Read Online Thomas Godfrey (Ed) by Murder for Christmas - Free Book Online Page A

appreciated
in the highest quarters.”
    “You are too kind,” Hercule Poirot
waved a hand, “but I really cannot undertake to do as you ask. At this season
of the year—”
    Again Mr. Jesmond interrupted. “Christmas
time,” he said, persuasively. “An old-fashioned Christmas in the English
countryside.”
    Hercule Poirot shivered. The thought
of the English countryside at this season of the year did not attract him.
    “A good old-fashioned Christmas!”
Mr. Jesmond stressed it.
    “Me—I am not an Englishman,” said
Hercule Poirot. “In my country, Christmas, it is for the children. The New
Year, that is what we celebrate.”
    “Ah,” said Mr. Jesmond, “but
Christmas in England is a great institution and I assure you at Kings Lacey you
would see it at its best. It’s a wonderful old house, you know. Why, one wing
of it dates from the fourteenth century.”
    Again Poirot shivered. The thought
of a fourteenth-century English manor house filled him with apprehension. He
had suffered too often in the historic country houses of England. He looked
round appreciatively at his comfortable modern flat with its radiators and the
latest patent devices for excluding any kind of draught.
    “In the winter,” he said firmly, “I
do not leave London.”
    “I don’t think you quite appreciate,
M. Poirot, what a very serious matter this is.” Mr. Jesmond glanced at his
companion and then back at Poirot.
    Poirot’s second visitor had up to
now said nothing but a polite and formal “How do you do.” He sat now, gazing
down at his well-polished shoes, with an air of the utmost dejection on his
coffee-coloured face. He was a young man, not more than twenty-three, and he was
clearly in a state of complete misery.
    “Yes, yes,” said Hercule Poirot. “Of
course the matter is serious. I do appreciate that. His Highness has my
heartfelt sympathy.”
    “The position is one of the utmost
delicacy,” said Mr. Jesmond.
    Poirot transferred his gaze from the
young man to his older companion. If one wanted to sum up Mr. Jesmond in a
word, the word would have been discretion. Everything about Mr. Jesmond was
discreet. His well-cut but inconspicuous clothes, his pleasant, well-bred voice
which rarely soared out of an agreeable monotone, his light-brown hair just
thinning a little at the temples, his pale serious face. It seemed to Hercule
Poirot that he had known not one Mr. Jesmond but a dozen Mr. Jesmonds in his
time, all using sooner or later the same phrase—”A position of the utmost
delicacy.”
    “The police,” said Hercule Poirot, “can
be very discreet, you know.”
    Mr. Jesmond shook his head firmly.
    “Not the police,” he said. “To
recover the—er—what we want to recover will almost inevitably invoke taking
proceedings in the law courts and we know so little. We suspect, but we do not know.”
    “You have my sympathy,” said Hercule
Poirot again.
    If he imagined that his sympathy was
going to mean anything to his two visitors, he was wrong. They did not want
sympathy, they wanted practiced help. Mr. Jesmond began once more to talk about
the delights of an English Christmas.
    “It’s dying out, you know,” he said,
“the real old-fashioned type of Christmas. People spend it at hotels nowadays.
But an English Christmas with all the family gathered round, the children and
their stockings, the Christmas tree, the turkey and plum pudding, the crackers.
The snowman outside the window—”
    In the interests of exactitude,
Hercule Poirot intervened.
    “To make a snow-man one has to have
the snow,” he remarked severely. “And one cannot have snow to order, even for
an English Christmas.”
    “I was talking to a friend of mine
in the meteorological office only today,” said Mr. Jesmond, “and he tells me
that it is highly probable there will be snow this
Christmas.”
    It was the wrong thing to have said.
Hercule Poirot shuddered more forcefully than ever.
    “Snow in the country!” he said.