“Mr. Amberiotis? I’m sorry, sir, I’m afraid you can’t see him.”
“Oh, yes, I can, my lad,” Japp said grimly. He drew the other a little aside and showed him his credentials.
The clerk said:
“You don’t understand, sir. Mr. Amberiotis died half an hour ago.”
To Hercule Poirot it was as though a door had gently but firmly shut.
FIVE, SIX, PICKING UP STICKS
I
Twenty-four hours later Japp rang Poirot up. His tone was bitter.
“Washout! The whole thing!”
“What do you mean, my friend?”
“Morley committed suicide all right. We’ve got the motive.”
“What was it?”
“I’ve just had the doctor’s report on Amberiotis’ death. I won’t give you the official jargon but in plain English he died as a result of an overdose of adrenaline and novocaine. It acted on his heart, I understand, and he collapsed. When the wretched devil said he was feeling bad yesterday afternoon, he was just speaking the truth. Well, there you are! Adrenaline and procaine is the stuff dentists inject into your gum—local anesthetic. Morley made an error, injected an overdose, and then after Amberiotis left, he realized what he had done, couldn’t face the music and shot himself.”
“With a pistol he was not known to possess?” queried Poirot.
“He may have possessed it all the same. Relations don’t know everything. You’d be surprised sometimes, the things they don’t know!”
“That is true, yes.”
Japp said:
“Well, there you are. It’s a perfectly logical explanation of the whole thing.”
Poirot said:
“You know, my friend, it does not quite satisfy me. It is true that patients have been known to react unfavourably to these local anesthetics. Adrenaline idiosyncrasy is well-known. In combination with procaine toxic effects have followed quite small doses. But the doctor or dentist who employed the drug does not usually carry his concern as far as killing himself!”
“Yes, but you’re talking of cases where the employment of the anesthetic was normal. In that case no particular blame attaches to the surgeon concerned. It is the idiosyncrasy of the patient that has caused death. But in this case it’s pretty clear that there was a definite overdose. They haven’t got the exact amount yet—these quantitive analyses seem to take a month of Sundays—but it was definitely more than the normal dose. That means that Morley must have made a mistake.”
“Even then,” said Poirot, “it was a mistake. It would not be a criminal matter.”
“No, but it wouldn’t do him any good in his profession. In fact, it would pretty well ruin him. Nobody’s going to go to a dentist who’s likely to shoot lethal doses of poison into you just because he happens to be a bit absentminded.”
“It was a curious thing to do, I admit.”
“These things happen—they happen to doctors—they happen to chemists … Careful and reliable for years, and then—one moment’s inattention—and the mischief’s done and the poor devils are for it. Morley was a sensitive man. In the case of a doctor, there’s usually a chemist or a dispenser to share the blame—or to shoulder it altogether. In this case Morley was solely responsible.”
Poirot demurred.
“Would he not have left some message
behind him? Saying what he had done? And that he could not face the consequences? Something of that kind? Just a word for his sister?”
“No, as I see it, he suddenly realized what had happened—and just lost his nerve and took the quickest way out.”
Poirot did not answer.