Page:Murder on the Links - 1985.djvu/206

 and beauty, and the crime passionnel. A clever lawyer will make out a great case of extenuating circumstances. It will not be pleasant for you”

“I don’t care about that. You see, M. Poirot, in a way I do feel guilty of my father’s murder. But for me, and my entanglement with this girl, he would be alive and well today. And then my cursed carelessness in taking away the wrong overcoat. I can’t help feeling responsible for his death. It will haunt me forever!”

“No, no,” I said soothingly.

“Of course it’s horrible to me to think that Bella killed my father,” resumed Jack, “but I’d treated her shamefully. After I met Marthe, and realized I’d made a mistake, I ought to have written and told her so honestly. But I was so terrified of a row, and of its coming to Marthe’s ears, and her thinking there was more in it than there ever had been, thatwell, I was a coward, and went on hoping the thing would die down of itself. I just drifted, in factnot realizing that I was driving the poor kid desperate. If she’d really knifed me, as she meant to, I should have got no more than my deserts. And the way she’s come forward now is downright plucky. I’d have stood the racket, you knowup to the end.”

He was silent for a moment or two, and then burst out on another tack:

“What gets me is why the Governor should be wandering about in underclothes and my overcoat at that time of night. I suppose he’d just given the foreign johnnies the slip, and my mother must have made a mistake about its being two o’clock when they came. Oror, it wasn’t all a frame-up, was it? I mean, my mother didn’t thinkcouldn’t thinkthatthat it was me?”

Poirot reassured him quickly.

“No, no, M. Jack. Have no fears on that score. As for the rest, I will explain it to you one of these days. It is rather curious. But will you recount to us exactly what did occur on that terrible evening?”

“There’s very little to tell. I came from Cherbourg, as I told you, in order to see Marthe before going to the other end of