XIII
The Goose Quill
That evening, at Poirot’s request, I went over to his house after dinner. Caroline saw me depart with visible reluctance. I think she would have liked to have accompanied me.
Poirot greeted me hospitably. He had placed a bottle of Irish whiskey (which I detest) on a small table, with a soda water siphon and a glass. He himself was engaged in brewing hot chocolate. It was a favourite beverage of his, I discovered later.
He inquired politely after my sister, whom he declared to be a most interesting woman.
“I’m afraid you’ve been giving her a swelled head,” I said drily. “What about Sunday afternoon?”
He laughed and twinkled. “I always like to employ the expert,” he remarked obscurely, but he refused to explain the remark.
“You got all the local gossip anyway,” I remarked. “True, and untrue.”
“And a great deal of valuable information,” he added quietly.
“Such as—?”
He shook his head. “Why not have told me the truth?” he countered. “In a place like this, all Ralph Paton’s doings were bound to be known. If your sister had not happened to pass through the wood that day somebody else would have done so.”
“I suppose they would,” I said grumpily. “What about this interest of yours in my patients?”
Again he twinkled. “Only one of them, doctor. Only one of them.”
“The last?” I hazarded.
“I find Miss Russell a study of the most interesting,” he said evasively.
“Do you agree with my sister and Mrs. Ackroyd that there is something fishy about her?” I asked.
“Eh? What do you say—fishy?”
I explained to the best of my ability.
“And they say that, do they?”
“Didn’t my sister convey as much to you yesterday afternoon?”
“C’est possible.”
“For no reason whatever,” I declared.
“Les femmes,” generalized Poirot. “They are marvelous! They invent haphazard—and by miracle they are right. Not that it is that, really. Women observe subconsciously a thousand little details, without knowing that they are doing so. Their subconscious mind adds these little things together—and they call the result intuition. Me, I am very skilled in psychology. I know these things.”
He swelled his chest out importantly, looking so ridiculous, that I found it difficult not to burst out laughing. Then he took a small sip of his chocolate, and carefully wiped his mustache.
“I wish you’d tell me,” I burst out, “what you really think of it all?”
He put down his cup. “You wish that?”
“I do.”
“You have seen what I have seen. Should not our ideas be the same?”
“I’m afraid you’re laughing at me,” I said stiffly. “Of course, I’ve no experience of matters of this kind.”
Poirot smiled at me indulgently.
“You are like the little child who wants to know the way the engine works. You wish to see the affair, not as the family doctor sees it, but with the eye of a detective who knows and cares for no one—to whom they are all strangers and all equally liable to suspicion.”
“You put it very well,” I said.
“So I give you then, a little lecture. The first thing is to get a clear history of what happened that evening—always bearing in mind that the person who speaks may be lying.”
I raised my eyebrows. “Rather a suspicious attitude.”
“But necessary—I assure you, necessary. Now first—Dr. Sheppard leaves the house at ten minutes to nine. How do I know that?”
“Because I told you so.”
“But you might not be speaking the truth—or the watch you went by might be wrong. But Parker also says that you left the house at ten minutes to nine. So we accept that statement and pass on. At nine o’clock you run into a man—and here we come to what we will call the Romance of the Mysterious Stranger—just outside the Park gates. How do I know that that is so?”
“I told you so,” I began again, but Poirot interrupted me with a gesture of impatience.
“Ah! but it is that you are a little stupid tonight, my friend. You know that it is so—but how am I to know? Eh bien, I am able to tell you that the Mysterious Stranger was not a hallucination on your part, because the maid of a Miss Gannett met him a few minutes before you did, and of her too he inquired the way to Fernly Park. We accept his presence, therefore, and we can be fairly sure of two things about him—that he was a stranger to the neighborhood, and that whatever his object in going to Fernly, there was no great secrecy about it, since he twice asked the way there.”
“Yes,” I said, “I see that.”
“Now I have made it my business to find out more about this man. He had a drink at the Three Boars, I learn, and the barmaid there says that he spoke with an American accent and mentioned having just come over from the States. Did it strike you that he had an American accent?”
“Yes, I think he had,” I said, after a minute or two, during which I cast my mind back, “but a very slight one.”
“Précisément. There is also this which, you will remember, I picked up in the summerhouse?”
He held out to me the little quill. I looked at it curiously. Then a memory of something I had read stirred in me.
Poirot, who had been watching my face, nodded. “Yes, heroin ‘snow.’ Drug-takers carry it like this, and sniff it up the nose.”
“Diamorphine hydrochloride,” I murmured mechanically.
“This method of taking the drug is very common on the other side. Another proof, if we wanted one, that the man came from Canada or the States.”
“What first attracted your attention to that summerhouse?” I asked curiously.
“My friend the inspector took it for granted that anyone using that path did so as a shortcut to the house, but as soon as I saw the summerhouse, I realized that the same path would be taken by anyone using the summerhouse as a rendezvous. Now it seems fairly certain that the stranger came neither to the front
