Death in the Clouds (Hercule Poirot 12)

‘That’s all very well,’ said Mr Clancy. ‘But I take it that’s a little difficult in a case like this. There’s a daughter who comes into money, so I’ve heard. But a lot of the people on board might benefit, for all we know—that is if they owed her money and haven’t got to pay it back.’

‘True,’ said Poirot. ‘And I can think of other solutions. Let us suppose that Madame Giselle knew of something—attempted murder, shall we say?—on the part of one of those people.’

‘Attempted murder?’ said Mr Clancy. ‘Now, why attempted murder? What a very curious suggestion.’

‘In cases such as these,’ said Poirot, ‘one must think of everything.’

‘Ah!’ said Mr Clancy. ‘But it’s no good thinking. You’ve got to know.’

‘You have reason—you have reason. A very just observation.’

Then he said, ‘I ask your pardon, but this blowpipe that you bought—’

‘Damn that blowpipe,’ said Mr Clancy. ‘I wish I’d never mentioned it.’

‘You bought it, you say, at a shop in the Charing Cross Road? Do you, by any chance, remember the name of that shop?’

‘Well,’ said Mr Clancy, ‘it might have been Absolom’s—or there’s Mitchell & Smith. I don’t know. But I’ve already told all this to that pestilential inspector. He must have checked up on it by this time.’

‘Ah,’ said Poirot, ‘but I ask for quite another reason. I desire to purchase such a thing and make a little experiment.’

‘Oh, I see. But I don’t know that you’ll find one all the same. They don’t keep sets of them, you know.’

‘All the same I can try. Perhaps, Miss Grey, you would be so obliging as to take down those two names?’

Jane opened her notebook and rapidly performed a series of (she hoped) professional-looking squiggles. Then she surreptitiously wrote the names in longhand on the reverse side of the sheet in case these instructions of Poirot’s should be genuine.

‘And now,’ said Poirot, ‘I have trespassed on your time too long. I will take my departure with a thousand thanks for your amiability.’

‘Not at all. Not at all,’ said Mr Clancy. ‘I wish you would have had a banana.’

‘You are most amiable.’

‘Not at all. As a matter of fact, I’m feeling rather happy tonight. I’d been held up in a short story I was writing—the thing wouldn’t pan out properly, and I couldn’t get a good name for the criminal. I wanted something with a flavour. Well, just a bit of luck, I saw just the name I wanted over a butcher’s shop. Pargiter. Just the name I was looking for. There’s a sort of genuine sound to it; and about five minutes later I got the other thing. There’s always the same snag in stories—why won’t the girl speak? The young man tries to make her and she says her lips are sealed. There’s never any real reason, of course, why she shouldn’t blurt out the whole thing at once, but you have to try to think of something that’s not too definitely idiotic. Unfortunately it has to be a different thing every time!’

He smiled gently at Jane.

‘The trials of an author!’

He darted past her to a bookcase.

‘One thing you must allow me to give you.’

He came back with a book in his hand.

‘The Clue of the Scarlet Petal. I think I mentioned at Croydon that that book of mine dealt with arrow poison and native darts.’

‘A thousand thanks. You are too amiable.’

‘Not at all. I see,’ said Mr Clancy suddenly to Jane, ‘that you don’t use the Pitman system of shorthand.’

Jane flushed scarlet. Poirot came to her rescue.

‘Miss Grey is very up to date. She uses the most recent system invented by a Czecho-Slovakian.’

‘You don’t say so? What an amazing place Czecho-Slovakia must be. Everything seems to come from there—shoes, glass, gloves, and now a shorthand system. Quite amazing.’

He shook hands with them both.