的；善于艺术创作的 | |
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pact
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| n.合同，条约，公约，协定 | |
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poker
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| n.扑克；vt.烙制 | |
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minor
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| adj.较小(少)的，较次要的；n.辅修学科；vi.辅修 | |
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placid
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| adj.安静的，平和的 | |
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decided
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| adj.决定了的，坚决的；明显的，明确的 | |
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34
unbearable
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| adj.不能容忍的；忍受不住的 | |
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35
blurred
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| v.（使）变模糊( blur的过去式和过去分词 )；（使）难以区分；模模糊糊；迷离 | |
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fingerprints
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| n.指纹( fingerprint的名词复数 )v.指纹( fingerprint的第三人称单数 ) | |
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apparently
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| adv.显然地；表面上，似乎 | |
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awakened
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| v.（使）醒( awaken的过去式和过去分词 )；（使）觉醒；弄醒；（使）意识到 | |
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strictly
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| adv.严厉地，严格地；严密地 | |
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retirement
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| n.退休，退职 | |
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41
hatred
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| n.憎恶，憎恨，仇恨 | |
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42
grudge
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| n.不满，怨恨，妒嫉；vt.勉强给，不情愿做 | |
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43
intervals
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| n.[军事]间隔( interval的名词复数 )；间隔时间；[数学]区间；（戏剧、电影或音乐会的）幕间休息 | |
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