The Killings at Kingfisher Hill Read online

  I was aware of various members of the Devonport family standing about in the entrance hall as Sergeant Gidley ushered Poirot and me through to the drawing room, telling us that in there we would find both the body and the police doctor.

  As he walked ahead of us towards the closed door and prepared to push it open, Poirot said softly to me, ‘I am very afraid, Catchpool.’

  ‘Of what?’ I asked. ‘We know what we are about to encounter, more or less.’

  ‘Ah, but we do not yet know who has been killed. That is to say … I fear that I know the identity of the victim and hope very much to be wrong. It is senseless, is it not? Whoever is dead, it is a tragedy. Yet when one feels that one might have prevented it—’

  His musings were cut off by an enthusiastic ‘Whenever you’re ready, gentlemen!’ from Sergeant Gidley, who was holding open the door to the drawing room. Poirot took a deep breath before walking in. I followed him.

  In front of the fireplace, lying parallel to the edge of the hearthstone, was a woman’s body. A short, stocky man with wire-rimmed spectacles and a pointed beard—the police doctor, I assumed—was kneeling on the floor beside her. She lay on her back, one arm by her side and another across her stomach. A fire poker with a bloodied tip lay at her stockinged feet. I could see no ladies’ shoes anywhere in the room, yet she must have come in wearing a pair, and her emerald-green overcoat was fully buttoned up to her neck. Why would she remove her shoes but not her coat? I wondered.

  A matching green hat covered her face completely and looked, from our vantage point near the door, as if it were afloat on a large sea of bright red.

  ‘The cause of death was bludgeoning by the poker,’ said Sergeant Gidley. ‘And if her death was the only desired result … well, that could have been achieved with less effort.’

  ‘Less bludgeoning?’ I asked.

  ‘Yes, sir,’ said Gidley. ‘Long after she was dead, the killer continued to assault her head and face until it was unrecognizable. Even more peculiar, though, is her clothing—or, rather, its absence. Underneath the coat she is wearing no dress, no blouse, no skirt. Only her undergarments.’

  ‘Which means’—I formed the conclusion as I spoke—‘that the killer must have removed her coat in order to remove her dress, or blouse and skirt, then put the coat back on her and buttoned it up. And taken away her shoes. That’s interesting.’

  ‘It is indeed,’ Poirot agreed. ‘Why not leave her in all her clothes? Why was the murderer happy to have her found in her coat, hat, stockings and underclothes, but not wearing her dress and shoes? Of course!’ He nodded briskly. ‘I know why.’ He pointed to the fireplace. ‘I assume that the dress and shoes were burned here? Is that not the heel of a shoe amidst the ashes?’

  Sergeant Gidley leaned in closer and peered into the grate. ‘I think you might be right, M. Poirot!’ he said in a tone of wonderment. Poirot gave me a look that said: is this the best that Scotland Yard has to offer? I shrugged. I too had neglected to notice the contents of the fireplace. It was rather hard to focus on anything other than the horror on the floor, which brought something to mind—a memory that was both vague and insistent. Where had I seen that green hat and coat not so long ago? Wait … there went a memory, spinning past …

  At the very moment that it came back to me with great certainty, Poirot said, ‘It is as I feared.’

  ‘Joan Blythe,’ I said, though my mouth found it rather hard to form the words. The woman with the unfinished face. My lips were numb. I did not understand how this was possible. Fragments of questions struggled for prominence in my brain: what …? How …?

  ‘It must be her,’ I said. ‘The coat and the hat—they’re the same.’ The strange thing was that, ten minutes earlier, if someone had asked me what colour of hat and coat Joan Blythe had worn on the day we first encountered her, I should not have been able to tell them.

  ‘Oui, oui. It is undoubtedly her,’ said Poirot. ‘Our frightened friend from the motor-coach.’

  ‘We cannot be certain it is her until we see her face,’ I said.

  ‘I am afraid that will not be possible,’ said the police doctor, who had walked over to join us. He extended his hand. ‘Dr Jens Niemietz. I am delighted to meet you. M. Poirot, I have heard so much about you. You have been described to me by many as a great man.’ His accent was educated, soft, continental. I liked him immediately; his pleasure at being in Poirot’s presence was contagious, and I reflected upon how lucky I was to be able to work with such a fine mind and good friend; it was too easy to take such benefits for granted.

  ‘It is an honour to be able to help you,’ said Niemietz. ‘You too, Inspector Catchpool. Though if it is a face attached to our dead body that would be of most help, I regret that I cannot show you one. The poker that you see there was used with utmost savagery. Not only the face but the whole head has been … How can I put this delicately? Nothing recognizable survives, I am afraid. I know that you will have to lift the hat and look, and I would advise you to prepare yourselves for a shock, even if you believe there is no sight so terrible that you have not already seen it many times.’

  ‘No one is to move the hat until I say so,’ said Poirot.

  ‘Sergeant Gidley,’ I said, ‘who is in this house at present apart from you, me, Poirot, Dr Niemietz and our murder victim?’

  ‘The Devonports—all four of them. Apart from them, there’s some friends of the family, Mr and Mrs Laviolette, and Daisy Devonport’s fiancé, Oliver Prowd.’

  ‘Anybody else?’

  ‘No, that is everyone—all the same people who were here when the murderer struck at between ten and eleven o’clock this morning,’ said Gidley. ‘The body was found at eleven by Daisy Devonport.’

  ‘Please find Mademoiselle Daisy and bring her here to this room,’ said Poirot.

  ‘Yes, sir..’

  Daisy appeared less than a minute later. ‘You asked for me, M. Poirot?’ She was paler than when I had seen her before, and seemed tense.

  ‘I did. I want you to look as this dead woman.’

  She raised an eyebrow at him. ‘I have already seen her. We all have, long before you turned up: we were the ones who found her.’

  ‘And when you first informed the police of what you had found, you told them, did you not, that none of you knew who she was?’

  ‘That’s right. Her face and head are all smashed up.’

  ‘How do you know that, Miss Devonport?’ Sergeant Gidley asked. ‘Did you disturb the crime scene?’

  ‘Are you asking me if I lifted the hat to try to establish who it was that lay dead on my drawing room carpet?’ Daisy followed her question with a mirthless laugh. ‘Why, yes, I did. I then replaced the hat in its former position and no harm was done, apart from to my stomach. I was sick as a dog afterwards. It’s … it’s horrible, what’s under there.’ Her upper lip trembled a little. ‘I was unable to identify her and so would anyone else have been. I advised none of them to look, for their own sakes. When I telephoned the police, I told them the truth: that an unidentifiable woman had been murdered in our home.’

  ‘You did not, then, recognize her from her coat and hat?’ said Poirot.

  ‘From her …?’ Daisy laughed again, incredulously this time. ‘No, I did not. Should I have?’

  ‘Look carefully, mademoiselle. Have you not seen this coat and hat before, and not long ago?’

  ‘I don’t believe so, no. Why do you ask? You seem to think I have seen them and ought to know them.’

  ‘The unhappy woman who sat beside you on the coach from London to Kingfisher Hill, before she leapt out of her seat and announced that she could sit there no longer … she wore a coat and hat of this same colour, n’est-ce pas?’

  ‘Did she?’ Daisy frowned. ‘Well, you might be right but I did not notice if she did. The only thing I noticed about her was her infuriating behaviour. I might be a woman, M. Poirot, but where others of my sex see clothes, I see character. Hers was unsavoury and unbalanced, and so I turned away f
rom her and tried to pretend she wasn’t there—until, mercifully, she removed herself and you came and sat beside me instead.’

  ‘I am not sure that someone who either murdered her own brother or is lying about having done so has any right to condemn others as being of unsavoury character,’ I said pointedly.

  ‘Don’t be silly, Inspector.’ Daisy seemed somewhat cheered to be under direct attack. ‘No one has any right to do anything. Do you really still see the world in those terms: people deserving things or not deserving them? It is much simpler than that. Everyone can do and say precisely what they want, as long as they’re prepared to take the consequences.’

  ‘Mademoiselle,’ Poirot said sternly. ‘Whether you approve or disapprove of Joan Blythe—for that is her name, or at least it is the name she gave us—I am surprised that it does not interest you more to find her dead in your drawing room.’

  ‘Do you mean to say …? It’s … it’s not her, is it?’ Daisy’s mouth dropped open. ‘I mean, even if the coat and hat are the same, it surely cannot be …’ She turned and looked again at the body. ‘It can’t be,’ she muttered. ‘Though she is of the same build and …’

  ‘It is she,’ said Poirot.

  Beside me, Sergeant Gidley made a note in his notebook: ‘Joan Blythe.’ Poirot’s word was obviously good enough for him.

  ‘Gidley, see if you can rustle up an aunt with a missing niece in or near Cobham,’ I said. ‘Miss Blythe told us she lived with her aunt.’

  ‘This is quite ridiculous!’ said Daisy, now red in the face and exercised. ‘Why on earth would a complete stranger who happened to sit next to me for a few minutes turn up dead next to my fireplace? It makes no sense! Who would have let her in? Who would have killed her, when none of us knows her? Why did she come here in the first place? Unless she was carried in already dead!’

  ‘That is not what happened,’ said Dr Niemietz. ‘The murder occurred here in this room. It must have been a frenzied attack. Look at the quantity of blood. And you saw her head yourself, Miss Devonport—what is left of it.’

  ‘It still seems more likely to me that this is somebody else, not Joan Blythe,’ Daisy insisted. ‘Another woman who happens to have the same coat and hat.’

  ‘M. Poirot, you mentioned something about this woman from the coach leaping out of her seat,’ said Dr Niemietz.

  ‘I did, yes.’

  The police doctor directed a meaningful look at Sergeant Gidley, who nodded, produced a pair of gloves from his pocket and put them on. Having done so, he pulled a small piece of white paper out of his other pocket and held it up so that Poirot and I could read what was written on it.

  I blinked several times as I stared at it, feeling as if a nightmare, too convincing to be imaginary, was slowly and tightly wrapping itself around me. The words had been written in black ink.

  ‘Goodness only knows what it means,’ said Sergeant Gidley. ‘I can’t make any sense of it. Dr Niemietz and I found it lying on top of the body—on her chest, tucked beneath the top button of her coat.’

  I knew what the message meant. So did Poirot. Now, surely, the identity of our dead woman was beyond doubt.

  The note read: ‘You sat in a seat you should never have sat in, now here comes a poker to batter your hat in.’

  Two hours later, Dr Niemietz and Sergeant Gidley had left for London, taking Joan Blythe’s body with them. Poirot and I were in the dining room at Little Key. Everybody had gathered there at our insistence, after our initial more polite request for them to join us had been declined. Around the table were seated Sidney and Lilian Devonport, Richard Devonport, Godfrey and Verna Laviolette, Daisy Devonport and Oliver Prowd.

  Sidney’s eyes glinted with anger. His fossilized, open-mouthed smile was still fixed in place, though today it appeared more like a grimace. Oliver Prowd seemed more confused than anything else. Lilian’s expression was untethered and absent, as if she did not know where she was or what she was doing there. Daisy was tense and alert, watching everybody keenly, while her brother Richard looked as if he might burst into tears at any moment. As for Verna Laviolette, she seemed as maliciously gleeful as ever, and I still found it nearly impossible to believe that she had been especially kind to Helen Acton, or could be to anyone. Her husband Godfrey kept fidgeting in his chair.

  There was a newcomer, too—someone who had not been at Little Key when Joan Blythe was murdered, a man Poirot and I had not met before: Percy Semley from Kingfisher’s View. As soon as I had mentioned that Semley had been at Little Key when Frank Devonport died, Poirot had insisted that we summon him forth.

  ‘For what?’ I had asked as Poirot had pushed me out of the house to go and find Semley.

  ‘It is time to clear up some of the irritating little peculiarities blocking the way to the truth that is now almost within reach,’ came the ambiguous answer.

  Almost within reach: had Poirot really said that? For my part, I was further away from understanding why two people had been murdered at Little Key, and by whom, than I had ever been from any truth in my life. The words of the note found on Joan Blythe’s body kept playing in my mind like a gramophone record that I could not switch off: You sat in a seat you should never have sat in, now here comes a poker to batter your hat in.

  What could it mean? For one thing, Joan Blythe’s green hat had not received any sort of battering from the poker. It was perfectly intact, which rendered the note inaccurate, unless whoever wrote it had used ‘hat’ as a metaphor for ‘head’ for the sake of making it rhyme properly.

  A more pressing problem was the note’s suggestion that Joan had been murdered as a punishment for sitting in that seat. If that was true, then for what was her killer punishing her? Ignoring his warning? That would make the warner and the killer one and the same person—and that made no sense at all.

  Unable to make useful deductive progress in any direction, I turned my attention to Percy Semley who was sitting directly opposite me. He was chewing his bottom lip and staring down at the table. No doubt he was perplexed to find himself here. He resembled a sand-coloured and reasonably handsome giraffe. I decided that he was overwhelmingly unlikely to be of any use to us.

  Poirot was our only hope. I knew that he intended to achieve great things before we left this room, so I placed all of my faith in him.

  He rose to his feet. ‘Ladies and gentlemen,’ he said. ‘In a matter of days—certainly in less than one week—we will gather once again around this table. On that occasion, we will be joined by one more person: Miss Helen Acton.’

  Richard Devonport closed his eyes as his mother said, ‘I will not allow that woman to enter this house.’

  ‘Yes, you will, madame,’ Poirot told her. ‘I have obtained special permission for her to be brought here, and you will do exactly as Inspector Catchpool and I tell you to do, without complaint. All of you will do this. In return for your cooperation, when we are next gathered here with the addition of Mademoiselle Helen, I shall tell you who murdered Frank Devonport and also who murdered the woman whose body has today been removed from the drawing room. I will tell you who committed both of these heinous crimes and why they did so.’

  ‘But we already know who killed Frank, Moysier Poy-row,’ said Godfrey Laviolette. ‘Helen Acton killed him.’

  ‘No, she didn’t,’ said Daisy. ‘I murdered Frank.’

  ‘Silence!’ her father bellowed at her. She shook in her chair, though her defiant glare did not waver. ‘Helen killed Frank.’ Sidney’s voice trembled with rage. ‘And if you have any care or respect for my family, M. Poirot, you will leave that monstrous woman exactly where she is, rotting in jail, until such time as she can be hanged!’

  ‘This will be easier for us all if there is no shouting,’ said Poirot. ‘Monsieur Devonport, please sit down. We should all conserve our energy for what is to come.’

  Sidney Devonport sat down heavily in his chair.

  ‘It has not yet been established who killed Frank,’ said Poirot, ‘but one thing we
do know is that Helen Acton cannot have committed this second murder. She was not here in the house at the time. Neither were you.’ He looked at Percy Semley. ‘Therefore, the woman in the drawing room must have been killed by one of the four Devonports, or by Godfrey or Verna Laviolette, or by Oliver Prowd.’

  ‘But none of us had any reason to kill her,’ said Verna.

  ‘None of us knew her,’ Lilian said.

  ‘Of course we didn’t,’ Sidney growled. ‘We had no reason to kill her, and we did not kill her. Nobody sitting at this table is a murderer!’

  ‘Strangers must have entered the house,’ said Godfrey Laviolette. ‘Maybe the front door wasn’t securely shut.’

  ‘None of you can be sure if you knew her or not,’ I said. ‘Her face had been destroyed beyond all recognition.’

  ‘It would be most helpful to hear from each of you where you were when la pauvre mademoiselle was killed,’ said Poirot. ‘Monsieur Devonport, may we start with you as the head of the household? Since you tell me so authoritatively that nobody here murdered this unfortunate woman, I can only assume that all of you were together in one room between ten and eleven and that none of you left the room?’

  ‘I was with my wife,’ Sidney said flatly.

  ‘Yes, Sidney and I were together.’

  ‘Where?’ Poirot asked.

  ‘In my bedroom,’ said Lilian.

  ‘From when until when, precisely?’

  ‘I was there all morning from the moment I awoke. Sidney brought me my breakfast and the newspapers at … I’m not sure what time it was, but probably around nine o’clock.’

  ‘It was thirty-five minutes after nine,’ said Sidney. ‘Godfrey and I were busy at Peepers HQ until then, and I’m afraid I forgot all about your breakfast, dear.’

  ‘Well, I was unaware of the time,’ said Lilian.

  ‘So, you took up the breakfast at thirty-five minutes past nine—and then …?’ said Poirot.