Poirot said:
'You suppose rightly – but why should you suppose anything of the kind?'
'My dear sir,' said Mr. Barnes, 'I've been retired from the Home Office for some time now – but I've not gone quite rusty yet. If there's any hush hush business, it's far better not to use the police. Draws attention to it all!'
Poirot said:
'I will ask yet another question. Why should you suppose this is a hush hush business?'
'Isn't it?' asked the other. 'Well, if it isn't, in my opinion it ought to be.'
He leaned forward and tapped with his pince-nez' on the arm of the chair.
'In Secret Service work it's never the little fry you want – it's the big bugs at the top – but to get them you've got to be careful not to alarm the little fry.'
'It seems to me, Mr. Barnes, that you know more than I do,' said Hercule Poirot.
'Don't know anything at all,' replied the other, 'just put two and two together.'
'One of those two being?'
'Amberiotis,' said Mr. Barnes promptly. 'You forget I sat opposite to him in the waiting room for a minute or two. He didn't know me. I was always an insignificant chap. Not a bad thing sometimes. But I knew him all right – and I could guess what he was up to over here.'
'Which was?'
Mr. Barnes twinkled more than ever.
'We're very tiresome people in this country. We're conservative, you know, conservative to the backbone. We grumble a lot, but we don't really want to smash our democratic government and try newfangled experiments. That's what's so heartbreaking to the wretched foreign agitator who's working full time and over! The whole trouble is – from their point of view – that we really are, as a country, comparatively solvent. Hardly any other country in Europe is at the moment! To upset England – really upset it – you've got to play hell with its finance – that's what it comes to! And you can't play hell with its finance when you've got men like Alistair Blunt at the helm.'
Mr. Barnes paused and then went on:
'Blunt is the kind of man who in private life would always pay his bills and live within his income – whether he'd got twopence a year or several million makes no difference. He is that type of fellow. And he just simply thinks that there's no reason why a country shouldn't do the same! No costly experiments. No frenzied expenditure on possible Utopias. That's why -' he paused – 'that's why certain people have made up their minds that Blunt must go.'
'Ah,' said Poirot.
Mr. Barnes nodded.
'Yes,' he said. 'I know what I'm talking about. Quite nice people, some of 'em. Long-haired, earnest-eyed, and full of ideals of a better world. Others not so nice, rather nasty in fact. Furtive little rats with beards and foreign accents. And another lot again of the Big Bully type. But they've all got the same idea: Blunt Must Go!'
He tilted his chair gently back and forward again.
'Sweep away the old order! The Tories, the Conservatives, the Die-hards, the hard-headed suspicious Business Men, that's the idea. Perhaps these people are right – I don't know – but I know one thing – you've got to have something to put in the place of the old order – something that will work – not just something that sounds all right. Well, we needn't go into that. We're dealing with concrete facts, not abstract theories. Take away the props and the building will come down. Blunt is one of the props of Things as They Are.'
He leaned forward.
'They're out after Blunt all right. That I know. And it's my opinion that yesterday morning they nearly got him. I may be wrong – but it's been tried before. The method, I mean.'
He paused and then quietly, circumspectly, he mentioned three names. An unusually able Chancellor of the Exchequer, a progressive and farsighted manufacturer, and a hopeful young politician who had captured the public fancy. The first had died on the operating table, the second had succumbed to an obscure disease which had been recognized too late, the third had been run down by a car and killed.
'It's very easy,' said Mr. Barnes. 'The anaesthetist muffled the giving of the anaesthetic – well, that does happen. In the second case the symptoms were puzzling. The doctor was just a well meaning G.P., couldn't be expected to recognize them. In the third case, anxious mother was driving car in a hurry to get to her sick child. Sob stuff – the jury acquitted her of blame!'
He paused:
'All quite natural. And soon forgotten. But I'll just tell you where those three people are now. The anaesthetist is set up on his own with a first-class research laboratory – no expense spared. That G.P. has retired from practice. He's got a yacht, and a nice little place on the Broads. The mother is giving all her children a first- class education, ponies to ride in the holidays, nice house in the country with a big garden and paddocks.'
He nodded his head slowly.
'In every profession and walk of life there is someone who is vulnerable to temptation. The trouble in our case was that Morley wasn't!'
'You think it was like that?' said Hercule Poirot.
Mr. Barnes said:
'I do. It's not easy to get at one of these big men, you know. They're fairly well protected. The car stunt is risky and doesn't always succeed. But a man is defenseless enough in a dentist's chair.'
He took off his pince-nez, polished them and put them on again. He said:
'That's my theory! Morley wouldn't do the job. He knew too much, though, so they had to put him out.'
'They?' asked Poirot.
'When I say they – I mean the organization that's behind all this. Only one person actually did the job, of course.'
'Which person?'
'Well, I could make a guess,' said Mr. Barnes, 'but it's only a guess and I might be wrong.'
Poirot said quietly:
'Reilly?'
'Of course! He's the obvious person. I think that probably they never asked Morley to do the job himself. What he was to do, was to turn Blunt over to his partner at the last minute. Sudden illness, something of that sort. Reilly would have done the actual business – and there would have been another regrettable accident – death of a famous banker – unhappy young dentist in court in such a state of dither and misery that he would have been let down lightly. He'd have given up dentistry afterwards – and settled down somewhere on a nice income of several thousands a year.'
Mr. Barnes looked across at Poirot.
'Don't think I'm romancing,' he said. 'These things happen.'
'Yes, yes, I know they happen.'
Mr. Barnes went on, tapping a book with a lurid jacket that lay on a table close at hand:
'I read a lot of these spy yarns. Fantastic, some of them. But curiously enough they're not any more fantastic than the real thing. There are beautiful adventuresses, and dark sinister men with foreign accents, and gangs and international associations and supercrooks! I'd blush to see some of the things I know set down in print – nobody would believe them for a minute!'
Poirot said:
'In your theory, where does Amberiotis come in?'
'I'm not quite sure. I think he was meant to take the rap. He's played a double game more than once and I daresay he was framed. That's only an idea, mind.'
Hercule Poirot said quietly:
'Granting that your ideas are correct – what will happen next?'
Mr. Barnes rubbed his nose.
'They'll try to get him again,' he said. 'Oh, yes. They'll have another try. Time's short. Blunt has got people looking after him, I daresay. They'll have to be extra careful. It won't be a man hiding in a bush with a pistol. Nothing so crude as that. You tell 'em to look out for the respectable people – the relations, the old servants, the chemist's assistant who makes up a medicine, the wine merchant who sells him his port. Getting Alistair Blunt out
