One, Two, Buckle My Shoe (Hercule Poirot 23)

Hercule Poirot said:

“He wants to take a short cut. To exterminate—”

Jane Olivera cried: “Don’t!”

SEVEN, EIGHT, LAY THEM STRAIGHT

I

Time went on. It was over a month since Mr. Morley’s death, and there was still no news of Miss Sainsbury Seale.

Japp became increasingly wrathful on the subject.

“Dash it all, Poirot, the woman’s got to be somewhere.”

“Indubitably, mon cher.”

“Either she’d dead or alive. If she’s dead, where’s her body? Say, for instance, she committed suicide—”

“Another suicide?”

“Don’t let’s get back to that. You still say Morley was murdered—I say it was suicide.”

“You haven’t traced the pistol?”

“No, it’s a foreign make.”

“That is suggestive, is it not?”

“Not in the way you mean. Morley had been abroad. He went on cruises, he and his sister. Everybody in the British Isles goes on cruises. He may have picked it up abroad. They like to feel life’s

dangerous.”

He paused and said:

“Don’t sidetrack me. I was saying that if—only if, mind you—that blasted woman committed suicide, if she’d drowned herself for instance, the body would have come ashore by now. If she was murdered, the same thing.”

“Not if a weight was attached to her body and it was put into the Thames.”

“From a cellar in Limehouse, I suppose! You’re talking like a thriller by a lady novelist.”

“I know—I know. I blush when I say these things!”

“And she was done to death by an international gang of crooks, I suppose?”

Poirot sighed. He said:

“I have been told lately that there really are such things.”

“Who told you so?”

“Mr. Reginald Barnes of Castlegarden Road, Ealing.”

“Well, he might know,” said Japp dubiously. “He dealt with aliens when he was at the Home Office.”

“And you do not agree?”

“It isn’t my branch—oh yes, there are such things—but they’re rather futile as a rule.”