She said at last:
“It was all you—all you….”
Peter Lord said:
“It was Hercule Poirot. The fellow’s a kind of magician!”
But Elinor shook her head. She said obstinately:
“It was you. You got hold of him and made him do it!”
Peter grinned.
“I made him do it all right….”
Elinor said:
“Did you know I hadn’t done it, or weren’t you sure?”
Peter said simply:
“I was never quite sure.”
Elinor said:
“That’s why I nearly said: ‘guilty’ right at the beginning…because, you see, I had thought of it… I thought of it that day when I laughed outside the cottage.”
Peter said:
“Yes, I knew.”
She said wonderingly:
“It seems so queer now…like a kind of possession. That day I bought the paste and cu
t the sandwiches I was pretending to myself, I was thinking: ‘I’ve mixed poison with this, and when she eats she will die—and then Roddy will come back to me.’”
Peter Lord said:
“It helps some people to pretend that sort of thing to themselves. It isn’t a bad thing, really. You take it out of yourself in a fantasy. Like sweating a thing out of your system.”
Elinor said:
“Yes, that’s true. Because it went—suddenly! The blackness, I mean! When that woman mentioned the rose tree outside the Lodge—it all swung back into—into being normal again….”
Then with a shiver she said:
“Afterwards when we went into the morning room and she was dead—dying, at least—I felt then: Is there much difference between thinking and doing murder?”
Peter Lord said:
“All the difference in the world!”
“Yes, but is there?”
“Of course there is! Thinking murder doesn’t really do any harm. People have silly ideas about that; they think it’s the same as planning murder! It isn’t. If you think murder long enough, you suddenly come through the blackness and feel that it’s all rather silly!”
Elinor cried: