Hallowe'en Party / Вечеринка на Хэллоуин. Книга для чтения на английском языке

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�But it happened, that’s what’s so awful,’ said Mrs Oliver. �I mean, it couldn’t have happened just because I was there, could it?’

�I do not think so. At least—Did any of the people at the party know who you were?’

�Yes,’ said Mrs Oliver. �One of the children said something about my writing books and that they liked murders. That’s how it—well—that’s what led to the thing—I mean to the thing that made me come to you.’

�Which you still haven’t told me.’

�Well, you see, at first I didn’t think of it.

Not straight away. I mean, children do queer things sometimes. I mean there are queer children about, children who—well, once I suppose they would have been in mental homes and things, but they send them home now and tell them to lead ordinary lives or something, and then they go and do something like this.’

�There were some young adolescents there?’

�There were two boys, or youths as they always seem to call them in police reports.

About sixteen to eighteen.’

�I suppose one of them might have done it. Is that what the police think?’

�They don’t say what they think,’ said Mrs Oliver, �but they looked as though they might think so.’

�Was this Joyce an attractive girl?’

�I don’t think so,’ said Mrs Oliver. �You mean attractive to boys, do you?’

�No,’ said Poirot, �I think I meant—well, just the plain simple meaning of the word.’

�I don’t think she was a very nice girl,’ said Mrs Oliver, �not one you’d want to talk to much.

She was the sort of girl who shows off and boasts. It’s a rather tiresome age, I think. It sounds unkind what I’m saying, but—’

�It is not unkind in murder to say what the victim was like,’ said Poirot. �It is very, very necessary. The personality of the victim is the cause of many a murder. How many people were there in the house at the time?’

�You mean for the party and so on? Well, I suppose there were five or six women, some mothers, a school-teacher, a doctor’s wife, or sister, I think, a couple of middle-aged married people, the two boys of sixteen to eighteen, a girl of fifteen, two or three of eleven or twelve—well that sort of thing.

About twenty-five or thirty in all, perhaps.’

�Any strangers?’

�They all knew each other, I think. Some better than others. I think the girls were mostly in the same school.