Dumb Witness (Hercule Poirot 16)

Poirot said, gravely:

“Yes, it was horrible… It was also unsuccessful… Miss Arundell was very little hurt though she might easily have broken her neck. Very disappointing for our unknown friend! But Miss Arundell was a sharp-witted old lady. Everyone told her she had slipped on the ball, and there the ball was in evidence, but she herself recalling the happening felt that the accident had arisen differently. She had not slipped on the ball. And in addition she remembered something else. She remembered hearing Bob barking for admission at five o’clock the next morning.

“This, I admit, is something in the way of guesswork but I believe I am right. Miss Arundell had put away Bob’s ball herself the evening before in its drawer. After that he went out and did not return. In that case it was not Bob who put that ball on the top of the stairs.”

“That is pure guesswork, Poirot,” I objected.

He demurred.

“Not quite, my friend. There are the significant words uttered by Miss Arundell when she was delirious—something about Bob’s ball and a ‘picture ajar.’ You see the point, do you not?”

“Not in the least.”

“Curious. I know your language well enough to realize that one does not talk of a picture being ajar. A door is ajar. A picture is awry.”

“Or simply crooked.”

“Or simply crooked, as you say. So I realized at once that Ellen has mistaken the meaning of the words she heard. It is not ajar—but a or the jar that was meant. Now in the drawing room there is a rather noticeable china jar. There, I have already observed a picture of a dog on it. With the remembrance of these delirious ravings in my mind I go up and examine it more closely. I find that it deals with the subject of a dog who has been out all night. You see the trend of the feverish woman’s thoughts? Bob was like the dog in the picture on the jar—out all night—so it was not he who left the ball on the stairs.”

I cried out, feeling some admiration in spite of myself.

“You’re an ingenious devil, Poirot! How you think of these things beats me!”

“I do not ‘think of them.’ They are there—plain—for anyone to see. Eh bien, you realize the position? Miss Arundell, lying in bed after her fall, becomes suspicious. That suspicion she feels is perhaps fanciful and absurd but there it is. ‘Since the incident of the dog’s ball I have been increasingly uneasy.’ And so—and so she writes to me, and by a piece of bad luck her letter does not reach me until over two months have gone by. Tell me, does her letter not fit in perfectly with these facts?”

“Yes,” I admitted. “It does.”

Poirot went on:

“There is another point worthy of consideration. Miss Lawson was exceedingly anxious that the fact of Bob’s being out all night should not get to Miss Arundell’s ears.”

“You think that she—”

“I think that the fact should be noted very carefully.”

I turned the thing over in my mind for a minute or two.

“Well,” I said at last with a sigh. “It’s all very interesting—as a mental exercise that is. And I take off my hat to you. It’s been a masterful piece of reconstruction. It’s almost a pity really that the old lady has died.”

“A pity—yes. She wrote to me that someone had attempted to murder her (that is what it amounts to, after all) and a very short time after, she was dead.”

“Yes,” I said. “And it’s a grand disappointment to you that she died a natural death, isn’t it? Come, admit it.”

Poirot shrugged his shoulders.

“Or perhaps you think she was poisoned,” I said maliciously. Poirot shook his head somewhat despondently.

“It certainly seems,” he admitted, “as though Miss Arundell died from natural causes.”

“And therefore,” I said, “we return to London with our tail between our legs.”

“Pardon, my friend, but we do not return to London.”

“What do you mean, Poirot,” I cried.

“If you show the dog the rabbit, my friend, does he return to London? No, he goes into the rabbit hole.”

“What do you mean?”