Death in the Clouds (Hercule Poirot 12)

Chapter 26

After Dinner Speech

The next day Poirot left Paris. Jane stayed behind with a list of duties to perform. Most of these seemed singularly meaningless to her, but she carried them out to the best of her powers. She saw Jean Dupont twice. He mentioned the expedition which she was to join, and Jane did not dare to undeceive him without orders from Poirot, so she hedged as best she could and turned the conversation to other matters.

Five days later she was recalled to England by a telegram.

Norman met her at Victoria and they discussed recent events.

Very little publicity had been given to the suicide. There had been a paragraph in the papers stating that a Canadian lady, a Mrs Richards, had committed suicide in the Paris-Boulogne express, but that was all. There had been no mention of any connexion with the aeroplane murder.

Both Norman and Jane were inclined to be jubilant. Their troubles, they hoped, were at an end. Norman was not so sanguine as Jane.

‘They may suspect her of doing her mother in, but now that she’s taken this way out they probably won’t bother to go on with the case; and unless it is proved publicly I don’t see what good it is going to be to all of us poor devils. From the point of view of the public we shall remain under suspicion just as much as ever!’

He said as much to Poirot, whom he met a few days later in Piccadilly.

Poirot smiled.

‘You are like all the rest. You think I am an old man who accomplishes nothing! Listen, you shall come tonight to dine with me. Japp is coming, and also our friend Mr Clancy. I have some things to say that may be interesting.’

The dinner passed off pleasantly. Japp was patronizing and good humoured, Norman was interested, and little Mr Clancy was nearly as thrilled as when he had recognized the fatal thorn.

It seemed clear that Poirot was not above trying to impress the little author.

After dinner, when coffee had been drunk, Poirot cleared his throat in a slightly embarrassed manner, not free from self-importance.

‘My friends,’ he said, ‘Mr Clancy here has expressed interest in what he would call “my methods, Watson”. (C’est c¸a, n’est-ce pas?) I propose, if it will not bore you all’—he paused significantly, and Norman and Japp said quickly, ‘No, no,’ and ‘Most interesting’—‘to give you a little résumé of my methods in dealing with this case.’

He paused and consulted some notes. Japp whispered to Norman:

‘Fancies himself, doesn’t he? Conceit’s that little man’s middle name.’

Poirot looked at him reproachfully and said, ‘Ahem!’

Three politely interested faces were turned to him, and he began:

‘I will start at the beginning, my friends. I will go back to the air liner Prometheus on its ill-fated journey from Paris to Croydon. I am going to tell you my precise ideas and impressions at the time—passing on to how I came to confirm or modify them in the light of future events.

‘When, just before we reached Croydon, Dr Bryant was approached by the steward and went with him to examine the body, I accompanied him. I had a feeling that it might—who knows?—be something in my line. I have, perhaps, too professional a point of view where deaths are concerned. They are divided, in my mind, into two classes—deaths which are my affair and deaths which are not my affair—and though the latter class is infinitely more numerous—nevertheless whenever I come in contact with death I am like the dog who lifts his head and sniffs the scent.

‘Dr Bryant confirmed the steward’s fear that the woman was dead. As to the cause of death, naturally he could not pronounce on that without a detailed examination. It was at this point that a suggestion was made—by M. Jean Dupont—that death was due to shock following on a wasp sting. In furtherance of this hypothesis, he drew attention to a wasp that he himself had slaughtered shortly before.

‘Now that was a perfectly plausible theory—and one quite likely to be accepted. There was the mark on the dead woman’s neck—closely resembling the mark of a sting—and there was the fact that a wasp had been in the plane.

‘But at that moment I was fortunate enough to look down and espy what might at first have been taken for the body of yet another wasp. In actuality it was a native thorn with a little teased yellow and black silk on it.

‘At this point Mr Clancy came forward and made the statement that it was a thorn shot from a blowpipe after the manner of some native tribe. Later, as you all know, the blowpipe itself was discovered.

‘By the time we reached Croydon several ideas were working in my mind. Once I was definitely on the firm ground, my brain began to work once more with its normal brilliance.’

‘Go it, M. Poirot,’ said Japp with a grin. ‘Don’t have any false modesty.’

Poirot threw him a look and went on.

‘One idea presented itself very strongly to me (as it did to everyone else), and that was the audacity of a crime being committed in such a manner—and the astonishing fact that nobody noticed its being done!

‘There were two other points that interested me. One was the convenient presence of the wasp. The other was the discovery of the blowpipe. As I remarked after the inquest to my friend Japp, why on earth did the murderer not get rid of it by passing it out through the ventilating hole in the window? The thorn itself might be difficult to trace or identify, but a blowpipe which still retained a portion of its price label was a very different matter.