Murder in the Mews (Hercule Poirot 18)

“Look here—who are you? I mean, I haven’t the foggiest idea. What are you doing here?”

Poirot took a card case from his pocket and selected a card.

Hugo Trent said, staring at it:

“Private detective—eh? Of course, I’ve heard of you . . . But I still don’t see what you are doing here.”

“You did not know that your uncle—he was your uncle, was he not—?”

Hugo’s eyes dropped for a fleeting moment to the dead man.

“The Old Man? Yes, he was my uncle all right.”

“You did not know that he had sent for me?”

Hugo shook his head. He said slowly:

“I’d no idea of it.”

There was an emotion in his voice that was rather hard to classify. His face looked wooden and stupid—the kind of expression, Poirot thought, that made a useful mask in times of stress.

Poirot said quietly:

“We are in Westshire, are we not? I know your Chief Constable, Major Riddle, very well.”

Hugo said:

“Riddle lives about half a mile away. He’ll probably come over himself.”

“That,” said Poirot, “will be very convenient.”

He began prowling gently round the room. He twitched aside the window curtain and examined the french windows, trying them gently. They were closed.

On the wall behind the desk there hung a round mirror. The mirror was shivered. Poirot bent down and picked up a small object.

“What’s that?” asked Hugo Trent.

“The bullet.”

“It passed straight through his head and struck the mirror?”

“It seems so.”

Poirot replaced the bullet meticulously where he had found it. He came up to the desk. Some papers were arranged neatly stacked in heaps. On the blotting pad itself there was a loose sheet of paper with the word SORRY printed across it in large, shaky handwriting.

Hugo said: “He must have written that just before he—did it.”

Poirot nodded thoughtfully.

He looked again at the smashed mirror, then at the dead man. His brow creased itself a little as though in perplexity. He went over to the door, where it hung crookedly with its splintered lock. There was no key in the door, as he knew—otherwise he would not have been able to see through the keyhole. There was no sign of it on the floor. Poirot leaned over the dead man and ran his fingers over him.

“Yes,” he said. “The key is in his pocket.”

Hugo drew out a cigarette case and lighted a cigarette. He spoke rather hoarsely.

“It seems all quite clear,” he said. “My uncle shut himself up in here, scrawled that message on a piece of paper, and then shot himself.”

Poirot nodded meditatively. Hugo went on: