Curtain. Agatha Christie

I find here a gentleman, a baronet who is a friend of the employer of your daughter. (That phrase it sounds a little like the French exercise, does it not?)

      Immediately I conceive a plan. He wishes to induce the Franklins to come here for the summer. I in my turn will persuade you and we shall be all together, en famille. It will be most agreeable. Therefore, mon cher Hastings, dépêchez-vous, arrive with the utmost celerity. I have commanded for you a room with bath (it is modernized now, you comprehend, the dear old Styles) and disputed the price with Mrs Colonel Luttrell until I have made an arrangement très bon marché.

       The Franklins and your charming Judith have been here for some days. It is all arranged, so make no histories.

      A bientôt, Yours always, Hercule Poirot

      The prospect was alluring, and I fell in with my old friend’s wishes without demur. I had no ties and no settled home. Of my children, one boy was in the Navy, the other married and running the ranch in the Argentine. My daughter Grace was married to a soldier and was at present in India. My remaining child, Judith, was the one whom secretly I had always loved best, although I had never for one moment understood her. A queer, dark, secretive child, with a passion for keeping her own counsel, which had sometimes affronted and distressed me. My wife had been more understanding. It was, she assured me, no lack of trust or confidence on Judith’s part, but a kind of fierce compulsion. But she, like myself, was sometimes worried about the child. Judith’s feelings, she said, were too intense, too concentrated, and her instinctive reserve deprived her of any safety valve. She had queer fits of brooding silence and a fierce, almost bitter power of partisanship. Her brains were the best of the family and we gladly fell in with her wish for a university education. She had taken her B.Sc. about a year ago, and had then taken the post of secretary to a doctor who was engaged in research work connected with tropical disease. His wife was somewhat of an invalid.

      I had occasionally had qualms as to whether Judith’s absorption in her work, and devotion to her employer, were not signs that she might be losing her heart, but the business-like footing of their relationship assured me.

      Judith was, I believed, fond of me, but she was very undemonstrative by nature, and she was often scornful and impatient of what she called my sentimental and outworn ideas. I was, frankly, a little nervous of my daughter!

      At this point my meditations were interrupted by the train drawing up at the station of Styles St Mary. That at least had not changed. Time had passed it by. It was still perched up in the midst of fields, with apparently no reason for existence.

      As my taxi passed through the village, though, I realized the passage of years. Styles St Mary was altered out of all recognition. Petrol stations, a cinema, two more inns and rows of council houses.

      Presently we turned in at the gate of Styles. Here we seemed to recede again from modern times. The park was much as I remembered it, but the drive was badly kept and much overgrown with weeds growing up over the gravel. We turned a corner and came in view of the house. It was unaltered from the outside and badly needed a coat of paint.

      As on my arrival all those years ago, there was a woman’s figure stooping over one of the garden beds. My heart missed a beat. Then the figure straightened up and came towards me, and I laughed at myself. No greater contrast to the robust Evelyn Howard could have been imagined.

      This was a frail elderly lady, with an abundance of curly white hair, pink cheeks, and a pair of cold pale blue eyes that were widely at variance with the easy geniality of her manner, which was frankly a shade too gushing for my taste.

      ‘It’ll be Captain Hastings now, won’t it?’ she demanded. ‘And me with my hands all over dirt and not able to shake hands. We’re delighted to see you here – the amount we’ve heard about you! I must introduce myself. I’m Mrs Luttrell. My husband and I bought this place in a fit of madness and have been trying to make a paying concern of it. I never thought the day would come when I’d be a hotel keeper! But I’ll warn you, Captain Hastings, I’m a very business-like woman. I pile up the extras all I know how.’

      We both laughed as though at an excellent joke, but it occurred to me that what Mrs Luttrell had just said was in all probability the literal truth. Behind the veneer of her charming old lady manner, I caught a glimpse of flint-like hardness.

      Although Mrs Luttrell occasionally affected a faint brogue, she had no Irish blood. It was a mere affectation.

      I enquired after my friend.

      ‘Ah, poor little M. Poirot. The way he’s been looking forward to your coming. It would melt a heart of stone. Terribly sorry I am for him, suffering the way he does.’

      We were walking towards the house and she was peeling off her gardening gloves.

      ‘And your pretty daughter, too,’ she went on. ‘What a lovely girl she is. We all admire her tremendously. But I’m old-fashioned, you know, and it seems to me a shame and a sin that a girl like that, that ought to be going to parties and dancing with young men, should spend her time cutting up rabbits and bending over a microscope all day. Leave that sort of thing to the frumps, I say.’

      ‘Where is Judith?’ I asked. ‘Is she somewhere about?’

      Mrs Luttrell made what children call ‘a face’.

      ‘Ah, the poor girl. She’s cooped up in that studio place down at the bottom of the garden. Dr Franklin rents it from me and he’s had it all fitted up. Hutches of guinea pigs he’s got there, the poor creatures, and mice and rabbits. I’m not sure that I like all this science, Captain Hastings. Ah, here’s my husband.’

      Colonel Luttrell had just come round the corner of the house. He was a very tall, attenuated old man, with a cadaverous face, mild blue eyes and a habit of irresolutely tugging at his little white moustache.

      He had a vague, rather nervous manner.

      ‘Ah, George, here’s Captain Hastings arrived.’

      Colonel Luttrell shook hands. ‘You came by the five – er – forty, eh?’

      ‘What else should he have come by?’ said Mrs Luttrell sharply. ‘And what does it matter anyway? Take him up and show him his room, George. And then maybe he’d like to go straight to M. Poirot – or would you rather have tea first?’

      I assured her that I did not want tea and would prefer to go and greet my friend.

      Colonel Luttrell said, ‘Right. Come along. I expect – er – they’ll have taken your things up already – eh, Daisy?’

      Mrs Luttrell said tartly, ‘That’s your business, George. I’ve been gardening. I can’t see to everything.’

      ‘No, no, of course not. I – I’ll see to it, my dear.’

      I followed him up the front steps. In the doorway we encountered a grey-haired man, slightly built, who was hurrying out with a pair of field-glasses. He limped, and had a boyish eager face. He said, stammering slightly: ‘There’s a pair of n-nesting blackcaps down by the sycamore.’

      As we went into the hall, Luttrell said, ‘That’s Norton. Nice fellow. Crazy about birds.’

      In the hall itself, a very big man was standing by the table. He had obviously just finished telephoning. Looking up he said, ‘I’d like to hang, draw and quarter all contractors and builders. Never get anything done right, curse ’em.’

      His wrath was so comical and so rueful, that we both laughed. I felt very attracted at once towards the man. He was very good-looking, though a man well over fifty, with a deeply tanned face. He looked as though he had led an out-of-doors life, and he looked, too, the type of man that is becoming more and more rare, an Englishman of the old school, straightforward, fond of out-of-doors life, and the kind of man who can command.

      I was hardly surprised when Colonel Luttrell introduced him as Sir William Boyd Carrington. He had been, I knew, Governor of a province in India, where he had been a signal success. He was also renowned as a first-class shot and big game hunter.