THE SECRET ADVERSARY. Agatha Christie

animal that I am! I guessed nothing! I have behaved like an imbecile! I should never have left that case here. I should have carried it away with me. Ah, triple pig! And now it is gone. It is destroyed—but is it destroyed? Is there not yet a chance—we must leave no stone unturned—”

      He rushed like a madman from the room, and I followed him as soon as I had sufficiently recovered my wits. But, by the time I had reached the top of the stairs, he was out of sight.

      Mary Cavendish was standing where the staircase branched, staring down into the hall in the direction in which he had disappeared.

      “What has happened to your extraordinary little friend, Mr. Hastings? He has just rushed past me like a mad bull.”

      “He’s rather upset about something,” I remarked feebly. I really did not know how much Poirot would wish me to disclose. As I saw a faint smile gather on Mrs. Cavendish’s expressive mouth, I endeavoured to try and turn the conversation by saying: “They haven’t met yet, have they?”

      “Who?”

      “Mr. Inglethorp and Miss Howard.”

      She looked at me in rather a disconcerting manner.

      “Do you think it would be such a disaster if they did meet?”

      “Well, don’t you?” I said, rather taken aback.

      “No.” She was smiling in her quiet way. “I should like to see a good flare up. It would clear the air. At present we are all thinking so much, and saying so little.”

      “John doesn’t think so,” I remarked. “He’s anxious to keep them apart.”

      “Oh, John!”

      Something in her tone fired me, and I blurted out:

      “Old John’s an awfully good sort.”

      She studied me curiously for a minute or two, and then said, to my great surprise: “You are loyal to your friend. I like you for that.”

      “Aren’t you my friend too?”

      “I am a very bad friend.”

      “Why do you say that?”

      “Because it is true. I am charming to my friends one day, and forget all about them the next.”

      I don’t know what impelled me, but I was nettled, and I said foolishly and not in the best of taste: “Yet you seem to be invariably charming to Dr. Bauerstein!”

      Instantly I regretted my words. Her face stiffened. I had the impression of a steel curtain coming down and blotting out the real woman. Without a word, she turned and went swiftly up the stairs, whilst I stood like an idiot gaping after her.

      I was recalled to other matters by a frightful row going on below. I could hear Poirot shouting and expounding. I was vexed to think that my diplomacy had been in vain. The little man appeared to be taking the whole house into his confidence, a proceeding of which I, for one, doubted the wisdom. Once again I could not help regretting that my friend was so prone to lose his head in moments of excitement. I stepped briskly down the stairs. The sight of me calmed Poirot almost immediately. I drew him aside.

      “My dear fellow,” I said, “is this wise? Surely you don’t want the whole house to know of this occurrence? You are actually playing into the criminal’s hands.”

      “You think so, Hastings?”

      “I am sure of it.”

      “Well, well, my friend, I will be guided by you.”

      “Good. Although, unfortunately, it is a little too late now.”

      “Sure.”

      He looked so crestfallen and abashed that I felt quite sorry, though I still thought my rebuke a just and wise one.

      “Well,” he said at last, “let us go, mon ami.”

      “You have finished here?”

      “For the moment, yes. You will walk back with me to the village?”

      “Willingly.”

      He picked up his little suit-case, and we went out through the open window in the drawing-room. Cynthia Murdoch was just coming in, and Poirot stood aside to let her pass.

      “Excuse me, mademoiselle, one minute.”

      “Yes?” she turned inquiringly.

      “Did you ever make up Mrs. Inglethorp’s medicines?”

      A slight flush rose in her face, as she answered rather constrainedly:

      “No.”

      “Only her powders?”

      The flush deepened as Cynthia replied:

      “Oh, yes, I did make up some sleeping powders for her once.”

      “These?”

      Poirot produced the empty box which had contained powders.

      She nodded.

      “Can you tell me what they were? Sulphonal? Veronal?”

      “No, they were bromide powders.”

      “Ah! Thank you, mademoiselle; good morning.”

      As we walked briskly away from the house, I glanced at him more than once. I had often before noticed that, if anything excited him, his eyes turned green like a cat’s. They were shining like emeralds now.

      “My friend,” he broke out at last, “I have a little idea, a very strange, and probably utterly impossible idea. And yet—it fits in.”

      I shrugged my shoulders. I privately thought that Poirot was rather too much given to these fantastic ideas. In this case, surely, the truth was only too plain and apparent.

      “So that is the explanation of the blank label on the box,” I remarked. “Very simple, as you said. I really wonder that I did not think of it myself.”

      Poirot did not appear to be listening to me.

      “They have made one more discovery, la-bas,” he observed, jerking his thumb over his shoulder in the direction of Styles. “Mr. Wells told me as we were going upstairs.”

      “What was it?”

      “Locked up in the desk in the boudoir, they found a will of Mrs. Inglethorp’s, dated before her marriage, leaving her fortune to Alfred Inglethorp. It must have been made just at the time they were engaged. It came quite as a surprise to Wells—and to John Cavendish also. It was written on one of those printed will forms, and witnessed by two of the servants—not Dorcas.”

      “Did Mr. Inglethorp know of it?”

      “He says not.”

      “One might take that with a grain of salt,” I remarked sceptically. “All these wills are very confusing. Tell me, how did those scribbled words on the envelope help you to discover that a will was made yesterday afternoon?”

      Poirot smiled.

      “Mon ami, have you ever, when writing a letter, been arrested by the fact that you did not know how to spell a certain word?”

      “Yes, often. I suppose every one has.”

      “Exactly. And have you not, in such a case, tried the word once or twice on the edge of the blotting-paper, or a spare scrap of paper, to see if it looked right? Well, that is what Mrs. Inglethorp did. You will notice that the word ‘possessed’ is spelt first with one ‘s’ and subsequently with two—correctly. To make sure, she had further tried it in a sentence, thus: ‘I am possessed.’ Now, what did that tell me? It told me that Mrs. Inglethorp had been writing the word ‘possessed’ that afternoon, and, having the fragment of paper found in the grate fresh in my mind, the possibility of a will—(a document almost certain to contain that word)—occurred to me at once.