Yes, as you say, he signed his death warrant when he baited his guests with those words."
There was a moment's silence.
"This will be a long business," said Battle with a sigh. "We can't find out all we want in a moment - and we've got to be careful. We don't want any of the four to suspect what we're doing.
All our questioning and so on must seem to have to do with this murder.
There mustn't be a suspicion that we've got any idea of the motive for the crime.
And the devil of it is we've got to check up on four possible murders in the past, not one."
Poirot demurred. "Our friend Mr. Shaitana was not infallible," he said. "He may - it is just possible - have made a mistake."
"About all four?"
"No - he was more intelligent than that."
"Call it fifty-fifty?"
"Not even that.
For me, I say one in four."
"One innocent and three guilty?
That's bad enough.
And the devil of it is even if we get at the truth it mayn't help us.
Even if somebody did push his or her great-aunt down the stairs years ago, it won't be much use to us today."
"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 previous victim will have been stabbed with a dagger, too?"
"Not quite as crude as that, Mrs. Oliver," said Battle. urning 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 himself 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 week-end 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 favorite Labrador, Bob, good-by, 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 singlehanded.
I've written thirty-two books by now - and of course they're all exactly the same really, as Monsieur Poirot seems to have noticed - but nobody else has; and I only regret one thing, making my detective a Finn.