Hallowe'en Party by Agatha Christie

able to tell you?”
    â€œI want to meet his sister. She has lived here longer than he has. He came here to join her when her husband died. She will know, perhaps, the people here fairly well.”
    â€œDo you know what you sound like?” said Mrs. Oliver. “A computer. You know. You’re programming yourself. That’s what they call it, isn’t it? I mean you’re feeding all these things into yourself all day and then you’re going to see what comes out.”
    â€œIt is certainly an idea you have there,” said Poirot, with some interest. “Yes, yes, I play the part of the computer. One feeds in the information—”
    â€œAnd supposing you come up with all the wrong answers?” said Mrs. Oliver.
    â€œThat would be impossible,” said Hercule Poirot. “Computers do not do that sort of a thing.”
    â€œThey’re not supposed to,” said Mrs. Oliver, “but you’d be surprised at the things that happen sometimes. My last electric light bill, for instance. I know there’s a proverb which says ‘To err is human,’ but a human error is nothing to what a computer can do if it tries. Come on in and meet Mrs. Drake.”
    Mrs. Drake was certainly something, Poirot thought. She was a tall, handsome woman of forty-odd, her golden hair was lightly tinged with grey, her eyes were brilliantly blue, she oozed competence from the fingertips downwards. Any party she had arranged would have been a successful one. In the drawing room a tray of morning coffee with two sugared biscuits was awaiting them.
    Apple Trees, he saw, was a most admirably kept house. It was well furnished, it had carpets of excellent quality, everything was scrupulously polished and cleaned, and the fact that it had hardly any outstanding object of interest in it was not readily noticeable. One would not have expected it. The colours of the curtains and the covers were pleasant but conventional. It could have been let furnished at any moment for a high rent to a desirable tenant, without having to put away any treasures or make any alterations to the arrangement of the furniture.
    Mrs. Drake greeted Mrs. Oliver and Poirot and concealed almost entirely what Poirot could not help suspecting was a feeling of vigorously suppressed annoyance at the position in which she found herself as the hostess at a social occasion at which something as antisocial as murder had occurred. As a prominent member of the community of Woodleigh Common, he suspected that she felt an unhappy sense of having herself in some way proved inadequate. What had occurred should not have occurred. To someone else in someone else’s house—yes. But at a party for children, arranged by her, given by her, organized by her, nothing like this ought to have happened. Somehow or other she ought to have seen to it that it did not happen. And Poirot also had a suspicion that she wasseeking round irritably in the back of her mind for a reason. Not so much a reason for murder having taken place, but to find out and pin down some inadequacy on the part of someone who had been helping her and who had by some mismanagement or some lack of perception failed to realize that something like this could happen.
    â€œMonsieur Poirot,” said Mrs. Drake, in her fine speaking voice, which Poirot thought would come over excellently in a small lecture room or the village hall, “I am so pleased you could come down here. Mrs. Oliver has been telling me how invaluable your help will be to us in this terrible crisis.”
    â€œRest assured, Madame, I shall do what I can, but as you no doubt realize from your experience of life, it is going to be a difficult business.”
    â€œDifficult?” said Mrs. Drake. “Of course it’s going to be difficult. It seems incredible, absolutely incredible, that such an awful thing should have happened. I suppose,” she added, “the police may know something?