Round her neck was a collar of very large pearls which, improbable though it seemed, were real.
Her hands were covered with rings.
Her sable coat was pushed back on her shoulders.
A very small and expensive black toque was hideously unbecoming to the yellow, toad-like face beneath it.
She was speaking now to the restaurant attendant in a clear, courteous, but completely autocratic tone.
“You will be sufficiently amiable to place in my compartment a bottle of mineral water and a large glass of orange juice.
You will arrange that I shall have chicken cooked without sauces for dinner this evening – also some boiled fish.”
The attendant replied respectfully that it should be done.
She gave a slight gracious nod of the head and rose.
Her glance caught Poirot’s and swept over him with the nonchalance of the uninterested aristocrat.
“That is Princess Dragomiroff,” said M. Bouc in a low tone. “She is a Russian.
Her husband realised all his money before the Revolution and invested it abroad.
She is extremely rich.
A cosmopolitan.”
Poirot nodded.
He had heard of Princess Dragomiroff.
“She is a personality,” said M. Bouc. “Ugly as sin but she makes herself felt.
You agree?”
Poirot agreed.
At another of the large tables Mary Debenham was sitting with two other women.
One of them was tall and middle-aged, in a plaid blouse and tweed skirt. She had a mass of faded yellow hair unbecomingly arranged in a large bun, wore glasses, and had a long mild amiable face rather like a sheep. She was listening to the third woman, a stout, pleasant-faced, elderly person who was talking in a slow clear monotone which showed no signs of pausing for breath or coming to a stop.
“–and so my daughter said,
‘Why,’ she said, ‘you just can’t apply American methods in this country.
It’s natural to the folks here to be indolent,’ she said.
‘They just haven’t got any hustle in them–’ But all the same you’d be surprised to know what our college there is doing.
They’ve got a fine staff of teachers.
I guess there’s nothing like education.
We’ve got to apply our Western ideals and teach the East to recognise them.
My daughter says–”
The train plunged into a tunnel.
The calm, monotonous voice was drowned.
At the next table, a small one, sat Colonel Arbuthnot – alone.
His gaze was fixed upon the back of Mary Debenham’s head.
They were not sitting together.
Yet it could easily have been managed.
Why?
Perhaps, Poirot thought, Mary Debenham had demurred.
A governess learns to be careful.
Appearances are important.
A girl with her living to get has to be discreet.
His glance shifted to the other side of the carriage.
At the far end, against the wall, was a middle-aged woman dressed in black with a broad, expressionless face.
German or Scandinavian, he thought. Probably the German lady’s maid.
Beyond her were a couple leaning forward and talking animatedly together.
The man wore English clothes of loose tweed, but he was not English.
Though only the back of his head was visible to Poirot, the shape of it and the set of the shoulders betrayed him.
A big man, well made.
He turned his head suddenly and Poirot saw his profile.
A very handsome man of thirty-odd with a big fair moustache.
The woman opposite him was a mere girl – twenty at a guess.