Hallowe'en Party / Вечеринка на Хэллоуин. Книга для чтения на английском языке

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�“Why didn’t you go and tell the police then?” one of the girls said. Ann, I think, or Beatrice. Rather a smug, superior girl.’

�Aha, and what did she say to that ?’

�She said: “Because I didn’t know at the time it was a murder”.’

�A very interesting remark,’ said Poirot, sitting up rather straighter in his chair.

�She’d got a bit mixed up by then, I think,’ said Mrs Oliver. �You know, trying to explain herself and getting angry because they were all teasing her.

�They kept asking her why she hadn’t gone to the police, and she kept on saying “Because I didn’t know then that it was a murder. It wasn’t until afterwards that it came to me quite suddenly that that was what I had seen”.’

�But nobody showed any signs of believing her—and you yourself did not believe her—but when you came across her dead you suddenly felt that she might have been speaking the truth?’

�Yes, just that. I didn’t know what I ought to do, or what I could do.

Poirot bowed his head gravely in acknowledgement. He was silent for a moment or two, then he said:

�I must pose to you a serious question, and reflect before you answer it. Do you think that this girl had really seen a murder? Or do you think that she merely believed that she had seen a murder?’

�The first, I think,’ said Mrs Oliver. �I didn’t at the time. I just thought that she was vaguely remembering something she had once seen and was working it up to make it sound important and exciting.

�And so.’

�And so I’ve come along to you,’ said Mrs Oliver, �because the only way her death makes sense is that there really was a murder and that she was a witness to it.’

�That would involve certain things. It would involve that one of the people who were at the party committed the murder, and that that same person must also have been there earlier that day and have heard what Joyce said.

�You don’t think I’m just imagining things, do you?’ said Mrs Oliver. �Do you think that it is all just my very far-fetched imagination?’

�A girl was murdered,’ said Poirot. �Murdered by someone who had strength enough to hold her head down in a bucket of water.