牙医谋杀案05

V
Hercule Poirot descended¹ from his taxi, paid the man and rang the bell of 58, Queen CharlotteStreet.

After a little delay it was opened by a boy in page boy’s uniform with a freckled² face, red hair,and an earnest manner.

Hercule Poirot said:

“Mr. Morley?”

There was in his heart a ridiculous hope that Mr. Morley might have been called away, might beindisposed, might not be seeing patients today … All in vain. The page boy drew back, HerculePoirot stepped inside, and the door closed behind him with the quiet remorselessness ofunalterable doom³.

The boy said: “Name, please?”

Poirot gave it to him, a door on the right of the hall was thrown open and he stepped into thewaiting room.

It was a room furnished in quiet good taste and, to Hercule Poirot, indescribably gloomy. On thepolished (reproduction) Sheraton table were carefully arranged papers and periodicals. The(reproduction) Hepplewhite sideboard held two Sheffield plated candlesticks and an épergne. Themantelpiece held a bronze clock and two bronze vases. The windows were shrouded⁴ by curtains ofblue velvet⁵. The chairs were upholstered in a Jacobean design of red birds and flowers.

In one of them sat a military- looking gentleman with a fierce moustache and a yellowcomplexion. He looked at Poirot with an air of one considering some noxious⁶ insect. It was not somuch his gun he looked as though he wished he had with him, as his Flit spray. Poirot, eyeing himwith distaste, said to himself, “In verity⁷, there are some Englishmen who are altogether sounpleasing and ridiculous that they should have been put out of their misery⁸ at birth.”

The military gentleman, after a prolonged glare, snatched up The Times, turned his chair so as toavoid seeing Poirot, and settled down to read it.

Poirot picked up Punch.

He went through it meticulously⁹, but failed to find any of the jokes funny.

The page boy came in and said, “Colonel Arrow-Bumby?”—and the military gentleman was ledaway.

Poirot was speculating on the probabilities of there really being such a name, when the dooropened to admit a young man of about thirty.

As the young man stood by the table, restlessly flicking¹⁰ over the covers of magazines, Poirotlooked at him sideways. An unpleasant and dangerous looking young man, he thought, and notimpossibly a murderer. At any rate he looked far more like a murderer than any of the murderersHercule Poirot had arrested in the course of his career.

The page boy opened the door and said to midair:

“Mr. Peerer.”

Rightly construing¹¹ this as a summons to himself, Poirot rose. The boy led him to the back of thehall and round the corner to a small lift in which he took him up to the second floor. Here he ledhim along a passage, opened a door which led into a little anteroom, tapped at a second door; andwithout waiting for a reply opened it and stood back for Poirot to enter.

Poirot entered to a sound of running water and came round the back of the door to discover Mr.

Morley washing his hands with professional gusto at a basin on the wall.

 

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