“I got work. I managed to pay for his board and lodging. I never told him that I was his mother. But he turned out badly, he drank, then took to drugs. I managed to pay his passage out to Canada. I didn’t hear of him for a year or two. Then, somehow or other, he found out that I was his mother. He wrote asking me for money. Finally, I heard from him back in this country again. He was coming to see me at Fernly, he said. I dared not let him come to the house. I have always been considered so—so very respectable. If anyone got an inkling—it would have been all up with my post as housekeeper. So I wrote to him in the way I have just told you.”
“And in the morning you came to see Dr. Sheppard?”
“Yes. I wondered if something could be done. He was not a bad boy—before he took to drugs.”
“I see,” said Poirot. “Now let us go on with the story. He came that night to the summerhouse?”
“Yes, he was waiting for me when I got there. He was very rough and abusive. I had brought with me all the money I had, and I gave it to him. We talked a little, and then he went away.”
“What time was that?”
“It must have been between twenty and twenty-five minutes past nine. It was not yet half-past when I got back to the house.”
“Which way did he go?”
“Straight out the same way he came, by the path that joined the drive just inside the lodge gates.”
Poirot nodded.
“And you, what did you do?”