II
“Yes, sir, it was me found her.”
Mrs. Elliot was dramatic. A neat house, this, neat and prim¹. The only drama in it was Mrs.
Elliot’s, a tall gaunt dark-haired woman, recounting her one moment of glorious living.
“Larkin, the baker², he came and knocked at the door. ‘It’s Mrs. McGinty,’ he said, ‘we can’tmake her hear. Seems she might have been taken bad.’ And indeed I thought she might. Shewasn’t a young woman, not by any means. And palpitations she’d had, to my certain knowledge. Ithought she might have had a stroke. So I hurried over, seeing as there were only the two men, andnaturally they wouldn’t like to go into the bedroom.”
Poirot accepted this piece of propriety³ with an assenting⁴ murmur⁵.
“Hurried up the stairs, I did. He was on the landing, pale as death he was. Not that I everthought at the time—well, of course, then I didn’t know what had happened. I knocked on thedoor loud and there wasn’t any answer, so I turned the handle and I went in. The whole placemessed about—and the board in the floor up. ‘It’s robbery,’ I said. ‘But where’s the poor soulherself?’ And then we thought to look in the sitting-room⁶. And there she was .?.?. Down on thefloor with her poor head stove in. Murder! I saw at once what it was—murder! Couldn’t beanything else! Robbery and murder! Here in Broadhinny. I screamed and I screamed! Quite a jobthey had with me. Come over all faint, I did. They had to go and get me brandy from the ThreeDucks. And even then I was all of a shiver for hours and hours. ‘Don’t you take on so, mother,’
that’s what the sergeant⁷ said to me when he came. ‘Don’t you take on so. You go home and makeyourself a nice cup of tea.’ And so I did. And when Elliot came home, ‘Why, whatever’shappened?’ he says, staring at me. Still all of a tremble I was. Always was sensitive from a child.”

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