II
Linda Marshall sat with Hercule Poirot on Gull Cove.
She said:
“Of course I’m glad I didn’t die after all. But you know, M. Poirot, it’s just the same as if I’d killed her, isn’t it? I meant to.”
Hercule Poirot said energetically:
“It is not at all the same thing. The wish to kill and the action of killing are two different things. If in your bedroom instead of a little wax figure you had had your stepmother bound and helpless and a dagger in your hand instead of a pin, you would not have pushed it into her heart! Something within you would have said ‘no.’ It is the same with me. I enrage myself at an imbecile. I say, ‘I would like to kick him.’ Instead, I kick the table. I say, ‘This table, it is the imbecile, I kick him so.’ And then, if I have not hurt my toe too much, I feel much better and the table it is not usually damaged. But if the imbecile himself was there I should not kick him. To make the wax figures and stick in the pins, it is silly, yes, it is childish, yes—but it does something useful too. You took the hate out of yourself and put it into that little figure. And with the pin and the fire you destroyed—not your stepmother—but the hate you bore her. Afterwards, even before you heard of her death, you felt cleansed, did you not—you felt lighter—happier?”
Linda nodded. She said:
“How did you know? That’s just how I did feel.”
Poirot said:
“Then do not repeat to yourself the imbecilities. Just make up your mind not to hate your next stepmother.”
Linda said startled:
“Do you think I’m going to have another? Oh, I see, you mean Rosamund. I don’t mind her.” She hesitated a minute. “She’s sensible.”
It was not the adjective that Poirot himself would have selected for Rosamund Darnley, but he realized that it was Linda’s idea of high praise.
III
Kenneth Marshall said:
“Rosamund, did you get some extraordinary idea into your head that I’d killed Arlena.”
Rosamund looked rather shamefaced. She said:
“I suppose I was a damned fool.”
“Of course you were.”
“Yes, but Ken, you are such an oyster. I never knew what you really felt about Arlena. I didn’t know if you accepted her as she was and were just frightfully decent about her, or whether you—well, just believed in her blindly. And I thought if it was that, and you suddenly found out that she was letting you down you might go mad with rage. I’ve heard stories about you. You’re always very quiet but you’re rather frightening sometimes.”
“So you thought I just took her by the throat and throttled the life out of her?”
“Well—yes—that’s just exactly what I did think. And your alibi seemed a bit on the light side. That’s when I suddenly decided to take a hand, and made up that silly story about seeing you typing in your room. And when I heard that you said you’d seen me look in—well, that made me quite sure you’d done it. That, and Linda’s queerness.”
Kenneth Marshall said with a sigh:
“Don’t you realize that I said I’d seen you in the mirror in order to back up your story. I—I thought you needed it corroborated.”
Rosamund stared at him.
“You don’t mean you thought that I killed your wife?”
Kenneth Marshall shifted uneasily. He mumbled:
“Dash it all, Rosamund, don’t you remember how you nearly killed that boy about that dog once? How you hung on to his throat and wouldn’t let go.”
“But that was years ago.”
“Yes, I know—”