“What is the matter?” whispered Knighton. “You are expecting something to happen, aren’t you?”
“I have the nerves,” confessed Poirot. “I am like the cat upon the hot tiles. Every little noise it makes me jump.”
Knighton yawned.
“Of all the darned uncomfortable journeys,” he murmured. “I suppose you know what you are playing at, Monsieur Poirot.”
He composed himself to sleep as best he could. Both he and Van Aldin had succumbed to slumber, when Poirot, glancing for the fourteenth time at his watch, leant across and tapped the millionaire on the shoulder.
“Eh? What is it?”
“In five or ten minutes, Monsieur, we shall arrive at Lyons.”
“My God!” Van Aldin’s face looked white and haggard in the dim light. “Then it must have been about this time that poor Ruth was killed.”
He sat staring straight in front of him. His lips twitched a little, his mind reverting back to the terrible tragedy that had saddened his life.
There was the usual long screaming sigh of the brake, and the train slackened speed and drew into Lyons. Van Aldin let down the window and leant out.
“If it wasn’t Derek—if your new theory is correct, it is here that the man left the train?” he asked over his shoulder.
Rather to his surprise Poirot shook his head.
“No,” he said thoughtfully, “no man left the train, but I think—yes, I think, a woman may have done so.”
Knighton gave a gasp.
“A woman?” demanded Van Aldin sharply.
“Yes, a woman,” said Poirot, nodding his head. “You may not remember, Monsieur Van Aldin, but Miss Grey in her evidence mentioned that a youth in a cap and overcoat descended on to the platform ostensibly to stretch his legs. Me, I think that that youth was most probably a woman.”
“But who was she?”
Van Aldin’s face expressed incredulity, but Poirot replied seriously and categorically:
“Her name—or the name under which she was known, for many years—is Kitty Kidd, but you, Monsieur Van Aldin, knew her by another name—that of Ada Mason.”
Knighton sprang to his feet.
“What?” he cried.
Poirot swung round to him.
“Ah!—before I forget it.” He whipped something from a pocket and held it out.
“Permit me to offer you a cigarette—out of your own cigarette-case. It was careless of you to drop it when you boarded the train on the ceinture at Paris.”
Knighton stood staring at him as though stupefied. Then he made a movement, but Poirot flung up his hand in a warning gesture.
“No, don’t move,” he said in a silky voice; “the door into the next compartment is open, and you are being covered from there this minute. I unbolted the door into the corridor when we left Paris, and our friends the police were told to take their places there. As I expect you know, the French police want you rather urgently, Major Knighton—or shall we say—Monsieur le Marquis?”
XXXV
Explanations
“Explanations?”
Poirot smiled. He was sitting opposite the millionaire at a luncheon table in the latter’s private suite at the Negresco. Facing him was a relieved but very puzzled man. Poirot leant back in his chair, lit one of his tiny cigarettes, and stared reflectively at the ceiling.
“Yes, I will give you explanations. It began with the one point that puzzled me. You know what that point was? The disfigured face. It is not an uncommon thing to find when investigating a crime and it rouses an immediate question, the question of identity. That naturally was the first thing that occurred to me. Was the dead woman really Mrs. Kettering? But that line led me nowhere, for Miss Grey’s evidence was positive and very reliable, so I put that idea aside. The dead woman was Ruth Kettering.”
“When did you first begin to suspect the maid?”
“Not for some time, but one peculiar little point drew my attention to her. The cigarette-case found in the railway carriage and which she told us was one which Mrs. Kettering had given to her husband. Now that was, on the face of it, most improbable, seeing the terms they were on. It awakened a doubt in my mind as to the general veracity of Ada Mason’s statements. There was the rather suspicious fact to be taken into consideration, that she had only been with her mistress for two months. Certainly it did not seem as if she could have had anything to do with the crime since she had been left behind in Paris and Mrs. Kettering had been seen alive by several people afterwards, but—”
Poirot leant forward. He raised an emphatic forefinger and wagged it with intense emphasis at Van Aldin.
“But I am a good detective. I suspect. There is nobody and nothing that I do not suspect. I believe nothing that I am told. I say to myself: how do we know that Ada Mason was left behind in Paris? And at first the answer to that question seemed completely satisfactory. There was the evidence of your secretary, Major Knighton, a complete outsider, whose testimony might be supposed to be entirely impartial, and there were the dead woman’s own words to the conductor of the train. But I put the latter point aside for the moment, because a very curious idea—an idea perhaps fantastic and impossible—was growing up in my mind. If by any outside chance it happened to be true, that particular piece of testimony was worthless.
“I concentrated on the chief stumbling-block to my theory, Major Knighton’s statement that he saw Ada Mason at the Ritz after the Blue Train had left Paris. That seemed conclusive enough, but yet,
