Taken at the Flood Read Free

looked at her reflectively.
    â€œMy fees,” he said softly, “are very expensive. I may say enormously expensive! And the task you suggest would not be easy.”
    â€œOh dear—but surely—it is most unfortunate. I and my husband are very badly off—very badly off indeed. Actually my own plight is worse than my dear husband knows. I bought some shares—under spirit guidance—and so far they have proved very disappointing—in fact, quite alarming. They have gone right down and are now, I gather, practically unsaleable.”
    She looked at him with dismayed blue eyes.
    â€œI have not dared to tell my husband. I simply tell you in order to explain how I am situated. But surely, dear M. Poirot, to reunite a young husband and wife—it is such a noble mission—”
    â€œNobility, chère Madame, will not pay steamer and railway and air travel fares. Nor will it cover the cost of long telegrams and cables, and the interrogations of witnesses.”
    â€œBut if he is found—if Captain Underhay is found alive and well—then—well, I think I may safely say that, once that was accomplished, there—there would be no difficulty about—er—reimbursing you.”
    â€œAh, he is rich, then, this Captain Underhay?”
    â€œNo. Well, no…But I can assure you—I can give you my word —that—that the money situation will not present difficulties.”
    Slowly Poirot shook his head.
    â€œI am sorry, Madame. The answer is No.”
    He had a little difficulty in getting her to accept that answer.
    When she had finally gone away, he stood lost in thought, frowning to himself. He remembered now why the name of Cloade was familiar to him. The conversation at the club the day of the airraid came back to him. The booming boring voice of Major Porter, going on and on, telling a story to which nobody wanted to listen.
    He remembered the rustle of a newspaper and Major Porter’s suddenly dropped jaw and expression of consternation.
    But what worried him was trying to make up his mind about the eager middle-aged lady who had just left him. The glib spiritualistic patter, the vagueness, the floating scarves, the chains and amulets jingling round her neck—and finally, slightly at variance with all this, that sudden shrewd glint in a pair of pale-blue eyes.
    â€œJust why exactly did she come to me?” he said to himself. “And what, I wonder, has been going on in”—he looked down at the card on his desk—“Warmsley Vale?”
    III
    It was exactly five days later that he saw a small paragraph in an evening paper—it referred to the death of a man called Enoch Arden—at Warmsley Vale, a small old-world village about three miles from the popular Warmsley Heath Golf Course.
    Hercule Poirot said to himself again:
    â€œI wonder what has been going on in Warmsley Vale….”

One
    I
    W armsley Heath consists of a golf course, two hotels, some very expensive modern villas giving on to the golf course, a row of what were, before the war, luxury shops, and a railway station.
    Emerging from the railway station, a main road roars its way to London on your left—to your right a small path across a field is signposted
    Footpath to Warmsley Vale.
    Warmsley Vale, tucked away amongst wooded hills, is as unlike Warmsley Heath as well can be. It is in essence a microscopic old-fashioned market town now degenerated into a village. It has a main street of Georgian houses, several pubs, a few unfashionable shops and a general air of being a hundred and fifty instead of twenty-eight miles from London.
    Its occupants one and all unite in despising the mushroom growth of Warmsley Heath.
    On the outskirts are some charming houses with pleasant old-world gardens. It was to one of these houses, the White House, that Lynn Marchmont returned in the early spring of 1946 when she was demobbed from the Wrens.
    On her third morning she