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“No, no, mon ami.”
“Here we had a lovely case of suicide. H.P. says it’s murder—wants it to be murder—and dash it all, it is murder!”
“Ah? So you agree at last?”
“Well, nobody can say I’m pigheaded. I don’t fly in the face of evidence. The trouble was there wasn’t any evidence before.”
“But there is now?”
“Yes, and I’ve come round to make the amend honourable, as you call it, and present the titbit to you on toast, as it were.”
“I am all agog, my good Japp.”
“All right. Here goes. The pistol that Frank Carter tried to shoot Blunt with on Saturday is a twin pistol to the one that killed Morley!”
Poirot stared: “But this is extraordinary!”
“Yes, it makes it look rather black for Master Frank.”
“It is not conclusive.”
“No, but it’s enough to make us reconsider the suicide verdict. They’re a foreign make of pistol and rather an uncommon one at that!”
Hercule Poirot stared. His eyebrows looked like crescent moons. He said at last:
“Frank Carter? No—surely not!”
Japp breathed a sigh of exasperation.
“What’s the matter with you, Poirot? First you will have it that Morley was murdered and that it wasn’t suicide. Then when I come and tell you we’re inclined to come round to your views you hem and ha and don’t seem to like it.”
“You really believe that Morley was murdered by Frank Carter?”
“It fits. Carter had got a grudge against Morley—that we knew all along. He came to Queen Charlotte Street that morning—and he pretended afterwards that he had come along to tell his young woman he’d got a job—but we’ve now discovered that he hadn’t got the job then. He didn’t get it till later in the day. He admits that now. So there’s lie No. 1. He can’t account for where he was at twenty-five past twelve onwards. Says he was walking in the Marylebone Road, but the first thing he can prove is having a drink in a pub at five past one. And the barman says he was in a regular state—his hand shaking and his face as white as a sheet!”
Hercule Poirot sighed and shook his head. He murmured:
“It does not accord with my ideas.”
“What are these ideas of yours?”
“It is very disturbing what you tell me. Very disturbing indeed. Because, you see, if you are right …”
The door opened softly and George murmured deferentially:
“Excuse me, sir, but …”
He got no further. Miss Gladys Nevill thrust him aside and came agitatedly into the room. She was crying.
“Oh, M. Poirot—”
“Here, I’ll be off,” said Japp hurriedly.
He left the room precipitately.
Gladys Nevill paid his back the tribute of a venomous look.
“That’s the man—that horrid Inspector from Scotland Yard—it’s he who has trumped up a whole case against poor Frank.”
