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Jane Olivera stood back to let her mother pass her. On the point of following her, she whirled back again.
“M. Poirot!”
Her voice was imperious.
Poirot crossed the room to her.
She said in a low voice: “You’re coming down to Exsham? Why?”
Poirot shrugged his shoulders. He said:
“It is a kind thought of your uncle’s.”
Jane said:
“But he can’t know … He can’t … When did he ask you? Oh, there’s no need—”
“Jane!”
Her mother was calling from the hall.
Jane said in a low, urgent tone:
“Stay away. Please don’t come.”
She went out. Poirot heard the sounds of altercation. Heard Mrs. Olivera’s high, complaining, clucking voice. “I really will not tolerate your rudeness, Jane … I shall take steps to see that you do not interfere—”
The secretary said:
“Then at a little before six tomorrow, M. Poirot?”
Poirot nodded assent mechanically. He was standing like a man who has seen a ghost. But it was his ears, not his eyes, that had given him the shock.
Two of the sentences that had drifted in through the open door were almost identical with those he had heard last night through the telephone, and he knew why the voice had been faintly familiar.
As he walked out into the sunshine he shook his head blankly.
Mrs. Olivera?
But it was impossible! It could not have been Mrs. Olivera who had spoken over the ’phone!
That empty-headed society woman—selfish, brainless, grasping, self-centred? What had he called her to himself just now?
“That good fat hen? C’est ridicule!” said Hercule Poirot.
His ears, he decided, must have deceived him. And yet—
VI
The Rolls called punctually for Poirot at a little before six.
Alistair Blunt and his secretary were the only occupants. Mrs. Olivera and Jane had gone down in another car earlier, it seemed.
The drive was uneventful. Blunt talked a little, mostly of his garden and of a recent horticultural show.
Poirot congratulated him on his escape from death, at which Blunt demurred. He said:
“Oh, that! Don’t think the fellow was shooting at me particularly. Anyway, the poor chap hadn’t the first idea of how to aim! Just one of these half-crazed students. There’s no harm in them really. They just get worked up and fancy a pot shot at the P.M. will alter the course of history. It’s pathetic, really.”
