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“I know just what you’re after! And I know now just what lies you tell! Why don’t you admit it straight out? Well, I’ll tell you this—you won’t find out anything—anything at all! There’s nothing to find out! No one’s going to harm a hair on my precious uncle’s head. He’s safe enough. He’ll always be safe. Safe and smug and prosperous—and full of platitudes! He’s just a stodgy John Bull, that’s what he is—without an ounce of imagination or vision.”
She paused, then, her agreeable, husky voice deepening, she said venomously: “I loathe the sight of you—you bloody little bourgeois detective!”
She swept away from him in a whirl of expensive model drapery.
Hercule Poirot remained, his eyes very wide open, his eyebrows raised and his hand thoughtfully caressing his moustaches.
The epithet bourgeois was, he admitted, well-applied to him. His outlook on life was essentially bourgeois, and always had been, but the employment of it as an epithet of contempt by the exquisitely turned out Jane Olivera gave him, as he expressed it to himself, furiously to think.
He went, still thinking, into the drawing room.
Mrs. Olivera was playing patience.
She looked up as Poirot entered, surveyed him with the cold look she might have bestowed upon a black beetle and murmured distantly:
“Red knave on black queen.”
Chilled, Poirot retreated. He reflected mournfully:
“Alas, it would seem that nobody loves me!”
He strolled out of the window into the garden. It was an enchanting evening with a smell of night-scented stocks in the air. Poirot sniffed happily and strolled along a path that ran between two herbaceous borders.
He turned a corner and two dimly-seen figures sprang apart.
It would seem that he had interrupted a pair of lovers.
Poirot hastily turned and retraced his steps.
Even out here, it would seem, his presence was de trop.
He passed Alistair Blunt’s window and Alistair Blunt was dictating to Mr. Selby.
There seemed definitely only one place for Hercule Poirot.
He went up to his bedroom.
He pondered for some time on various fantastic aspects of the situation.
Had he or had he not made a mistake in believing the voice on the telephone to be that of Mrs. Olivera? Surely the idea was absurd!
He recalled the melodramatic revelations of quiet little Mr. Barnes. He speculated on the mysterious whereabouts of Mr. Q.X.912, alias Albert Chapman. He remembered, with a spasm of annoyance, the anxious look in the eyes of the maidservant, Agnes—
It was always the same way—people would keep things back! Usually quite unimportant things, but until they were cleared out of the way, impossible to pursue a straight path.
At the moment the path was anything but straight!
And the most unaccountable obstacle in the way of clear thinking and orderly progress was what he described to himself as the contradictory and impossible problem of Miss Sainsbury Seale. For, if the facts that Hercule Poirot had observed were true facts—then nothing whatever made sense!
Hercule Poirot said to himself, with astonishment in the thought:
“Is it possible that I am growing old?”
ELEVEN, TWELVE, MEN MUST DELVE
I
After passing a troubled night, Hercule Poirot was up and about early on the next day. The weather was perfect and he retraced his steps of last night.
