死亡约会 Part I Chapter 1（1）（在线收听）

Chapter 1

‘You do see, don’t you, that she’s got to be killed?’

The question floated out into the still night air, seemed to hang there a moment and then driftaway down into the darkness towards the Dead Sea.

Hercule Poirot paused a minute with his hand on the window catch. Frowning, he shut itdecisively, thereby excluding any injurious night air! Hercule Poirot had been brought up tobelieve that all outside air was best left outside, and that night air was especially dangerous to thehealth.

As he pulled the curtains neatly over the window and walked to his bed, he smiled tolerantly tohimself.

‘You do see, don’t you, that she’s got to be killed?’

Curious words for one Hercule Poirot, detective, to overhear on his first night in Jerusalem.

‘Decidedly, wherever I go, there is something to remind me of crime!’ he murmured to himself.

His smile continued as he remembered a story he had once heard concerning Anthony Trollopethe novelist. Trollope was crossing the Atlantic at the time and had overheard two fellowpassengers discussing the last published installment of one of his novels.

‘Very good,’ one man had declared. ‘But he ought to kill off that tiresome old woman.’

With a broad smile the novelist had addressed them:

‘Gentlemen, I am much obliged to you! I will go and kill her immediately!’

Hercule Poirot wondered what had occasioned the words he had just overheard. Acollaboration, perhaps, over a play or a book.

He thought, still smiling: ‘Those words might be remembered, one day, and given a moresinister meaning.’

There had been, he now recollected, a curious nervous intensity in the voice—a tremor thatspoke of some intense emotional strain. A man’s voice—or a boy’s…Hercule Poirot thought to himself as he turned out the light by his bed: ‘I should know that voiceagain…’

II

Their elbows on the window-sill, their heads close together, Raymond and Carol Boynton gazedout into the blue depths of the night. Nervously, Raymond repeated his former words: ‘You dosee, don’t you, that she’s got to be killed?’

Carol Boynton stirred slightly. She said, her voice deep and hoarse: ‘It’s horrible…’

‘It’s not more horrible than this!’

‘I suppose not…’

Raymond said violently: ‘It can’t go on like this—it can’t…We must do something…And thereisn’t anything else we can do…’

Carol said—but her voice was unconvincing and she knew it: ‘If we could get away somehow—?’

‘We can’t.’ His voice was empty and hopeless. ‘Carol, you know we can’t…’

The girl shivered. ‘I know, Ray—I know.’

He gave a sudden short, bitter laugh.

‘People would say we were crazy—not to be able just to walk out—’

Carol said slowly: ‘Perhaps we—are crazy!’

‘I dare say. Yes, I dare say we are. Anyway, we soon shall be…I suppose some people wouldsay we are already—here we are calmly planning, in cold blood, to kill our own mother!’

Carol said sharply: ‘She isn’t our own mother!’

‘No, that’s true.’