Hallowe'en party by Agatha Christie

Author:Agatha Christie
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Detective, Detective and mystery stories, Mystery & Detective, Fiction - Mystery, General, Mystery & Detective - Series, Traditional British, Fiction, Mystery & Detective - Traditional British, Mystery and detective stories
ISBN: 9780671542030
Publisher: Pocket Books
Published: 1984-10-02T07:55:16.302000+00:00

Chapter 13

When Hercule Poirot had taken his leave and departed, Jeremy Fullerton sat before his desk drumming gently with his fingertips. His eyes, however, were far away lost in thought.

He picked up a document in front of him and dropped his eyes down to it, but without focusing his glance. The discreet buzz of the house telephone caused him to pick up the receiver on his desk.

"Yes, Miss Miles?"

"Mr Holden is here, sir."

"Yes. Yes, his appointment, I believe, was for nearly three quarters of an hour ago. Did he give any reason for having been so late?... Yes, yes, I quite see. Rather the same excuse he gave last time. Will you tell him I've seen another client, and I am now too short of time. Make an appointment with him for next week, will you? We can't have this sort of thing going on."

"Yes, Mr Fullerton."

He replaced the receiver and sat looking thoughtfully down at the document in front of him. He was still not reading it.

His mind was going over events of the past. Two years - close on two years ago - and that strange little man this morning with his patent leather shoes and his big moustaches, had brought it back to him, asking all those questions. Now he was going over in his own mind a conversation of nearly two years ago. He saw again, sitting in the chair opposite him, a girl, a short, stocky figure the olive brown skin, the dark red generous mouth, the heavy cheekbones and the fierceness of the blue eyes that looked into his beneath the heavy, beetling brows. A passionate face, a face full of vitality, a face that had known suffering - would probably always know suffering - but would never learn to accept suffering. The kind of woman who would fight and protest until the end. Where was she now, he wondered?

Somehow or other she had managed - what had she managed exactly? Who had helped her? Had anyone helped her? Somebody must have done so.

She was back again, he supposed, in some trouble-stricken spot in Central Europe where she had come from, where she belonged, where she had had to go back to because there was no other course for her to take unless she was content to lose her liberty.

Jeremy Fullerton was an upholder of the law. He believed in the law, he was contemptuous of many of the magistrates of today with their weak sentences, their acceptance of scholastic needs. The students who stole books, the young married women who denuded the supermarkets, the girls who filched money from their employers, the boys who wrecked telephone boxes, none of them in real need, none of them desperate, most of them had known nothing but over-indulgence in bringing-up and a fervent belief that anything they could not afford to buy was theirs to take. Yet along with his intrinsic belief in the administration of the law justly, Mr Fullerton was a man who had compassion.

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