Hercule Poirot said to Miss Brewster: "You are going to bathe, Mademoiselle?"
"Oh, I've had my morning dip before breakfast. Somebody nearly brained me with a bottle, too.
Chucked it out of one of the hotel windows."
"Now that's a very dangerous thing to do," said Mrs Gardener.
"I had a very dear friend who got concussion by a toothpaste tin falling on him in the street - thrown out of a thirty-fifth storey window it was.
A most dangerous thing to do. He got very substantial damages."
She began to hunt among her skeins of wool.
"Why, Odell, I don't believe I've got that second shade of purple wool.
It's in the second drawer of the bureau in our bedroom or it might be the third."
"Yes, darling." Mr Gardener rose obediently and departed on his search.
Mrs Gardener went on:
"Sometimes, you know, I do think that maybe we're going a little too far nowadays.
What with all our great discoveries and all the electrical waves there must be in the atmosphere, I do think it leads to a great deal of mental unrest and I just feel that maybe the time has come for a new message to humanity.
I don't know, M. Poirot, if you've ever interested yourself in the prophecies from the Pyramids."
"I have not," said Poirot.
"Well, I do assure you that they're very, very interesting.
What with Moscow being exactly a thousand miles due North of - now what was it? - Would it be Nineveh? - but anyway you take a circle and it just shows the most surprising things and one can just see that there must have been special guidance, and that those ancient Egyptians couldn't have thought of what they did all by themselves.
And when you've gone into the theory of the numbers and their repetition, why, it's all just so clear that I can't see how any one can doubt the truth of it for a moment."
Mrs Gardener paused triumphantly but neither Poirot nor Miss Emily Brewster felt moved to argue the point.
Poirot studied his white suede shoes ruefully.
Emily Brewster said: "You been paddling with your shoes on, M. Poirot?"
Poirot murmured: "Alas! I was precipitate."
Emily Brewster lowered her voice. She said:
"Where's our Vamp this morning?
She's late."
Mrs Gardener, raising her eyes from her knitting to study Patrick Redfern, murmured: "He looks just like a thundercloud. Oh!
Dear, I do feel the whole thing is such a pity.
I wonder what Captain Marshall thinks about it all.
He's such a nice quiet man - very British and unassuming. You just never know what he's thinking about things."
Patrick Redfern rose and began to pace up and down the beach.
Mrs Gardener murmured: "Just like a tiger."
Three pairs of eyes watched his pacing. Their scrutiny seemed to make Patrick Redfern uncomfortable. He looked more than sulky now. He looked in a flaming temper.
In the stillness a faint chime from the mainland came to their ears.
Emily Brewster murmured: "Wind's from the East again.
That's a good sign when you can hear the church clock strike."
Nobody said any more until Mr Gardener returned with a skein of brilliant magenta wool.
"Why, Odell, what a long time you have been!"
"Sorry, darling, but you see it wasn't in your bureau at all.
I found it on your wardrobe shelf."
"Why, isn't that too extraordinary?
I could have declared I put it in that bureau drawer.
I do think it's fortunate that I've never had to give evidence in a court case.
I'd just worry myself to death in case I wasn't remembering a thing just right."
Mr Gardener said: "Mrs Gardener is very conscientious."
It was some five minutes later that Patrick Redfern said: "Going for your row this morning, Miss Brewster? Mind if I come with you?"
Miss Brewster said heartily: "Delighted."
"Let's row right round the island," proposed Redfern.
Miss Brewster consulted her watch. "Shall we have time?
Oh, yes, it's not half past eleven yet.
Come on then, let's start."