“What do you propose to do? Reconstruct something that happened sixteen years ago?”
“See it, perhaps, from a clearer angle. You will come?”
Angela Warren said slowly:
“Oh, yes, I’ll come. It will be interesting to see all those people again. I shall see them now, perhaps, from a clearer angle (as you put it) than I did then.”
“And you will bring with you the letter that you showed me?”
Angela Warren frowned.
“That letter is my own. I showed it to you for a good and sufficient reason, but I have no intention of allowing it to be read by strange and unsympathetic persons.”
“But you will allow yourself to be guided by me in this matter?”
“I will do nothing of the kind. I will bring the letter with me, but I shall use my own judgement which I venture to think is quite as good as yours.”
Poirot spread out his hands in a gesture of resignation. He got up to go. He said:
“You permit that I ask one little question?”
“What is it?”
“At the time of the tragedy, you had lately read, had you not, Somerset Maugham’s The Moon and Sixpence?”
Angela stared at him. Then she said:
“I believe—why, yes, that is quite true.” She looked at him with frank curiosity. “How did you know?”
“I want to show you, mademoiselle, that even in a small unimportant matter, I am something of a magician. There are things I know without having to be told.”
Three
RECONSTRUCTION
The afternoon sun shone into the laboratory at Handcross Manor. Some easy chairs and a settee had been brought into the room, but they served more to emphasize its forlorn aspect than to furnish it.
Slightly embarrassed, pulling at his moustache, Meredith Blake talked to Carla in a desultory way. He broke off once to say: “My dear, you are very like your mother—and yet unlike her, too.”
Carla asked: “How am I like her and how unlike?”
“You have her colouring and her way of moving, but you are—how shall I put it—more positive than she ever was.”
Philip Blake, a scowl creasing over his forehead, looked out of the window and drummed impatiently on the pane. He said:
“What’s the sense of all this? A perfectly fine Saturday afternoon—”
Hercule Poirot hastened to pour oil on troubled waters.
“Ah, I apologize—it is, I know, unpardonable to disarrange the golf. Mais voyons, Mr. Blake, this is the daughter of your best friend. You will stretch a point for her, will you not?”
The butler announced: “Miss Warren.”
Meredith went to welcome her. He said: “It’s good of you to spare the time, Angela. You’re busy, I know.”
He led her over to the window.
Carla said: “H