Elephants Can Remember by Agatha Christie
‘News from foreign places, do you mean?’
‘Quite a lot of them were from foreign places. Other people who knew them here rather slightly or from people whose aunts or cousins or friends knew them long ago.’
‘And each one that you’ve noted down had some story to tell – some reference to the tragedy or to people involved?’
‘That’s the idea,’ said Mrs Oliver. ‘I’ll tell you roughly, shall I?’
‘Yes. Have a petit-four.’
‘Thank you,’ said Mrs Oliver.
She took a particularly sweet and rather bilious-looking one and champed it with energy.
‘Sweet things,’ she said, ‘really give you a lot of vitality, I always think. Well now, I’ve got the following suggestions. These things have usually been said to me starting by: – “Oh yes, of course!” “How sad it was, that whole story!” “Of course, I think everyone knows really what happened.” That’s the sort of thing.’
‘Yes.’
‘These people thought they knew what happened. But there weren’t really any very good reasons. It was just something someone had told them, or they’d heard either from friends or servants or relations or things like that. The suggestions, of course, are all the kind that you might think they were. A. That General Ravenscroft was writing his memoirs of his Malayan days and that he had a young woman who acted as his secretary and took dictation and typed things for him and was helping him, that she was a nice-looking girl and no doubt there was something there. The result being – well, there seemed to be two schools of thought. One school of thought was that he shot his wife because he hoped to marry the girl, and then when he had shot her, immediately was horror-stricken at what he’d done and shot himself . . .’
‘Exactly,’ said Poirot. ‘A romantic explanation.’
‘The other idea was that there had been a tutor who came to give lessons to the son who had been ill and away from his prep school for six months or so – a good-looking young man.’
‘Ah yes. And the wife had fallen in love with the young man. Perhaps had an affair with him?’
‘That was the idea,’ said Mrs Oliver. ‘No kind of evidence. Just romantic suggestion again.’
‘And therefore?’
‘Therefore I think the idea was that the General probably shot his wife and then in a fit of remorse shot himself. There was another story that the General had had an affair, and his wife found out about it, that she shot him and then herself. It’s always been slightly different every time. But nobody really knew anything. I mean, it’s always just a likely story every time. I mean, the General may have had an affair with a girl or lots of girls or just another married woman, or it might have been the wife who had an affair with someone. It’s been a different someone in each story I’ve been told. There was nothing definite about it or any evidence for it. It’s just the gossip that went around about twelve or thirteen years ago, which people have rather forgotten about now. But they remember enough about it to tell one a few names and get things only moderately wrong about what happened. There was an angry gardener who happened to live on the place, there was a nice elderly cook-housekeeper, who was rather blind and rather deaf, but nobody seems to suspect that she had anything to do with it. And so on. I’ve got all the names and possibilities written down. The names of some of them wrong and some of them right. It’s all very difficult. His wife had been ill, I gather, for some short time, I think it was some kind of fever that she had. A lot of her hair must have fallen out because she bought four wigs. There were at least four new wigs found among her things.’
‘Yes. I, too, heard that,’ said Poirot.
‘Who did you hear it from?’
‘A friend of mine in the police. He went back over the accounts of the inquest and the various things in the house. Four wigs! I would like to have your opinion on that, madame. Do you think that four wigs seems somewhat excessive?’
‘Well, I do really,’ said Mrs Oliver. ‘I had an aunt who had a wig, and she had an extra wig, but she sent one back to be redressed and wore the second one. I never heard of anyone who had four wigs.’
Mrs Oliver extracted a small notebook from her bag, ruffled the pages of it, searching for extracts.
‘Mrs Carstairs, she’s seventy-seven and rather gaga. Quote from her: “I do remember the Ravenscrofts quite well. Yes, yes, a very nice couple. It’s very sad, I think. Yes. Cancer it was!” I asked her which of them had cancer,’ said Mrs Oliver, ‘but Mrs Carstairs had rather forgotten about that. She said she thought the wife came to London and consulted a doctor and had an operation and then came home and was very miserable, and her husband was very upset about her. So of course he shot her and himself.’
‘Was that her theory or did she have an exact knowledge?’
‘I think it was entirely theory. As far as I can see and hear in the course of my investigations,’ said Mrs Oliver, making rather a point of this last word, ‘when anybody has heard that any of their friends whom they don’t happen to know very well have sudden illness or consult doctors, they always think it’s cancer. And so do the people themselves, I think. Somebody else – I can’t read her name here, I’ve forgotten, I think it began with T – she said that it was the husband who had cancer. He was very unhappy, and so was his wife. And they talked it over together and they couldn’t bear the thought of it all, so they decided to commit suicide.’
‘Sad and romantic,’ said Poirot.
‘Yes, and I don’t think really true,’ said Mrs Oliver. ‘It is worrying, isn’t it? I mean, the people remembering so much and that they really mostly seem to have made it up themselves.’
‘They have made up the solution of something they knew about,’ said Poirot. ‘That is to say, they know that somebody comes to London, say, to consult a doctor, or that somebody has been in hospital for two or three months. That is a fact that they know.’
‘Yes,’ said Mrs Oliver, ‘and then when they come to talk about it a long time afterwards, they’ve got the solution for it which they’ve made up themselves. That isn’t awfully helpful, is it?’
‘It is helpful,’ said Poirot. ‘You are quite right, you know, in what you said to me.’
‘About elephants?’ said Mrs Oliver, rather doubtfully.
‘About elephants,’ said Poirot. ‘It is important to know certain facts which have lingered in people’s memories although they may not know exactly what the fact was, why it happened or what led to it. But they might easily know something that we do not know and that we have no means of learning. So there have been memories leading to theories – theories of infidelity, of illness, of suicide pacts, of jealousy, all these things have been suggested to you. Further search could be made as to points if they seem in any way probable.’
‘People like talking about the past,’ said Mrs Oliver. ‘They like talking about the past really much more than they like talking about what’s happening now, or what happened last year. It brings things back to them. They tell you, of course, first about a lot of other people that you don’t want to hear about and then you hear what the other people that they’ve remembered knew about somebody else that they didn’t know but they heard about. You know, so that the General and Lady Ravenscroft you hear about is at one remove, as it were. It’s like family relationships,’ she said. ‘You know, first cousin once removed, second cousin twice removed, all the rest of it. I don’t think I’ve been really very helpful, though.’
‘You must not think that,’ said Poirot. ‘I am pretty sure that you will find that some of these things in your agreeable little purple-coloured notebook will have something to do with the past tragedy. I can tell you from my own enquiries into the official accounts of these two deaths, that they have remained a mystery. That is, from the police point of view. They were an affectionate couple, there was no gossip or hearsay much about them of any sex trouble, there was no illness discovered such as would have caused anyone to take their own lives. I talk now only of the time, you unde
‘I know what you mean,’ said Mrs Oliver, ‘and I’ve got something about that from an old Nanny. An old Nanny who is now – I don’t know, she might be a hundred, but I think she’s only about eighty. I remember her from my childhood days. She used to tell me stories about people in the Services abroad – India, Egypt, Siam and Hong Kong and the rest.’
‘Anything that interested you?’
‘Yes,’ said Mrs Oliver, ‘there was some tragedy that she talked about. She seemed a bit uncertain about what it was. I’m not sure that it had anything to do with the Ravenscrofts, it might have been to do with some other people out there because she doesn’t remember surnames and things very well. It was a mental case in one family. Someone’s sister-in-law. Either General Whoever-it-was’s sister or Mrs Who-ever-it-was’ssister. Somebody who’d been in a mental home for years. I gathered she’d killed her own children or tried to kill her own children long ago, and then she’d been supposed to be cured or paroled or something and came out to Egypt, or Malaya or wherever it was. She came out to stay with the people. And then it seems there was some other tragedy, connected again, I think, with children or something of that kind. Anyway, it was something that was hushed up. But I wondered. I mean, if there was something mental in the family, either Lady Ravenscroft’s family or General Ravenscroft’s family. I don’t think it need have been as near as a sister. It could have been a cousin or something like that. But – well, it seemed to me a possible line of enquiry.’
‘Yes,’ said Poirot, ‘there’s always possibility and something that waits for many years and then comes home to roost from somewhere in the past. That is what someone said to me. Old sins have long shadows.’
‘It seemed to me,’ said Mrs Oliver, ‘not that it was likely or even that old Nanny Matcham remembered it right or even really about it being the people she thought it was. But it might have fitted in with what that awful woman at the literary luncheon said to me.’
‘You mean when she wanted to know . . .’
‘Yes. When she wanted me to find out from the daughter, my godchild, whether her mother had killed her father or whether her father had killed her mother.’
‘And she thought the girl might know?’
‘Well, it’s likely enough that the girl would know. I mean, not at the time – it might have been shielded from her – but she might know things about it which would make her be aware what the circumstances were in their lives and who was likely to have killed whom, though she would probably never mention it or say anything about it or talk to anyone about it.’
‘And you say that woman – this Mrs –’
‘Yes. I’ve forgotten her name now. Mrs Burton something. A name like that. She said something about her son had this girlfriend and that they were thinking of getting married. And I can quite see you might want to know, if so, whether her mother or father had criminal relations in their family – or a loony strain. She probably thought that if it was the mother who killed the father it would be very unwise for the boy to marry her, whereas if the father had killed the mother, she probably wouldn’t mind as much,’ said Mrs Oliver.
‘You mean that she would think that the inheritance would go in the female line?’
‘Well, she wasn’t a very clever type of woman. Bossy,’ said Mrs Oliver. ‘Thinks she knows a lot, but no. I think you might think that way if you were a woman.’
‘An interesting point of view, but possible,’ said Poirot. ‘Yes, I realize that.’ He sighed. ‘We have a lot to do still.’
‘I’ve got another side light on things, too. Same thing, but second hand, if you know what I mean. You know. Someone says “The Ravenscrofts? Weren’t they that couple who adopted a child? Then it seems, after it was all arranged, and they were absolutely stuck on it – very, very keen on it, one of their children had died in Malaya, I think – but at any rate they had adopted this child and then its own mother wanted it back and they had a court case or something. But the court gave them the custody of the child and the mother came and tried to kidnap it back.”’
‘There are simpler points,’ said Poirot, ‘arising out of your report, points that I prefer.’
‘Such as?’
‘Wigs. Four wigs.’
‘Well,’ said Mrs Oliver, ‘I thought that was interesting you but I don’t know why. It doesn’t seem to mean anything. The other story was just somebody mental. There are mental people who are in homes or loony-bins because they have killed their children or some other child, for some absolutely batty reason, no sense to it at all. I don’t see why that would make General and Lady Ravenscroft want to kill themselves.’
‘Unless one of them was implicated,’ said Poirot.
‘You mean that General Ravenscroft may have killed someone, a boy – an illigitimate child, perhaps, of his wife’s or of his own? No, I think we’re getting a bit too melodramatic there. Or she might have killed her husband’s child or her own.’
‘And yet,’ said Poirot, ‘what people seem to be, they usually are.’
‘You mean –?’
‘They seemed an affectionate couple, a couple who lived together happily without disputes. They seem to have had no case history of illness beyond a suggestion of an operation, of someone coming to London to consult some medical authority, a possiblility of cancer, of leukaemia, something of that kind, some future that they could not face. And yet, somehow we do not seem to get at something beyond what is possible, but not yet what is probable. If there was anyone else in the house, anyone else at the time, the police, my friends that is to say, who have known the investigation at the time, say that nothing told was really compatible with anything else but with the facts. For some reason, those two didn’t want to go on living. Why?’
‘I knew a couple,’ said Mrs Oliver, ‘in the war – the second war, I mean – they thought that the Germans would land in England and they had decided if that happened they would kill themselves. I said it was very stupid. They said it would be impossible to go on living. It still seems to me stupid. You’ve got to have enough courage to live through something. I mean, it’s not as though your death was going to do any good to anybody else. I wonder –’
‘Yes, what do you wonder?’
‘Well, when I said that I wondered suddenly if General and Lady Ravenscroft’s deaths did any good to anyone else.’
‘You mean somebody inherited money from them?’
‘Yes. Not quite as blatant as that. Perhaps somebody would have a better chance of doing well in life. Something there was in their life that they didn’t want either of their two children ever to hear about or to know about.’
Poirot sighed.
‘The trouble with you, is,’ he said, ‘you think so often of something that well might have occurred, that might have been. You give me ideas. Possible ideas. If only they were probable ideas also. Why? Why were the deaths of those two necessary? Why is it – they were not in pain, they were not in illness, they were not deeply unhappy from what one can see. Then why, in the evening of a beautiful day, did they go for a walk to a cliff and taking the dog with them . . .’
‘What’s the dog got to do with it?’ said Mrs Oliver.
‘Well, I wondered for a moment. Did they take the dog, or did the dog follow them? Where does the dog come in?’
‘I suppose it comes in like the wigs,’ said Mrs Oliver. ‘Just one more thing that you can’t explain and doesn’t seem to make sense. One of my elephants said the dog was devoted to Lady Ravenscroft, but another one said the dog bit her.’
‘One always comes back to the same thing,’ said Poirot. ‘One wants to know more.’ He sighed. ‘One wants to know more about the people, and how can you know people separated from you by a gulf of years.’
‘Well, you’ve done it once or twice, haven’t you?’ said Mrs Oliver. ‘You know – something about where a painter was shot or poisoned. That was near the sea on
‘No. I didn’t know any of the people, but I learnt about them from the other people who were there.’1
‘Well, that’s what I’m trying to do,’ said Mrs Oliver, ‘only I can’t get near enough. I can’t get to anyone who really knew anything, who was really involved. Do you think really we ought to give it up?’
‘I think it would be very wise to give it up,’ said Poirot, ‘but there is a moment when one no longer wants to be wise. One wants to find out more. I have an interest now in that couple of kindly people, with two nice children. I presume they are nice children?’
‘I don’t know the boy,’ said Mrs Oliver, ‘I don’tthink I’ve ever met him. Do you want to see my goddaughter? I could send her to see you, if you like.’
‘Yes, I think I would like to see her, meet her some way. Perhaps she would not wish to come and see me, but a meeting could be brought about. It might, I think, be interesting. And there is someone else I would like to see.’
‘Oh! Who is that?’
‘The woman at the party. The bossy woman. Your bossy friend.’
‘She’s no friend of mine,’ said Mrs Oliver. ‘She just came up and spoke to me, that’s all.’
‘You could resume acquaintance with her?’
‘Oh yes, quite easily. I would think she’d probably jump at it.’
‘I would like to see her. I would like to know why she wants to know these things.’
‘Yes. I suppose that might be useful. Anyway –’ Mrs Oliver sighed – ‘I shall be glad to have a rest from elephants. Nanny – you know, the old Nanny I talked about – she mentioned elephants and that elephants didn’t forget. That sort of silly sentence is beginning to haunt me. Ah well, you must look for more elephants. It’s your turn.’