“You are in error, madame. It was a very stupid idea. The tiger was alarmed—and the tiger sprang.”
“The tiger? Why the tiger?”
“By the tiger I mean the murderer,” said Poirot.
Battle said bluntly:
“What’s your idea of the right line to take, M. Poirot? That’s one question. And I’d also like to know what you think of the psychology of these four people. You’re rather hot on that.”
Still smoothing his bridge scores, Poirot said:
“You are right—psychology is very important. We know the kind of murder that has been committed, the way it was committed. If we have a person who from the psychological point of view could not have committed that particular type of murder, then we can dismiss that person from our calculations. We know something about these people. We have our own impression of them, we know the line that each has elected to take, and we know something about their minds and their characters from what we have learned about them as card players and from the study of their handwriting and of these scores. But alas! it is not too easy to give a definite pronouncement. This murder required audacity and nerve—a person who was willing to take a risk. Well, we have Dr. Roberts—a bluffer—an overcaller of his hand—a man with complete confidence in his own powers to pull off a risky thing. His psychology fits very well with the crime. One might say, then, that that automatically wipes out Miss Meredith. She is timid, frightened of overcalling her hand, careful, economical, prudent and lacking in self-confidence. The last type of person to carry out a bold and risky coup. But a timid person will murder out of fear. A frightened nervous person can be made desperate, can turn like a rat at bay if driven into a corner. If Miss Meredith had committed a crime in the past, and if she believed that Mr. Shaitana knew the circumstances of that crime and was about to deliver her up to justice she would be wild with terror—she would stick at nothing to save herself. It would be the same result, though brought about through a different reaction—not cool nerve and daring, but desperate panic. Then take Major Despard—a cool, resourceful man willing to try a long shot if he believed it absolutely necessary. He would weigh the pros and cons and might decide that there was a sporting chance in his favour—and he is the type of man to prefer action to inaction, and a man who would never shrink from taking the dangerous way if he believed there was a reasonable chance of success. Finally, there is Mrs. Lorrimer, an elderly woman, but a woman in full possession of her wits and faculties. A cool woman. A woman with a mathematical brain. She has probably the best brain of the four. I confess that if Mrs. Lorrimer committed a crime, I should expect it to be a premeditated crime. I can see her planning a crime slowly and carefully, making sure that there were no flaws in her scheme. For that reason she seems to me slightly more unlikely than the other three. She is, however, the most dominating personality, and whatever she undertook she would probably carry through without a flaw. She is a thoroughly efficient woman.”
He paused:
“So you see, that does not help us much. No—there is only one way in this crime. We must go back into the past.”
Battle sighed.
“You’ve said it,” he murmured.
“In the opinion of Mr. Shaitana, each of those four people had committed murder. Had he evidence? Or was it a guess? We cannot tell. It is unlikely, I think, that he could have had actual evidence in all four cases—”
“I agree with you there,” said Battle, nodding his head. “That would be a bit too much of a coincidence.”
“I suggest that it might come about this way—murder or a certain form of murder is mentioned, and Mr. Shaitana surprised a look on someone’s face. He was very quick—very sensitive to expression. It amuses him to experiment—to probe gently in the course of apparently aimless conversation—he is alert to notice a wince, a reservation, a desire to turn the conversation. Oh, it is easily done. If you suspect a certain secret, nothing is easier than to confirm your suspicion. Every time a word goes home you notice it—if you are watching for such a thing.”
“It’s the sort of game that would have amused our late friend,” said Battle, nodding.
“We may assume, then, that such was the procedure in one or more cases. He may have come across a piece of actual evidence in another case and followed it up. I doubt whether, in any of the cases, he had sufficient actual knowledge with which, for instance, to have gone to the police.”
“Or it mayn’t have been the kind of case,” said Battle. “Often enough there’s a fishy business—we suspect foul play, but we can’t ever prove it. Anyway, the course is clear. We’ve got to go through the records of all these people—and note any deaths that may be significant. I expect you noticed, just as the Colonel did, what Shaitana said at dinner.”
“The black angel,” murmured Mrs. Oliver.
“A neat little reference to poison, to accident, to a doctor’s opportunities, to shooting accidents. I shouldn’t be surprised if he signed his death warrant when he said those words.”
“It was a nasty sort of pause,” said Mrs. Oliver.
“Yes,” said Poirot. “Those words went home to one person at least—that person probably thought that Shaitana knew far more than he really did. That listener thought that they were the prelude to the end—that the party was a dramatic entertainment arranged by Shaitana leading up to arrest for murder as its climax! Yes, as you say, he signed his death warrant when he baited his guests with those words.”
There was a moment’s silence.
“This will be a long business,” said Battle with a sigh. “We can’t find out all we want in a moment—and we’ve got to be careful. We don’t want any of the four to suspect what we’re doing. All our questioning and so on must seem to have to do with this murder. There mustn’t be a suspicion that we’ve got any idea of the motive for the crime. And the devil of it is we’ve got to check up on four possible murders in the past, not one.”
Poirot demurred.
“Our friend Mr. Shaitana was not infallible,” he said. “He may—it is just possible—have made a mistake.”
“About all four?”
“No—he was more intelligent than that.”
“Call it fifty-fifty?”
“Not even that. For me, I say one in four.”
“One innocent and three guilty? That’s bad enough. And the devil of it is, even if we get at the truth it mayn’t help us. Even if somebody did push their great-aunts down the stairs in 1912, it won’t be much use to us in 1937.”