Evil Under the Sun (Hercule Poirot 24)

“Perhaps you would go and look now, then.”

“Certainly, sir.”

She left the room, her print dress rustling. Weston looked at Poirot. He said: “What’s all this?”

Poirot murmured:

“My orderly mind, that is vexed by trifles! Miss Brewster, this morning, was bathing off the rocks before breakfast, and she says that a bottle was thrown from above and nearly hit her. Eh bien, I want to know who threw that bottle and why?”

“My dear man, any one may have chucked a bottle away.”

“Not at all. To begin with, it could only have been thrown from a window on the east side of the hotel—that is, one of the windows of the rooms we have just examined. Now I ask you, if you have an empty bottle on your dressing table or in your bathroom what do you do with it? I will tell you, you drop it into the wastepaper basket. You do not take the trouble to go out on your balcony and hurl it into the sea! For one thing you might hit someone, for another it would be too much trouble. No, you would only do that if you did not want anyone to see that particular bottle.”

Weston stared at him.

Weston said:

“I know that Chief Inspector Japp, whom I met over a case not long ago, always says you have a damned tortuous mind. You’re not going to tell me now that Arlena Marshall wasn’t strangled at all, but poisoned out of some mysterious bottle with a mysterious drug?”

“No, no, I do not think there was poison in that bottle.”

“Then what was there?”

“I do not know at all. That’s why I am interested.”

Gladys Narracott came back. She was a little breathless. She said:

“I’m sorry, sir, but I can’t find anything missing. I’m sure there’s nothing gone from Captain Marshall’s room, or Miss Linda Marshall’s room, or Mr. and Mrs. Redfern’s room, and I’m pretty sure there’s nothing gone from Miss Darnley’s either. But I couldn’t say about Mrs. Marshall’s. As I say, she’s got such a lot.”

Poirot shrugged his shoulders.

He said:

“No matter. We will leave it.”

Gladys Narracott said:

“Is there anything more, sir?”

She looked from one to the other of them.

Weston said:

“Don’t think so. Thank you.”

Poirot said:

“I thank you, no. You are sure, are you not, that there is nothing—nothing at all, that you have forgotten to tell us?”

“About Mrs. Marshall, sir?”

“About anything at all. Anything unusual, out of the way, unexplained, slightly peculiar, rather curious—enfin, something that has made you say to yourself or to one of your colleagues: ‘That’s funny!’?”

Gladys said doubtfully:

“Well, not the sort of thing that you would mean, sir.”