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when it happened?”
    â€œNo. Mrs. Oliver came to me in London. She was upset, very upset. She wanted me to do something.”
    A faint smile showed on Superintendent Spence’s face.
    â€œI see. Same old story. I came up to you, too, because I wanted you to do something.”
    â€œAnd I have carried things one step further,” said Poirot. “ I have come to you. ”
    â€œBecause you want me to do something? I tell you, there’s nothing I can do.”
    â€œOh yes there is. You can tell me all about the people. The people who live here. The people who went to that party. The fathers and mothers of the children who were at the party. The school, the teachers, the lawyers, the doctors. Somebody, during a party, induced a child to kneel down, and perhaps, laughing, saying: ‘I’ll show you the best way to get hold of an apple with your teeth. I know the trick of it.’ And then he or she—whoever it was—put a hand on that girl’s head. There wouldn’t have been much struggle or noise or anything of that kind.”
    â€œA nasty business,” said Spence. “I thought so when I heard about it. What do you want to know? I’ve been here a year. My sister’s been here longer—two or three years. It’s not a big community. It’s not a particularly settled one either. People come and go. The husband has a job in either Medchester or Great Canning, or one of the other places round about. Their children go to school here. Then perhaps the husband changes his job and they go somewhere else. It’s not a fixed community. Some of the people have been here a long time, Miss Emlyn, the schoolmistress, has, Dr. Ferguson has. But on the whole, it fluctuates a bit.”
    â€œOne supposes,” said Hercule Poirot, “that having agreed with you that this was a nasty business, I might hope that you would know who are the nasty people here.”
    â€œYes,” said Spence. “It’s the first thing one looks for, isn’t it? And the next thing one looks for is a nasty adolescent in a thing of this kind. Who wants to strangle or drown or get rid of a lump of a girl of thirteen? There doesn’t seem to have been any evidence of a sexual assault or anything of that kind, which would be the first thing one looks for. Plenty of that sort of thing in every small townor village nowadays. There again, I think there’s more of it than there used to be in my young day. We had our mentally disturbed, or whatever they call them, but not so many as we have now. I expect there are more of them let out of the place they ought to be kept safe in. All our mental homes are too full; overcrowded, so doctors say ‘Let him or her lead a normal life. Go back and live with his relatives,’ etc. And then the nasty bit of goods, or the poor afflicted fellow, whichever way you like to look at it, gets the urge again and another young woman goes out walking and is found in a gravel pit, or is silly enough to take lifts in a car. Children don’t come home from school because they’ve accepted a lift from a stranger, although they’ve been warned not to. Yes, there’s a lot of that nowadays.”
    â€œDoes that quite fit the pattern we have here?”
    â€œWell, it’s the first thing one thinks of,” said Spence. “Somebody was at the party who had the urge, shall we say. Perhaps he’d done it before, perhaps he’d only wanted to do it. I’d say roughly that there might be some past history of assaulting a child somewhere. As far as I know, nobody’s come up with anything of that kind. Not officially, I mean. There were two in the right age group at the party. Nicholas Ransom, nice looking lad, seventeen or eighteen. He’d be the right age. Comes from the East Coast or somewhere like that, I think. Seems all right. Looks normal enough, but who knows? And there’s Desmond, remanded once for a