Hercule Poirot - Christie Agatha (читать книгу онлайн бесплатно полностью без регистрации txt) 📗

George Lee said sharply:

‘Of course she’s guilty! It’s all clear enough! I alwayssaid an outsider killed my father! Preposterous nonsense to pretend one of his family would do a thing like that! It-it wouldn’t be natural!’

Poirot stirred in his seat. He said:

‘I disagree with you. Taking into consideration the character of Simeon Lee, it would be a very natural thing to happen.’

‘Eh?’ George’s jaw dropped. He stared at Poirot.

Poirot went on:

‘And, in my opinion, that very thingdid happen. Simeon Lee was killed by his own flesh and blood, for what seemed to the murderer a very good and sufficient reason.’

George cried: ‘One of us? I deny-’

Poirot’s voice broke in hard as steel.

‘There is a case against every person here. We will, Mr George Lee, begin with the case againstyou.You had no love for your father! You kept on good terms with him for the sake of money. On the day of his deathhe threatened to cut down your allowance. You knew that on his death you would probably inherit a very substantial sum. There is the motive. After dinner you went, as you say, to telephone. Youdid telephone-but the call lasted onlyfive minutes. After that you could easily have gone to your father’s room, chatted with him, and then attacked him and killed him. You left the room and turned the key from outside, for you hoped the affair would be put down to a burglar. You omitted, in your panic, to make sure that the window was fully open so as to support the burglar theory. That was stupid; but you are, if you will pardon my saying so, rather a stupid man!

‘However,’ said Poirot, after a brief pause during which George tried to speak and failed, ‘many stupid men have been criminals!’

He turned his eyes on Magdalene.

‘Madame, too, she also had a motive. She is, I think, in debt, and the tone of certain of your father’s remarks may-have caused her uneasiness. She, too, has no alibi. She went to telephone, but she didnot telephone, and we haveonly her word for what she did do…

‘Then,’ he paused, ‘there is Mr David Lee. We have heard, not once but many times, of the revengeful tempers and long memories that went with the Lee blood. Mr David Lee did not forget or forgive the way his father had treated his mother. A final jibe directed at the dead lady may have been the last straw. David Lee is said to have been playing the piano at the time of the murder. By a coincidence he was playing the “Dead March”. But supposesomebody else was playing that “Dead March”, somebody who knew what he was going to do, and who approved his action?’

Hilda Lee said quietly:

‘That is an infamous suggestion.’

Poirot turned to her. ‘I will offer you another, madame. It wasyour hand that did the deed. It wasyou who crept upstairs to execute judgment on a man you considered beyond human forgiveness. You are of those, madame, who can be terrible in anger…’

Hilda said: ‘I did not kill him.’

Superintendent Sugden said brusquely:

‘Mr Poirot’s quite right. There is a possible case against everyone except Mr Alfred Lee, Mr Harry Lee, and Mrs Alfred Lee.’ 

Poirot said gently:

‘I should not even except those three…’

The superintendent protested: ‘Oh, come now, Mr Poirot!’

Lydia Lee said:

‘And what is the case against me, M. Poirot?’

She smiled a little as she spoke, her brows raised ironically.

Poirot bowed. He said:

‘Your motive, madame, I pass over. It is sufficiently obvious. As to the rest, you were wearing last night a flowered taffeta dress of a very distinctive pattern with a cape. I will remind you of the fact that Tressilian, the butler, is shortsighted. Objects at a distance are dim and vague to him. I will also point out that your drawing-room is big and lighted by heavily shaded lamps. On that night, a minute or two before the cries were heard, Tressilian came into the drawing-room to take away the coffee-cups. He saw you,as he thought, in a familiar attitude by the far window half concealed by the heavy curtains.’

Lydia Lee said: ‘He did see me.’

Poirot went on:

‘I suggest that it is possible thatwhat Tressilian saw was the cape of your dress, arranged to show by the window curtain, as though you yourself were standing there.’ 

Lydia said: ‘I was standing there…’

Alfred said: ‘How dare you suggest-?’

Harry interrupted him.

‘Let him go on, Alfred. It’s our turn next. How do you suggest that dear Alfred killed his beloved father since we were both together in the dining-room at the time?’

Poirot beamed at him.

‘That,’ he said, ‘is very simple. An alibi gains in force accordingly as it is unwillingly given. You and your brother are on bad terms. It is well known.You jibe athim in public.He has not a good word to say foryou! But,supposing that were all part of a very clever plot. Supposing that Alfred Lee is tired of dancing attendance upon an exacting taskmaster. Supposing that you and he have got together some time ago. Your plan is laid. You come home. Alfred appears to resent your presence. He shows jealousy and dislike of you. You show contempt for him. And then comes the night of the murder you have so cleverly planned together. One of you remains in the dining-room, talking and perhaps quarrelling aloud as though two people were there.The other goes upstairs and commits the crime…’

Alfred sprang to his feet.

‘You devil!’ he said. His voice was inarticulate.

Sugden was staring at Poirot. He said: 

‘Do you really mean-?’

Poirot said, with a sudden ring of authority in his voice:

‘I have had to show you thepossibilities! These are the things thatmight have happened! Which of them actuallydid happen we can only tell by passing from the outside appearance to the inside reality…’

He paused and then said slowly:

‘We must come back, as I said before, to the character of Simeon Lee himself…’

There was a momentary pause. Strangely enough, all indignation and all rancour had died down. Hercule Poirot held his audience under the spell of his personality. They watched him, fascinated, as he began slowly to speak.

‘It is all there, you see. The dead man is the focus and centre of the mystery! We must probe deep into the heart and mind of Simeon Lee and see what we find there. For a man does not live and die to himself alone. That which he has, he hands on-to those who come after him…

‘What had Simeon Lee to bequeath to his sons and daughter? Pride, to begin with-a pride which, in the old man, was frustrated in his disappointment over his children. Then there was the quality of patience. We have been told that Simeon Lee waited patiently for years in order to revenge himself upon someone who had done him an injury. We see that that aspect of his temperament was inherited by the son who resembled him least in face. David Lee also could remember and continue to harbour resentment through long years. Inface, Harry Lee was the only one of his children who closely resembled him. That resemblance is quite striking when we examine the portrait of Simeon Lee as a young man. There is the same high-bridged aquiline nose, the long sharp line of the jaw, the backward poise of the head. I think, too, that Harry inherited many of his father’s mannerisms-that habit, for instance, of throwing back his head and laughing, and another habit of drawing his finger along the line of his jaw.

‘Bearing all these things in mind, and being convinced that the murder was committed by a person closely connected with the dead man, I studied the family from the psychological standpoint. That is, I tried to decide which of them werepsychologically possible criminals. And, in my judgment, only two persons qualified in that respect. They were Alfred Lee and Hilda Lee, David’s wife. David himself I rejected as a possible murderer. I do not think a person of his delicate susceptibilities could have faced the actual bloodshed of a cut throat. George Lee and his wife I likewise rejected. Whatever their desires, I did not think they had the temperament to take arisk. They were both essentially cautious. Mrs Alfred Lee I felt sure was quite incapable of an act of violence. She has too much irony in her nature. About Harry Lee I hesitated. He had a certain coarse truculence of aspect, but I was nearly sure that Harry Lee, in spite of his bluff and his bluster, was essentially a weakling. That, I now know, was also his father’s opinion. Harry, he said, was worth no more than the rest. That left me with two people I have already mentioned. Alfred Lee was a person capable of a great deal of selfless devotion. He was a man who had controlled and subordinated himself to the will of another for many years. It was always possible under these conditions for something to snap. Moreover, he might quite possibly have harboured a secret grudge against his father which might gradually have grown in force through never being expressed in any way. It is the quietest and meekest people who are often capable of the most sudden and unexpected violence for the reason that when their control does snap, it does so entirely! The other person I considered was capable of the crime was Hilda Lee. She is the kind of individual who is capable, on occasions, of taking the law into her own hands-though never through selfish motives. Such people judge and also execute. Many Old Testament characters are of this type. Jael and Judith, for example.

‘And now having got so far I examined the circumstances of the crime itself. And the first thing that arises-that strikes one in the face, as it were-is the extraordinary conditions under which that crime took place! Take your minds back to that room where Simeon Lee lay dead. If you remember, there was both a heavy table and a heavy chair overturned, a lamp, crockery, glasses, etc. But the chair and the table were especially surprising. They were of solid mahogany. It was hard to see howany struggle between that frail old man and his opponent could result in so much solid furniture being overturned and knocked down. The whole thing seemedunreal. And yet surely no one in their senses would stage such an effect if it had not really occurred-unless possibly Simeon Lee had been killed by a powerful man and the idea was to suggest that the assailant was a woman or somebody of weak physique.

‘But such an idea was unconvincing in the extreme, since the noise of the furniture would give the alarm and the murderer would thereby have very little time to make his exit. It would surely be toanyone’s advantage to cut Simeon Lee’s throat asquietly as possible.