Death in the Clouds (Hercule Poirot 12)

‘At a guess eight or nine million francs.’

Poirot pursed his lips to a whistle. Japp said, ‘Lord, she didn’t look it. Let me see, what’s the exchange—that’s—why, that must be well over a hundred thousand pounds. Whew!’

‘Mademoiselle Anne Morisot will be a very wealthy young woman,’ said Poirot.

‘Just as well she wasn’t on that plane,’ said Japp drily. ‘She might have been suspected of bumping off her mother to get the dibs. How old would she be?’

‘I really cannot say. I should imagine about twenty-four or five.’

‘Well, there doesn’t seem anything to connect her with the crime. We’ll have to get down to this blackmailing business. Everyone on that plane denies knowing Madame Giselle. One of them is lying. We’ve got to find out which. An examination of her private papers might help, eh, Fournier?’

‘My friend,’ said the Frenchman, ‘immediately the news came through, after I had conversed with Scotland Yard on the telephone, I went straight to her house. There was a safe there containing papers. All those papers had been burnt.’

‘Burnt? Who by? Why?’

‘Madame Giselle had a confidential maid, Elise. Elise had instructions in the event of anything happening to her mistress to open the safe (the combination of which she knew) and burn the contents.’

‘What? But that’s amazing!’ Japp stared.

‘You see,’ said Fournier, ‘Madame Giselle had her own code. She kept faith with those who kept faith with her. She gave her promise to her clients that she would deal honestly with them. She was ruthless, but she was also a woman of her word.’

Japp shook his head dumbly. The four men were silent, ruminating on the strange character of the dead woman…

Maître Thibault rose.

‘I must leave you, Messieurs. I have to keep an appointment. If there is any further information I can give you at any time, you know my address.’

He shook hands with them ceremoniously and left the apartment.

Chapter 7

Probabilities

With the departure of Maître Thibault, the three men drew their chairs a little closer to the table.

‘Now, then,’ said Japp, ‘let’s get down to it.’ He unscrewed the cap of his fountain-pen. ‘There were eleven passengers in that plane—in the rear car, I mean; the other doesn’t come into it—eleven passengers and two stewards—that’s thirteen people we’ve got. One of the remaining twelve did the old woman in. Some of the passengers were English, some were French. The latter I shall hand over to M. Fournier. The English ones I’ll take on. Then there are inquiries to be made in Paris—that’s your job too, Fournier.’

‘And not only in Paris,’ said Fournier. ‘In the summer Giselle did a lot of business at the French watering-places—Deauville, Le Pinet, Wimereux. She went down south too, to Antibes and Nice, and all those places.’

‘A good point; one or two of the people in the Prometheus mentioned Le Pinet, I remember. Well, that’s one line. Then we’ve got to get down to the actual murder itself—prove who could possibly be in a position to use that blowpipe.’ He unrolled a large sketch plan of the car of the aeroplane and placed it in the centre of the table. ‘Now, then, we’re ready for the preliminary work. And, to begin with, let’s go through the people one by one, and decide on the probabilities and—even more important—the possibilities.

‘To begin with, we can eliminate M. Poirot here. That brings the number down to eleven.’

Poirot shook his head sadly.

‘You are of too trustful a nature, my friend. You should trust nobody—nobody at all.’

‘Well, we’ll leave you in if you like,’ said Japp good-temperedly. ‘Then there are the stewards. Seems to me very unlikely it should be either of them from the probability point of view. They’re not likely to have borrowed money on a grand scale and they’ve both got a good record—decent, sober men, both of them. It would surprise me very much if either of them had anything to do with this. On the other hand, from the possibility point of view we’ve got to include them. They were up and down the car. They could actually have taken up a position from which they could have used that blowpipe—from the right angle, I mean—though I don’t believe that a steward could shoot a poisoned dart out of a blowpipe in a car full of people without someone noticing him do it. I know by experience that most people are blind as bats; but there are limits. Of course, in a way, the same thing applies to every blessed person. It was madness, absolute madness, to commit a crime that way. Only about a chance in a hundred that it would come off without being spotted. The fellow that did it must have had the luck of the devil. Of all the damn fool ways to commit a murder—’

Poirot, who had been sitting with his eyes down, smoking quietly, interposed a question.

‘You think it was a foolish way of committing a murder, yes?’

‘Of course it was. It was absolute madness.’

‘And yet—it succeeded. We sit here, we three, we talk about it, but we have no knowledge of who committed the crime! That is success!’

‘That’s pure luck,’ argued Japp. ‘The murderer ought to have been spotted five or six times over.’