Free Mrs McGinty's Dead by Agatha Christie

her, had gone abroad “to forget.”
    Has she forgotten? asked the Sunday Companion. We hope so. Somewhere, perhaps, is a happy wife and mother to whom those years of nightmare suffering silently endured, seem now only like a dream...
    “Well, well,” said Hercule Poirot and passed on to Lily Gamboll, the tragic child product of our overcrowded age.
    Lily Gamboll had, it seemed, been removed from her overcrowded home. An aunt had assumed responsibility for Lily's life. Lily had wanted to go to the pictures, Aunt had said “No.” Lily Gamboll had picked up the meat chopper which was lying conveniently on the table and had aimed a blow at her aunt with it. The aunt, though autocratic, was small and frail. The blow killed her. Lily was a well-developed and muscular child for her twelve years. An approved school had opened its doors and Lily had disappeared from the everyday scene.
    By now she is a woman, free again to take her place in our civilization. Her conduct, during her years of confinement and probation, is said to have been exemplary. Does not this show that it is not the child, but the system, that we must blame? Brought up in ignorance, in slum conditions, little Lily was the victim of her environment.
    Now, having atoned for her tragic lapse, she lives somewhere, happily, we hope, a good citizen and a good wife and mother. Poor little Lily Gamboll.
    Poirot shook his head. A child of twelve who took a swing at her aunt with a meat chopper and hit her hard enough to kill her was not, in his opinion, a nice child. His sympathies were, in this case, with the aunt.
    He passed on to Vera Blake.
    Vera Blake was clearly one of those women with whom everything, goes wrong. She had first taken up with a boyfriend who turned out to be a gangster wanted by the police for killing a bank watchman. She had then married a respectable tradesman who turned out to be a receiver of stolen goods. Her two children had likewise, in due course, attracted the attention of the police. They went with mamma to department stores and did a pretty line in shoplifting. Finally, however, a “good man” had appeared on the scene. He had offered tragic Vera a home in the Dominions. She and her children should leave this effete country.
    From henceforward a New Life awaited them. At last, after long years of repeated blows from Fate, Vera's troubles are over.
    “I wonder,” said Poirot sceptically. “Very possibly she will find she has married a confidence trickster who works the liners!”
    He leant back and studied the four photographs. Eva Kane with tousled curly hair over her ears and an enormous hat, held a bunch of roses up to her ear like a telephone receiver. Janice Courtland had a cloche hat pushed down over her ears and a waist round her hips. Lily Gamboll was a plain child with an adenoidal appearance of open mouth, hard breathing and thick spectacles. Vera Blake was so tragically black and white that no features showed.
    For some reason Mrs McGinty had torn out this feature, photographs and all. Why? Just to keep because the stories interested her? He thought not. Mrs McGinty had kept very few things during her sixty-odd years of life. Poirot knew that from the police reports of her belongings.
    She had torn this out on the Sunday and on the Monday she had bought a bottle of ink and the inference was that she, who never wrote letters, was about to write a letter. If it had been a business letter, she would probably have asked Joe Burch to help her. So it had not been business. It had been - what?
    Poirot's eye looked over the four photographs once again.
    Where, the Sunday Companion asked, are these women now?
    One of them, Poirot thought, might have been in Broadhinny last November.

Mrs McGinty's Dead
    III
    It was not until the following day that Poirot found himself tête à tête with Miss Pamela Horsefall.
    Miss Horsefall couldn't give him long, because she had to rush away to Sheffield, she explained.
    Miss Horsefall was