Free Five Little Pigs by Agatha Christie

sure—talk it over—make quite certain who could have taken it…’ Damned old fool—never made a quick decision in his life! A good thing for him he was the eldest son and has an estate to live on. If he’d ever tried to make money he’d have lost every penny he had.”
    Poirot asked:
    â€œYou had no doubt yourself who had taken the poison?”
    â€œOf course not. I knew at once it must be Caroline. You see, I knew Caroline very well.”
    Poirot said:
    â€œThat is very interesting. I want to know, Mr. Blake, what kind of a woman Caroline Crale was?”
    Philip Blake said sharply:
    â€œShe wasn’t the injured innocent people thought she was at the time of the trial!”
    â€œWhat was she, then?”
    Blake sat down again. He said seriously:
    â€œWould you really like to know?”
    â€œI would like to know very much indeed.”
    â€œCaroline was a rotter. She was a rotter through and through. Mind you, she had charm. She had that kind of sweetness of manner that deceives people utterly. She had a frail, helpless look about her that appealed to people’s chivalry. Sometimes, when I’ve read a bit of history, I think Mary Queen of Scots must have been a bit like her. Always sweet and unfortunate and magnetic—and actually a cold calculating woman, a scheming woman who planned the murder of Darnley and got away with it. Caroline was like that—a cold, calculating planner. And she had a wicked temper.
    â€œI don’t know whether they’ve told you—it isn’t a vital point of the trial, but it shows her up—what she did to her baby sister? She was jealous, you know. Her mother had married again, and all the notice and affection went to little Angela. Caroline couldn’t stand that. She tried to kill the baby with a crowbar—smash its head in. Luckily the blow wasn’t fatal. But it was a pretty ghastly thing to do.”
    â€œYes, indeed.”
    â€œWell, that was the real Caroline. She had to be first. That was the thing she simply could not stand—not being first. And there was a cold, egotistical devil in her that was capable of being stirred to murderous lengths.
    â€œShe appeared impulsive, you know, but she was really calculating. When she stayed at Alderbury as a girl, she gave us all the once over and made her plans. She’d no money of her own. I was never in the running—a younger son with his way to make. (Funny, that, I could probably buy up Meredith and Crale, if he’d lived, nowadays!) She considered Meredith for a bit, but she finally fixed on Amyas. Amyas would have Alderbury, and though he wouldn’t have much money with it, she realized that his talentas a painter was something quite out of the way. She gambled on his being not only a genius but a financial success as well.
    â€œAnd she won. Recognition came to Amyas early. He wasn’t a fashionable painter exactly—but his genius was recognized and his pictures were bought. Have you seen any of his paintings? There’s one here. Come and look at it.”
    He led the way into the dining room and pointed to the left-hand wall.
    â€œThere you are. That’s Amyas.”
    Poirot looked in silence. It came to him with fresh amazement that a man could so imbue a conventional subject with his own particular magic. A vase of roses on a polished mahogany table. That hoary old set piece. How then did Amyas Crale contrive to make his roses flame and burn with a riotous almost obscene life. The polished wood of the table trembled and took on sentient life. How explain the excitement the picture roused? For it was exciting. The proportions of the table would have distressed Superintendent Hale, he would have complained that no known roses were precisely of that shape or colour. And afterwards he would have gone about wondering vaguely why the roses he saw were unsatisfactory, and round mahogany tables would have annoyed him for