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"Naturally," said Mrs Oliver, "what else would you expect? Is he deafer or blinder or fatter or thinner?"
Poirot considered.
"He has lost a little weight. He wears spectacles for reading the paper. I do not think he is deaf, not to
any noticeable extent."
"And what does he think about it all?"
"You go too quickly," said Poirot.
"And what exactly are you and he going to do?"
"I have planned my programme," said Poirot. "First I have seen and consulted with my old friend. I
asked him to get me, perhaps, some information that would not be easy to get otherwise."
"You mean the police here will be his buddies and he'll get a lot of inside stuff from them?"
"Well, I should not put it exactly like that, but yes, those are the lines along which I have been
thinking."
"And after that?"
"I come to meet you here, Madame. I have to see just where this thing happened."
Mrs Oliver turned her head and looked up at the house.
"It doesn't look the sort ofhousethere'd be a murder in, does it?" she said.
Poirot thought again: What an unerring instinct she has!
"No," he said, "it does not look at all that sort of a house. After I have seen where, then I go with you to
see the mother of the dead child. I hear what she can tell me. This afternoon my friend Spence is
making an appointment for me to talk with the local inspector at a suitable hour. I should also like a talk
with the doctor here. And possibly the headmistress at the school. At six o'clock I drink tea and eat
sausages with my friend Spence and his sister again in their house and we discuss."
"What more do you think he'll be able to tell you?"
"I want to meet his sister. She has lived here longer than he has. He came here to join her when her
husband died. She will know, perhaps, the people here fairly well."
"Do you know what you sound like?" said Mrs Oliver. "A computer. You know. You're programming
yourself. That's what they call it, isn't it? I mean you're feeding all these things into yourself all day and
then you're going to see what comes out."
"It is certainly an idea you have there," said Poirot, with some interest. "Yes, yes, I play the part of the
computer. One feeds in the information -"
"And supposing you come up with all the wrong answers?" said Mrs Oliver.
"That would be impossible," said Hercule Poirot. "Computers do not do that sort of a thing."
"They're not supposed to," said Mrs Oliver, "but you'd be surprised at the things that happen sometimes.
My last electric light bill, for instance. I know there's a proverb which says 'To err is human', but a
human error is nothing to what a computer can do if it tries. Come on in and meet Mrs Drake."
Mrs Drake was certainly something, Poirot thought. She was a tall, handsome woman of forty-odd, her
golden hair was lightly tinged with grey, her eyes were brilliantly blue, she oozed competence from the
fingertips downwards. Any party she had arranged would have been a successful one. In the drawing-
room a tray of morning coffee with two sugared biscuits was awaiting them.
Apple Trees, he saw, was a most admirably kept house. It was well furnished, it had carpets of excellent
quality, everything was scrupulously polished and cleaned, and the fact that it had hardly any
outstanding object of interest in it was not readily noticeable. One would not have expected it. The
colours of the curtains and the covers were pleasant but conventional.
It could have been let furnished at any moment for a high rent to a desirable tenant, without having to
put away any treasures or make any alterations to the arrangement of the furniture.
Mrs Drake greeted Mrs Oliver and Poirot and concealed almost entirely what Poirot could not help
suspecting was a feeling of vigorously suppressed annoyance at the position in which she found herself
as the hostess at a social occasion at which something as anti-social as murder had occurred. As a
prominent member of the community of Woodleigh Common, he suspected that she felt an unhappy
sense of having herself in some way proved inadequate. What had occurred should not have occurred.
To someone else in someone else's house - yes. But at a party for children, arranged by her, given by
her, organised by her, nothing like this ought to have happened. Somehow or other she ought to have
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