"I think not. And you, Madame?"

"I told you already. I've no idea whatever."

"You would perhaps say so, and yet-you might, might you not, have, perhaps, what amounts to a very good idea, but only an idea. A half-formed idea. A possibie idea."

"Why should you think that?"

She looked at him curiously.

"You might have seen something-something quite small and unimportant but which on reflection might seem more significant to you, perhaps, than it had done at first."

"You must have something in your mind. Monsieur Poirot, some definite incident."

"Well, I admit it. It is because of what someone said to me."

"Indeed! And who was that?"

"A Miss Whittaker. A schoolteacher."

"Oh yes, of course. Elizabeth Whit224 taker. She's the mathematics mistress, isn't she, at The Elms? She was at the party, I remember. Did she see something?"

"It was not so much that she saw something as she had the idea that you might have seen something."

Mrs. Drake looked surprised and shook her head.

"I can't think of anything I can possibly have seen," said Rowena Drake, "but one never knows."

"It had to do with a vase," said Poirot.

"A vase of flowers."

"A vase of flowers?" Rowena Drake looked puzzled. Then her brow cleared.

"Oh, of course. I know. Yes, there was a big vase of autumn leaves and chrysanthemums on the table in the angle of the stairs. A very nice glass vase. One of my wedding presents. The leaves seemed to be drooping and so did one or two of the flowers. I remember noticing it as I passed through the hall-it was near the end of the party, I think, by then, but I'm not sure-I wondered why it looked like that, and I went up and dipped my fingers into it and found that some idiot must have forgotten to put any water into it after arranging it. It made me very angry. So I took it into the bathroom and filled it up.

But what could I have seen in that bathroom?

There was nobody in it. I am quite sure of that. I think one or two of the older girls and boys had done a little harmless, what the Americans call 'necking'3 there during the course of the party, but there was certainly nobody when I went into it with the vase."

"No, no, I do not mean that," said Poirot.

"But I understood that there was an accident. That the vase slipped out of your hand and it fell to the hall below and was shattered to pieces."

"Oh yes," said Rowena.

"Broken to smithereens. I was rather upset about it because as I've said, it had been one of our wedding presents, and it was really a perfect flower vase, heavy enough to hold big autumn bouquets and things like that.

It was very stupid of me. One of those things. My fingers just slipped. It went out of my hand and crashed on the hall floor below.

Elizabeth Whittaker was standing there. She helped me pick up the pieces and sweep some of the broken glass out of the way in case someone stepped on it. We just swept it into a corner by the Grandfather clock to be cleared up later."

She looked inquiringly at Poirot.

"Is that the incident you mean?" she asked.

"Yes," said Poirot.

"Miss Whittaker wondered, I think, how you had come to drop the vase.

She thought that something perhaps had startled you."

"Startled me?" Rowena Drake looked at him, then frowned as she tried to think again.

"No, I don't think I was startled, anyway. It was just one of those ways things do slip out of your hands. Sometimes when you're washing up. I think, really, it's a result of being tired. I was pretty tired by that time, what with the preparations for the party and running the party and all the rest of it. It went very well, I must say. I think it was-oh, just one of those clumsy actions that you can't help when you're tired."

"There was nothing-you are sure-that startled you? Something unexpected that you saw."

"Saw? Where? In the hall below? I didn't see anything in the hall below. It was empty at the moment because everyone was in at the Snapdragon excepting, of course, for Miss Whittaker.

And I don't think I even noticed her until she came forward to help when I ran down."

"Did you see someone, perhaps, leaving the library door?"

"The library door… I see what you mean. Yes, I could have seen that." She paused for quite a long time, then she looked at Poirot with a very straight, firm glance.

"I didn't see anyone leave the library," she said.

"Nobody at all…"

He wondered. The way in which she said it was what aroused the belief in his mind that she was not speaking the truth, that instead she had seen someone or something, perhaps the door just opening a little, a mere glance perhaps of a figure inside. But she was quite firm in her denial. Why, he wondered, had she been so firm? Because the person she had seen was a person she did not want to believe for one moment had had anything to do with the crime committed on the other side of the door? Someone she cared about, or someone which seemed more likely, he thought-someone whom she wished to protect. Someone, perhaps, who had not long passed beyond childhood, someone whom she might feel was not truly conscious of the awful thing they had just done.

He thought her a hard creature but a person of integrity. He thought that she was, like many women of the same type, women who were often magistrates, or who ran councils or charities, or interested themselves in what used to be called "good works". Women who had an inordinate belief in extenuating circumstances, who were ready, strangely enough, to make excuses for the young criminal. An adolescent boy, a mentally retarded girl.

Someone perhaps who had already been-what is the phrase-"in care". If that had been the type of person she had seen coming out of the library, then he thought it possible that Rowena Drake's protective instinct might have come into play. It was not unknown in the present age for children to commit crimes, quite young children.

Children of seven, of nine and so on, and it was often difficult to know how to dispose of these natural, it seemed, young criminals who came before the juvenile courts. Excuses had to be brought for them.

Broken homes. Negligent and unsuitable parents. But the people who spoke the most vehemently for them, the people who sought to bring forth every excuse for them, were usually the type of Rowena Drake. A stern and censorious woman, except in such cases.

For himself, Poirot did not agree. He was a man who thought first always of justice. He was suspicious, had always been suspicious, of mercy-too much mercy, that is to say. Too much mercy, as he knew from former experience both in Belgium and this country, often resulted in further crimes which were fatal to innocent victims who need not have been victims if justice had been put first and mercy second.

"I see," said Poirot.

"I see."

"You don't think it's possible that Miss Whittaker might have seen someone go into the library?" suggested Mrs. Drake.

Poirot was interested.

"Ah, you think that that might have been so?"

"It seemed to me merely a possibility.

She might have caught sight of someone going in through the library, say, perhaps five minutes or so earlier, and then, when I dropped the vase it might have suggested to her that I could have caught a glimpse of the same person. That I might have seen who it was. Perhaps she doesn't like to say anything that might suggest, unfairly perhaps, some person whom she had perhaps only half glimpsed not enough to be sure of. Some back view perhaps of a child, or a young boy."

"You think, do you not, Madame, that it was shall we say, a child a boy or girl, a mere child, or a young adolescent?

You think it was not any definite one of these but, shall we say, you think that that is the most likely type to have committed the crime we are discussing?"