Читать книгу Poirot’s Early Cases - Агата Кристи, Agatha Christie, Detection Club The - Страница 19

‘Very interesting, is it not, Hastings?’ said Poirot, as the train steamed out of the station.

He had taken out a small comb from his pocket, also a microscopic mirror, and was carefully arranging his moustache, the symmetry of which had become slightly impaired during our brisk run.

‘You seem to find it so,’ I replied. ‘To me, it is all rather sordid and unpleasant. There’s hardly any mystery about it.’

‘I agree with you; there is no mystery whatever.’

‘I suppose we can accept the girl’s rather extraordinary story of her aunt’s infatuation? That seemed the only fishy part to me. She was such a nice, respectable woman.’

‘There is nothing extraordinary about that—it is completely ordinary. If you read the papers carefully, you will find that often a nice respectable woman of that age leaves a husband she has lived with for twenty years, and sometimes a whole family of children as well, in order to link her life with that of a young man considerably her junior. You admire les femmes, Hastings; you prostrate yourself before all of them who are good-looking and have the good taste to smile upon you; but psychologically you know nothing whatever about them. In the autumn of a woman’s life, there comes always one mad moment when she longs for romance, for adventure—before it is too late. It comes none the less surely to a woman because she is the wife of a respectable dentist in a country town!’

‘And you think—’

‘That a clever man might take advantage of such a moment.’

‘I shouldn’t call Pengelley so clever,’ I mused. ‘He’s got the whole town by the ears. And yet I suppose you’re right. The only two men who know anything, Radnor and the doctor, both want to hush it up. He’s managed that somehow. I wish we’d seen the fellow.’

‘You can indulge your wish. Return by the next train and invent an aching molar.’

I looked at him keenly.

‘I wish I knew what you considered so interesting about the case.’

‘My interest is very aptly summed up by a remark of yours, Hastings. After interviewing the maid, you observed that for someone who was not going to say a word, she had said a good deal.’

‘Oh!’ I said doubtfully; then I harped back to my original criticism: ‘I wonder why you made no attempt to see Pengelley?’

‘Mon ami, I give him just three months. Then I shall see him for as long as I please—in the dock.’