Elephants Can Remember Read Online Free PDF

mean - through the exciting friends you've got?”
    “Well, I wouldn't say the exciting friends, perhaps. Certainly there are knowledgeable friends, friends who could get certain records, look up the accounts that were given of the crime at the time, some access I could get to certain records.”
    “You could find out things,” said Mrs. Oliver hopefully, “and then tell me.”
    “Yes,” said Poirot, “I think I could help you to know at any rate the full facts of the case. It'll take a little time, though.”
    “I can see that if you do that, which is what I want you to do, I've got to do something myself. I'll have to see the girl. I've got to see whether she knows anything about all this, ask her if she'd like me to give her mother-in-law-to-be a raspberry, or whether there is any other way in which I can help her. And I'd like to see the boy she's going to marry, too.”
    “Quite right,” said Poirot. “Excellent.”
    “And I suppose,” said Mrs. Oliver, “there might be people -”
    She broke off, frowning.
    “I don't suppose people will be very much good,” said Hercule Poirot. “This is an affair of the past. A cause célèbre, perhaps at the time. But what is a cause célèbre when you come to think of it? Unless it comes to an astonishing dénouement, which this one didn't, nobody remembers it.”
    “No,” said Mrs. Oliver, “that is quite true. There was a lot about it in the papers and mentions of it for some time, and then it just - faded out. Well, like things do now. Like that girl, the other day. You know, who left her home and they couldn't find her anywhere. Well, I mean, that was five or six years ago and then suddenly a little boy, playing about in a sand heap or a gravel pit or something, suddenly came across her dead body. Five or six years later.”
    “That is true,” said Poirot. “And it is true that knowing from the body how long it is since death and what happened on the particular day and going back over various events of which there is a written record, one may in the end turn up a murderer. But it will be more difficult in your problem since it seems the answer must be one of two things: that the husband disliked his wife and wanted to get rid of her, or that the wife hated her husband or else had a lover. Therefore, it might have been a passionate crime or something quite different. Anyway, there would be nothing, as it were, to find out about it. If the police could not find out at the time, then the motive must have been a difficult one, not easy to see. Therefore it has remained a nine days' wonder, that is all.”
    “I suppose I can go to the daughter. Perhaps that is what that odious woman was getting me to do - wanted me to do. She thought the daughter knew - well, the daughter might have known,” said Mrs. Oliver. “Children do, you know. They know the most extraordinary things.”
    “Have you any idea how old this goddaughter of yours would have been at the time?”
    “Well, I have if I reckon it up, but I can't say offhand. I think she might have been nine or ten, but perhaps older, I don't know. I think that she was away at school at the time. But that may be just my fancy, remembering back what I read.”
    “But you think Mrs. Burton-Cox's wish was to make you get information from the daughter? Perhaps the daughter knows something, perhaps she said something to the son, and the son said something to his mother. I expect Mrs. Burton-Cox tried to question the girl herself and got rebuffed, but thought the famous Mrs. Oliver, being both a godmother and also full of criminal knowledge, might obtain information. Though why it should matter to her, I still don't see,” said Poirot. “And it does not seem to me that what you call vaguely 'people' can help after all this time.”
    He added, “Would anybody remember?”
    “Well, that's where I think they might,” said Mrs. Oliver.
    “You surprise me,” said Poirot, looking at her with a somewhat puzzled face.