He’s not at Liverpool!’
Poirot beamed on me.
‘You have the intelligence so quick!
No, he has not been found at Liverpool.
Inspector Raglan was very loath to let me send this paragraph to the press, especially as I could not take him into my confidence.
But I assured him most solemnly that very interesting results would follow its appearance in print, so he gave in, after stipulating that he was, on no account, to bear the responsibility.’ I stared at Poirot. He smiled back at me.
‘It beats me,’ I said at last, ‘what you expect to get out of that.’
‘You should employ your little grey cells,’ said Poirot gravely.
He rose and came across to the bench.
‘It is that you have really the love of the machinery,’ he said, after inspecting the debris of my labours.
Every man has his hobby.
I immediately drew Poirot’s attention to my home-made wireless.
Finding him sympathetic, I showed him one or two little inventions of my own - trifling things, but useful in the house.
‘Decidedly,’ said Poirot, ‘you should be an inventor by trade, not a doctor.
But I hear the bell - that is your patient.
Let us go into the surgery.’
Once before I had been struck by the remnants of beauty in the housekeeper’s face.
This morning I was struck anew.
Very simply dressed in black, tall, upright and independent as ever, with her big dark eyes and an unwonted flush of colour in her usually pale cheeks, I realized that as a girl she must have been startlingly handsome.
‘Good-morning, mademoiselle,’ said Poirot.
‘Will you be seated?
Dr Sheppard is so kind as to permit me the use of his surgery for a little conversation I am anxious to have with you.’
Miss Russell sat down with her usual composure.
If she felt any inward agitation, it did not display itself in any outward manifestation.
‘It seems a queer way of doing things, if you’ll allow me to say so,’ she remarked.
‘Miss Russell - I have news to give you.’
‘Indeed!’
‘Charles Kent has been arrested at Liverpool.’
Not a muscle of her face moved.
She merely opened her eyes a trifle wider, and asked, with a tinge of defiance:
‘Well, what of it?’
But at that moment it came to me - the resemblance that had haunted me all along, something familiar in the defiance of Charles Kent’s manner.
The two voices, one rough and coarse, the other painfully ladylike - were strangely the same in timbre.
It was of Miss Russell that I had been reminded that night outside the gates of Fernly Park.
I looked at Poirot, full of my discovery, and he gave me an imperceptible nod. In answer to Miss Russell’s question, he threw out his hands in a thoroughly French gesture.
‘I thought you might be interested, that is all,’ he said mildly.
‘Well I’m not particularly,’ said Miss Russell.
‘Who is this Charles Kent anyway?’
‘He is a man, mademoiselle, who was at Fernly on the night of the murder.’
‘Really?’
‘Fortunately for him, he has an alibi.
At a quarter to ten he was at a public-house a mile from here.’
‘Lucky for him,’ commented Miss Russell.
‘But we still do not know what he was doing at Fernly who it was he went to meet, for instance.’
‘I’m afraid I can’t help you at all,’ said the housekeeper politely.
‘Nothing came to my ears.
If that is all ‘ She made a tentative movement as though to rise. Poirot stopped her.
‘It is not quite all,’ he said smoothly.
‘This morning fresh developments have arisen. It seems now that Mr Ackroyd was murdered, not at a quarter to ten, but before. Between ten minutes to nine, when Dr Sheppard left, and a quarter to ten.’
I saw the colour drain from the housekeeper’s face, leaving it dead white. She leaned forward, her figure swaying.