He was tall, slender, with features of great perfection such as a classical sculptor might have produced. His eyes were dark, his hair was black and fitted him as a woven chain mail helmet or cap might have done. For a moment Poirot wondered whether he and this young man might not be meeting in the course of some pageant that was being rehearsed.

If so, thought Poirot, looking down at his galoshes, I, alas, shall have to go to the wardrobe mistress to get myself better equipped. He said:

"I am perhaps trepassing here. If so, I must apologise. I am a stranger in this part of the world. I only arrived yesterday."

"I don't think one could call it trespassing."

The voice was very quiet; it was polite yet in a curious way uninterested, as if this man's thoughts were really somewhere quite far away.

"It's not exactly open to the public, but people do walk round here.

Old Colonel Weston and his wife don't mind. They would mind if there was any damage done, but that's not really very likely."

"No vandalism," said Poirot, looking round him.

"No litter that is noticeable.

Not even a little basket. That is very unusual, is it not? And it seems deserted strange. Here you would think," he went on, "there would be lovers walking."

"Lovers don't come here," said the young man.

"It's supposed to be unlucky for some reason."

"Are you, I wonder, the architect? But perhaps I'm guessing wrong."

"My name is Michael Garfield," said the young man.

"I thought it might be," said Poirot. He gesticulated with a hand around him.

"You made this?"

"Yes," said Michael Garfield.

"It is very beautiful," said Poirot.

"Somehow one feels it is always rather unusual when something beautiful is made in well, frankly, what is a dull part of the English landscape.

"I congratulate you," he said.

"You must be satisfied with what you have done here."

"Is one ever satisfied? I wonder."

"You made it, I think, for a Mrs.

Llewellyn-Smythe. No longer alive, I believe. There is a Colonel and Mrs.

Weston, I believe? Do they own it now?"

"Yes. They got it cheap. It's a big, ungainly house not easy to run not what most people want. She left it in her Will to me."

"And you sold it."

"I sold the house."

"And not the Quarry Garden?"

"Oh yes. The Quarry Garden went with it, practically thrown in, as one might say."

"Now why?" said Poirot.

"It is interesting, that. You do not mind if I am perhaps a little curious?"

"Your questions are not quite the usual ones," said Michael Garfield.

"I ask not so much for facts as for reasons. Why did A do so and so?

Why did B do something else? Why was C's behaviour quite different from that of A and B?"

"You should be talking to a scientist," said Michael.

"It is a matter or so we are told nowadays of genes or chromosomes.

The arrangement, the pattern, and so on."

"You said just now you were not entirely satisfied because no-one ever was.

Was your employer, your patron, whatever you like to call her was she satisfied?

With this thing of beauty?"

"Up to a point," said Michael.

"I saw to that. She was easy to satisfy."

"That seems most unlikely," said Hercule Poirot.

"She was, I have learned, over sixty. Sixty-five at least. Are people of that age often satisfied?"

"She was assured by me that what I had carried out was the exact carrying out of her instructions and imagination and ideas."

"And was it?"

"Do you ask me that seriously?"

"No," said Poirot.

"No. Frankly I do not."

"For success in life," said Michael Garfield, "one has to pursue the career one wants, one has to satisfy such artistic leanings as one has got, but one has as well to be a tradesman. You have to sell your wares. Otherwise you are tied to carrying out other people's ideas in a way which will not accord with one's own. I carried out mainly my own ideas and I sold them, marketed them perhaps is a better word, to the client who employed me, as a direct carrying out of her plans and schemes. It is not a very difficult art to learn. There is no more to it than selling a child brown eggs rather than white ones. The customer has to be assured they are the best ones, the right ones. The essence of the countryside.

Shall we say, the hen's own preference?

Brown, farm, country eggs. One does not sell them if one says They are just eggs. There is only one difference in eggs. They are new laid or they are not?" "You are an unusual young man," said Poirot.

"Arrogant," he said thoughtfully.

"Perhaps."

"You have made here something very beautiful. You have added vision and planning to the rough material of stone hollowed out in the pursuit of industry, with no thought of beauty in that hacking out. You have added imagination, a result seen in the mind's eye, that you have managed to raise the money to fulfill. I congratulate you. I pay my tribute. The tribute of an old man who is approaching a time when the end of his own work is come."

"But at the moment you are still carrying it on?"

"You know who I am, then?"

Poirot was pleased indubitably. He liked people to know who he was.

Nowadays, he feared, most people did not.

"You follow the trail of blood… It is already known here. It is a small community, news travels. Another public success brought you here."

"Ah, you mean Mrs. Oliver."

"Ariadne Oliver. A best seller. People wish to interview her, to know what she thinks about such subjects as student unrest, socialism, girls' clothing, should sex be permissive, and many other things that are no concern of hers."

"Yes, yes," said Poirot, "deplorable, I think. They do not learn very much, I have noticed, from Mrs. Oliver. They learn only that she is fond of apples. That has now been known for twenty years at least, I should think, but she still repeats it with a pleasant smile. Although now, I fear, she no longer likes apples."

"It was apples that brought you here, was it not?"

"Apples at a Hallowe'en party," said Poirot.

"You were at that party?"

"No."

"You were fortunate."

"Fortunate?" Michael Garfield repeated the word, something that sounded faintly like surprise in his voice.

"To have been one of the guests at a party where murder is committed is not a pleasant experience. Perhaps you have not experienced it, but I tell you, you are fortunate because " Poirot became a little more foreign " il ya a des ennuis, vous comprenez^ People ask you times, dates, impertinent questions." He went on, "You knew the child?"

"Oh yes. The Reynolds are well known here. I know most of the people living round here. We all know each other in Woodleigh Common, though in varying degrees. There is some intimacy, some friendships, some people remain merest acquaintances, and so on."

"What was she like, the child Joyce?"

"She was how can I put it? not important. She had rather an ugly voice.

Shrill. Really, that's about all I remember about her. Fm not particularly fond of children. Mostly they bore me. Joyce bored me.

When she talked, she talked about herself."

"She was not interesting?"

Michael Garfield looked slightly surprised.

"I shouldn't think so," he said.

"Does she have to be?"

"It is my view that people devoid of interest are unlikely to be murdered.

People are murdered for gain, for fear or for love. One takes one's choice, but one has to have a starting point-" He broke off and glanced at his watch.

"I must proceed. I have an engagement to fulfill. Once more, my felicitations."

He went on down, following the path and picking his way carefully. He was glad that for once he was not wearing his tight patent leather shoes.

Michael Garfield was not the only person he was to meet in the sunk garden that day. As he reached the bottom he noted that three paths led from here in slightly different directions. At the entrance of the middle path, sitting on a fallen trunk of a tree, a child was awaiting him. She made this clear at once.