Poirot frowned, dissatisfied. That picture did not somehow fit the Andrew Restarick that he himself had met. Not weak surely, with that thrust-out chin, the steady eyes, the air of resolution. He had been a successful business man, too, apparently.
Good at his job in the earlier years, and he had put through good deals in South Africa and in South America. He had increased his holdings. It was a success story that he had brought home with him, not one of failure. How then could he be a weak personality? Weak, perhaps, only where women were concerned. He had made a mistake in his marriage-married the wrong woman… Pushed into it perhaps by his family? And then he had met the other woman. Just that one woman? Or had there been several women? It was hard to find a record of that kind after so many years. Certainly he had not been a notoriously unfaithful husband. He had had a normal home, he had been fond, by all accounts, of his small daughter. But then he had come across a woman whom he had cared for enough to leave his home and to leave his country. It had been a real love affair.
But had it, perhaps, matched up with any additional motive? Dislike of office work, the City, the daily routine of London? He thought it might. It matched the pattern. He seemed, too, to have been a solitary type. Everyone had liked him both here and abroad, but there seemed no intimate friends. Indeed, it would have been difficult for him to have intimate friends abroad because he had never stopped in any one spot long enough. He had plunged into some gamble, attempted a coup, had made good, then tired of the thing and gone on somewhere else. Nomadic I A wanderer.
It still did not quite accord with his own picture of the man… A picture? The word stirred in his mind the memory of the picture that hung in Restarick's office, on the wall behind his desk. It had been a portrait of the same man fifteen years ago.
How much difference had those fifteen years made in the man sitting there?
Surprisingly little, on the whole! More grey in the hair, a heavier set to the shoulders, but the lines of character on the face were much the same. A determined face. A man who knew what he wanted, who meant to get it. A man who would take risks. A man with a certain ruthlessness.
Why, he wondered, had Restarick brought that picture up to London? They had been companion portraits of a husband and wife. Strictly speaking artistically, they should have remained together. Would a psychologist have said that subconsciously Restarick wanted to dissociate himself from his former wife once more, to separate himself from her? Was he then mentally still retreating from her personality although she was dead? An interesting point.
The pictures had presumably come out of storage with various other family articles of furnishing. Mary Restarick had no doubt selected certain personal objects to supplement the furniture of Crosshedges for which Sir Roderick had made room. He wondered whether Mary Restarick, the new wife, had liked hanging up that particular pair of portraits. More natural, perhaps, if she had put the first wife's portrait in an attic! But then he reflected that she would probably not have had an attic to stow away unwanted objects at Crosshedges. Presumably Sir Roderick had made room for a few family things whilst the returned couple were looking about for a suitable house in London. So it had not mattered much, and it would have been easier to hang both portraits. Besides, Mary Restarick seemed a sensible type of woman -not a jealous or emotional type.
"Tout de meme^ thought Hercule Poirot to himself, "les femmes, they are all capable of jealousy, and sometimes the ones you would consider the least likely!" His thoughts passed to Mary Restarick, and he considered her in turn. It struck him that what was really odd was that he had so few thoughts about her! He had seen her only the once, and she had, somehow or other, not made much impression on him. A certain efficiency, he thought, and also a certain-how could he put it? - artificiality? ("But there, my friend," said Hercule Poirot, again in parenthesis, "there you are considering her wig!") It was absurd really that one should know so little about a woman. A woman who was efficient and who wore a wig, and who was good-looking, and who was sensible, and who could feel anger. Yes, she had been angry when she had found the Peacock Boy wandering uninvited in her house. She had displayed it sharply and unmistakably. And the boy - he had seemed what? Amused, no more. But she had been angry, very angry at finding him there. Well, that was natural enough. He would not be any mother's choice for her daughter - Poirot stopped short in his thoughts, shaking his head vexedly. Mary Restarick was not Norma's mother. Not for her the agony, the apprehension about a daughter making an unsuitable unhappy marriage, or announcing an illegitimate baby with an unsuitable father! What did Mary feel about Norma? Presumably, to begin with, that she was a thoroughly tiresome girl - who had picked up with a young man who was going to be obviously a source of worry and annoyance to Andrew Restarick. But after that? What had she thought and felt about a step-daughter who was apparently deliberately trying to poison her?
Her attitude seemed to have been the sensible one. She had wanted to get Norma out of the house, herself out of danger, and to co-operate with her husband in suppressing any scandal about what had happened.
Norma came down for an occasional weekend to keep up appearances, but her life henceforward was bound to centre in London. Even when the Restaricks moved into the house they were looking for, they would not suggest Norma living with them. Most girls, nowadays, lived away from their families. So that problem had been settled.
Except that, for Poirot, the question of who had administered poison to Mary Restarick was very far from settled. Restarick himself believed it was his daughter - But Poirot wondered.
His mind played with the possibilities of the girl Sonia. What was she doing in that house? Why had she come there? She had Sir Roderick eating out of her hand all right - perhaps she had no wish to go back to her own country? Possibly her designs were purely matrimonial - old men of Sir Roderick's age married pretty young girls every day of the week. In the worldly sense, Sonia could do very well for herself.
A secure social position, and widowhood to look forward to with a settled and sufficient income - or were her aims quite different? Had she gone to Kew Gardens with Sir Roderick's missing papers tucked between the pages of a book?
Had Mary Restarick become suspicious of her - of her activities, of her loyalties, of where she went on her days off, and of whom she met? And had Sonia, then, administered the substances which in cumulative small doses, would arouse no suspicion of anything but ordinary gastroenteritis?
For the time being, he put the household at Crosshedges out of his mind.
He came, as Norma had come, to London, and proceeded to the consideration of three girls who shared a flat.
Claudia Reece-Holland, Frances Cary, Norma Restarick. Claudia ReeceHolland, daughter of a well-known Member of Parliament, well off, capable, well trained, good-looking, a first-class secretary.
Frances Cary, a country solicitor's daughter, artistic, had been to drama school for a short time, then to the Slade, chucked that also, occasionally worked for the Arts Council, now employed by an art gallery.
Earned a good salary, was artistic and had bohemian associations. She knew the young man, David Baker, though not apparently more than casually. Perhaps she was in love with him? He was the kind of young man, Poirot thought, disliked generally by parents, members of the Establishment and also the police. Where the attraction lay for well-born girls Poirot failed to see. But one had to acknowledge it as a fact. What did he himself think of David?