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

I haven’t been very well lately and children’s parties can be very tiring. I drove them there, and then later I came back to fetch them. The three children went together, you know. Ann, that’s the older one, she is sixteen, and Leopold who is nearly eleven. What was it Joyce said that you wanted to know about?’

�Mrs Oliver, who was there, will tell you what your daughter’s words were exactly. She said, I believe, that she had once seen a murder committed.’

�Joyce? Oh, she couldn’t have said a thing like that.

�Well, everyone seems to think it was rather unlikely,’ said Poirot. �I just wondered if you thought it likely. Did she ever speak to you about such a thing?’

�Seeing a murder? Joyce?’

�You must remember,’ said Poirot, �that the term murder might have been used by someone of Joyce’s age in a rather loose way. It might have been just a question of somebody being run over by a car, or of children fighting together perhaps and one pushing another into a stream or over a bridge.

�Well, I can’t think of anything like that happening here that Joyce could have seen, and she certainly never said anything about it to me. She must have been joking.’

�She was very positive,’ said Mrs Oliver. �She kept on saying that it was true and that she’d seen it.’

�Did anyone believe her?’ asked Mrs Reynolds.

�I don’t know,’ said Poirot.

�I don’t think they did,’ said Mrs Oliver, �or perhaps they didn’t want to—er—well, encourage her by saying they believed it.’

�They were inclined to jeer at her and say she was making it all up,’ said Poirot, less kind-hearted than Mrs Oliver.

�Well, that wasn’t very nice of them,’ said Mrs Reynolds. �As though Joyce would tell a lot of lies about things like that.’ She looked flushed and indignant.

�I know. It seems unlikely,’ said Poirot. �It was more possible, was it not, that she might have made a mistake, that she might have seen something she did think could have been described as a murder. Some accident, perhaps.’

�She’d have said something about it to me, if so, wouldn’t she?’ said Mrs Reynolds, still indignant.

�One would think so,’ said Poirot. �She did not say so at any time in the past? You might have forgotten.