iii
three-quarters of an hour later hercule poirot came out of the underground station at ealing
broadway and five minutes after that he had reached his destination—no. 88, castlegardens road.
it was a small semidetached house, and the neatness of the front garden drew an admiring nod
from hercule poirot.
“admirably symmetrical,” he murmured to himself.
mr. barnes was at home and poirot was shown into a small, precise dining room and here
presently mr. barnes came to him.
mr. barnes was a small man with twinkling eyes and a nearly bald head. he peeped over the top
of his glasses at his visitor while in his left hand he twirled the card that poirot had given the maid.
he said in a small, prim, almost falsetto voice:
“well, well, m. poirot? i am honoured, i am sure.”
“you must excuse my calling upon you in this informal manner,” said poirot punctiliously.
“much the best way,” said mr. barnes. “and the time is admirable, too. a quarter to seven—
very sound time at this period of the year for catching anyone at home.” he waved his hand. “sit
down, m. poirot. i’ve no doubt we’ve got a good deal to talk about. 58, queen charlotte street, i
suppose?”
poirot said:
“you suppose rightly—but why should you suppose anything of the kind?”
“my dear sir,” said mr. barnes, “i’ve been retired from the home office for some time now—
but i’ve not gone quite rusty yet. if there’s any hush-hush business, it’s far better not to use the
police. draws attention to it all!”
poirot said:
“i will ask yet another question. why should you suppose this is a hush-hush business?”
“isn’t it?” asked the other. “well, if it isn’t, in my opinion it ought to be.” he leant forward and
tapped with his pince-nez on the arm of the chair. “in secret service work it’s never the little fry
you want—it’s the big bugs at the top—but to get them you’ve got to be careful not to alarm the
little fry.”
“it seems to me, mr. barnes, that you know more than i do,” said hercule poirot.
“don’t know anything at all,” replied the other, “just put two and two together.”
“one of those two being?”
“amberiotis,” said mr. barnes promptly. “you forget i sat opposite him in the waiting room for
a minute or two. he didn’t know me. i was always an insignificant chap. not a bad thing
sometimes. but i knew him all right—and i could guess what he was up to over here.”
“which was?”
mr. barnes twinkled more than ever.
“we’re very tiresome people in this country. we’re conservative, you know, conservative to the
backbone. we grumble a lot, but we don’t really want to smash our democratic government and
try newfangled experiments. that’s what’s so heartbreaking to the wretched foreign agitator who’s
working full time and over! the whole trouble is—from their point of view—that we really are, as
a country, comparatively solvent. hardly any other country in europe is at the moment! to upset
england—really upset it—you’ve got to play hell with its finance—that’s what it comes to! and
you can’t play hell with its finance when you’ve got men like alistair blunt at the helm.”
mr. barnes paused and then went on:
“blunt is the kind of man who in private life would always pay his bills and live within his
income—whether he’d got two-pence a year or several million makes no difference. he is that
type of fellow. and he just simply thinks that there’s no reason why a country shouldn’t be the
same! no costly experiments. no frenzied expenditure on possible utopias. that’s why”—he
paused—“that’s why certain people have made up their minds that blunt must go.”
“ah,” said poirot.
mr. barnes nodded.
“yes,” he said. “i know what i’m talking about. quite nice people some of ’em. long-haired,
earnest-eyed, and full of ideals of a better world. others not so nice, rather nasty in fact. furtive
little rats with beards and foreign accents. and another lot again of the big bully type. but they’ve
all got the same idea: blunt must go!”
he tilted his chair gently back and forward again.
“sweep away the old order! the tories, the conservatives, the diehards, the hardheaded
suspicious business men, that’s the idea. perhaps these people are right—i don’t know—but i
know one thing—you’ve got to have something to put in place of the old order—something that
will work—not just something that sounds all right. well, we needn’t go into that. we are dealing
with concrete facts, not abstract theories. take away the props and the building will come down.
blunt is one of the props of things as they are.”
he leaned forward.
“they’re out after blunt all right. that i know. and it’s my opinion that yesterday morning they
nearly got him. i may be wrong—but it’s been tried before. the method, i mean.”
he paused and then quietly, circumspectly, he mentioned three names. an unusually able
chancellor of the exchequer, a progressive and farsighted manufacturer, and a hopeful young
politician who had captured the public fancy. the first had died on the operating table, the second
had succumbed to an obscure disease which had been recognized too late, the third had been run
down by a car and killed.
“it’s very easy,” said mr. barnes. “the anesthetist muffed the giving of the anesthetic—well,
that does happen. in the second case the symptoms were puzzling. the doctor was just a well-
meaning g.p., couldn’t be expected to recognize them. in the third case, anxious mother was
driving car in a hurry to get to her sick child. sob stuff—the jury acquitted her of blame!”
he paused:
“all quite natural. and soon forgotten. but i’ll just tell you where those three people are now.
the anesthetist is set up on his own with a first-class research laboratory—no expense spared. that
g.p. has retired from practice. he’s got a yacht, and a nice little place on the broads. the mother
is giving all her children a first-class education, ponies to ride in the holidays, nice house in the
country with a big garden and paddocks.”
he nodded his head slowly.
“in every profession and walk of life there is someone who is vulnerable to temptation. the
trouble in our case is that morley wasn’t!”
“you think it was like that?” said hercule poirot.
mr. barnes said:
“i do. it’s not easy to get at one of these big men, you know. they’re fairly well protected. the
car stunt is risky and doesn’t always succeed. but a man is defenceless enough in a dentist’s
chair.”
he took off his pince-nez, polished them and put them on again. he said:
“that’s my theory! morley wouldn’t do the job. he knew too much, though, so they had to put
him out.”
“they?” asked poirot.
“when i say they—i mean the organization that’s behind all this. only one person actually did
the job, of course.”
“which person?”
“well, i could make a guess,” said mr. barnes, “but it’s only a guess and i might be wrong.”
poirot said quietly: “reilly?”
“of course! he’s the obvious person. i think that probably they never asked morley to do the
job himself. what he was to do, was to turn blunt over to his partner at the last minute. sudden
illness, something of that sort. reilly would have done the actual business—and there would have
been another regrettable accident—death of a famous banker—unhappy young dentist in court in
such a state of dither and misery that he would have been let down light. he’d have given up
dentistry afterwards—and settled down somewhere on a nice income of several thousands a year.”
mr. barnes looked across at poirot.
“don’t think i’m romancing,” he said. “these things happen.”
“yes, yes, i know they happen.”
mr. barnes went on, tapping a book with a lurid jacket that lay on a table close at hand: “i read
a lot of these spy yarns. fantastic, some of them. but curiously enough they’re not any more
fantastic than the real thing. there are beautiful adventuresses, and dark sinister men with foreign
accents, and gangs and international associations and super crooks! i’d blush to see some of the
things i know set down in print—nobody would believe them for a minute!”
poirot said:
“in your theory, where does amberiotis come in?”
“i’m not quite sure. i think he was meant to take the rap. he’s played a double game more than
once and i daresay he was framed. that’s only an idea, mind.”
hercule poirot said quietly:
“granting that your ideas are correct—what will happen next?”
mr. barnes rubbed his nose.
“they’ll try to get him again,” he said. “oh, yes. they’ll have another try. time’s short. blunt
has got people looking after him, i daresay. they’ll have to be extra careful. it won’t be a man
hiding in a bush with a pistol. nothing so crude as that. you tell ’em to look out for the respectable
people—the relations, the old servants, the chemist’s assistant who makes up a medicine, the wine
merchant who sells him his port. getting alistair blunt out of the way is worth a great many
millions, and it’s wonderful what people will do for—say a nice little income of four thousand a
year!”
“as much as that?”
“possibly more …”
poirot was silent a moment, then he said:
“i have had reilly in mind from the first.”
“irish? i.r.a.?”
“not that so much, but there was a mark, you see, on the carpet, as though the body had been
dragged along it. but if morley had been shot by a patient he would be shot in the surgery and
there would be no need to move the body. that is why, from the first, i suspected that he had been
shot, not in the surgery, but in his office—next door. that would mean that it was not a patient
who shot him, but some member of his own household.”
“neat,” said mr. barnes appreciatively.
hercule poirot got up and held out a hand.
“thank you,” he said. “you have helped me a great deal.”
