Cards on the Table (Hercule Poirot 15)

“Yes, yes, it will be of use to us.” Poirot encouraged him. “You know that. You know it as well as I do.”

Battle nodded slowly.

“I know what you mean,” he said. “Same hallmark.”

“Do you mean,” said Mrs. Oliver, “that the former victim will have been stabbed with a dagger too?”

“Not quite as crude as that, Mrs. Oliver,” said Battle turning to her. “But I don’t doubt it will be essentially the same type of crime. The details may be different, but the essentials underlying them will be the same. It’s odd, but a criminal gives h

imself away every time by that.”

“Man is an unoriginal animal,” said Hercule Poirot.

“Women,” said Mrs. Oliver, “are capable of infinite variation. I should never commit the same type of murder twice running.”

“Don’t you ever write the same plot twice running?” asked Battle.

“The Lotus Murder,” murmured Poirot. “The Clue of the Candle Wax.”

Mrs. Oliver turned on him, her eyes beaming appreciation.

“That’s clever of you—that’s really very clever of you. Because, of course, those two are exactly the same plot—but nobody else has seen it. One is stolen papers at an informal weekend party of the Cabinet, and the other’s a murder in Borneo in a rubber planter’s bungalow.”

“But the essential point on which the story turns is the same,” said Poirot. “One of your neatest tricks. The rubber planter arranges his own murder—the Cabinet Minister arranges the robbery of his own papers. At the last minute the third person steps in and turns deception into reality.”

“I enjoyed your last, Mrs. Oliver,” said Superintendent Battle kindly. “The one where all the Chief Constables were shot simultaneously. You just slipped up once or twice on official details. I know you’re keen on accuracy, so I wondered if—”

Mrs. Oliver interrupted him.

“As a matter of fact I don’t care two pins about accuracy. Who is accurate? Nobody nowadays. If a reporter writes that a beautiful girl of twenty-two dies by turning on the gas after looking out over the sea and kissing her favourite labrador, Bob, good-bye, does anybody make a fuss because the girl was twenty-six, the room faced inland, and the dog was a Sealyham terrier called Bonnie? If a journalist can do that sort of thing, I don’t see that it matters if I mix up police ranks and say a revolver when I mean an automatic, and a dictograph when I mean a phonograph, and use a poison that just allows you to gasp one dying sentence and no more. What really matters is plenty of bodies! If the thing’s getting a little dull, some more blood cheers it up. Somebody is going to tell something—and then they’re killed first. That always goes down well. It comes in all my books—camouflaged different ways, of course. And people like untraceable poisons, and idiotic police inspectors and girls tied up in cellars with sewer gas or water pouring in (such a troublesome way of killing anyone really) and a hero who can dispose of anything from three to seven villains single-handed. I’ve written thirty-two books by now—and of course they’re all exactly the same really, as M. Poirot seems to have noticed—but nobody else has—and I only regret one thing—making my detective a Finn. I don’t really know anything about Finns and I’m always getting letters from Finland pointing out something impossible that he’s said or done. They seem to read detective stories a good deal in Finland. I suppose it’s the long winters with no daylight. In Bulgaria and Romania they don’t seem to read at all. I’d have done better to have made him a Bulgar.”

She broke off.

“I’m so sorry. I’m talking shop. And this is a real murder.” Her face lit up. “What a good idea it would be if none of them had murdered him. If he’d asked them all, and then quietly committed suicide just for the fun of making a schemozzle.”

Poirot nodded approvingly.

“An admirable solution. So neat. So ironic. But, alas, Mr. Shaitana was not that sort of man. He was very fond of life.”

“I don’t think he was really a nice man,” said Mrs. Oliver slowly.

“He was not nice, no,” said Poirot. “But he was alive—and now he is dead, and as I told him once, I have a bourgeois attitude to murder, I disapprove of it.”

He added softly:

“And so—I am prepared to go inside the tiger’s cage….”

Nine

DR. ROBERTS

“Good morning, Superintendent Battle.”

Dr. Roberts rose from his chair and offered a large pink hand smelling of a mixture of good soap and faint carbolic.

“How are things going?” he went on.

Superintendent Battle glanced round the comfortable consulting room before answering.