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.