III

Three-quarters of an hour later Hercule Poirot came out of the underground station at EalingBroadway and five minutes after that he had reached his destination—No. 88, Castlegardens Road.

It was a small semidetached house, and the neatness of the front garden drew an admiring nodfrom Hercule Poirot.

“Admirably symmetrical,” he murmured to himself.

Mr. Barnes was at home and Poirot was shown into a small, precise dining room and herepresently Mr. Barnes came to him.

Mr. Barnes was a small man with twinkling eyes and a nearly bald head. He peeped over the topof his glasses at his visitor while in his left hand he twirled the card that Poirot had given the maid.

He said in a small, prim, almost falsetto voice:

“Well, well, M. Poirot? I am honoured, I am sure.”

“You must excuse my calling upon you in this informal manner,” said Poirot punctiliously.

“Much the best way,” said Mr. Barnes. “And the time is admirable, too. A quarter to seven—very sound time at this period of the year for catching anyone at home.” He waved his hand. “Sitdown, M. Poirot. I’ve no doubt we’ve got a good deal to talk about. 58, Queen Charlotte Street, Isuppose?”

Poirot said:

“You suppose rightly—but why should you suppose anything of the kind?”

“My dear sir,” said Mr. Barnes, “I’ve been retired from the Home Office for some time now—but I’ve not gone quite rusty yet. If there’s any hush-hush business, it’s far better not to use thepolice. Draws attention to it all!”

Poirot said:

“I will ask yet another question. Why should you suppose this is a hush-hush business?”

“Isn’t it?” asked the other. “Well, if it isn’t, in my opinion it ought to be.” He leant forward andtapped with his pince-nez on the arm of the chair. “In Secret Service work it’s never the little fryyou want—it’s the big bugs at the top—but to get them you’ve got to be careful not to alarm thelittle 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 him in the waiting room fora minute or two. He didn’t know me. I was always an insignificant chap. Not a bad thingsometimes. 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 thebackbone. We grumble a lot, but we don’t really want to smash our democratic government andtry newfangled experiments. That’s what’s so heartbreaking to the wretched foreign agitator who’sworking full time and over! The whole trouble is—from their point of view—that we really are, asa country, comparatively solvent. Hardly any other country in Europe is at the moment! To upsetEngland—really upset it—you’ve got to play hell with its finance—that’s what it comes to! Andyou 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 hisincome—whether he’d got two-pence a year or several million makes no difference. He is thattype of fellow. And he just simply thinks that there’s no reason why a country shouldn’t be thesame! No costly experiments. No frenzied expenditure on possible Utopias. That’s why”—hepaused—“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. Furtivelittle rats with beards and foreign accents. And another lot again of the Big Bully type. But they’veall 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 Diehards, the hardheadedsuspicious Business Men, that’s the idea. Perhaps these people are right—I don’t know—but Iknow one thing—you’ve got to have something to put in place of the old order—something thatwill work—not just something that sounds all right. Well, we needn’t go into that. We are dealingwith 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 theynearly 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 ableChancellor of the Exchequer, a progressive and farsighted manufacturer, and a hopeful youngpolitician who had captured the public fancy. The first had died on the operating table, the secondhad succumbed to an obscure disease which had been recognized too late, the third had been rundown by a car and killed.

“It’s very easy,” said Mr. Barnes. “The anesthetist muffed the giving of the anesthetic—well,that does happen. In the second case the symptoms were puzzling. The doctor was just a well-meaning G.P., couldn’t be expected to recognize them. In the third case, anxious mother wasdriving car in a hurry to get to her sick child. Sob stuff—the jury acquitted her of blame!”

He paused:

“All quite natural. And soon forgotten. But I’ll just tell you where those three people are now.

The anesthetist is set up on his own with a first-class research laboratory—no expense spared. ThatG.P. has retired from practice. He’s got a yacht, and a nice little place on the Broads. The motheris giving all her children a first-class education, ponies to ride in the holidays, nice house in thecountry with a big garden and paddocks.”

He nodded his head slowly.

“In every profession and walk of life there is someone who is vulnerable to temptation. Thetrouble in our case is that Morley wasn’t!”

“You think it was like that?” said Hercule Poirot.

Mr. Barnes said:

“I do. It’s not easy to get at one of these big men, you know. They’re fairly well protected. Thecar stunt is risky and doesn’t always succeed. But a man is defenceless enough in a dentist’schair.”

He took off his pince-nez, polished them and put them on again. He said:

“That’s my theory! Morley wouldn’t do the job. He knew too much, though, so they had to puthim out.”

“They?” asked Poirot.

“When I say they—I mean the organization that’s behind all this. Only one person actually didthe job, of course.”

“Which person?”

“Well, I could make a guess,” said Mr. Barnes, “but it’s only a guess and I might be wrong.”

Poirot said quietly: “Reilly?”

“Of course! He’s the obvious person. I think that probably they never asked Morley to do thejob himself. What he was to do, was to turn Blunt over to his partner at the last minute. Suddenillness, something of that sort. Reilly would have done the actual business—and there would havebeen another regrettable accident—death of a famous banker—unhappy young dentist in court insuch a state of dither and misery that he would have been let down light. He’d have given updentistry afterwards—and settled down somewhere on a nice income of several thousands a year.”

Mr. Barnes looked across at Poirot.

“Don’t think I’m romancing,” he said. “These things happen.”

“Yes, yes, I know they happen.”

Mr. Barnes went on, tapping a book with a lurid jacket that lay on a table close at hand: “I reada lot of these spy yarns. Fantastic, some of them. But curiously enough they’re not any morefantastic than the real thing. There are beautiful adventuresses, and dark sinister men with foreignaccents, and gangs and international associations and super crooks! I’d blush to see some of thethings I know set down in print—nobody would believe them for a minute!”

Poirot said:

“In your theory, where does Amberiotis come in?”

“I’m not quite sure. I think he was meant to take the rap. He’s played a double game more thanonce and I daresay he was framed. That’s only an idea, mind.”

Hercule Poirot said quietly:

“Granting that your ideas are correct—what will happen next?”

Mr. Barnes rubbed his nose.

“They’ll try to get him again,” he said. “Oh, yes. They’ll have another try. Time’s short. Blunthas got people looking after him, I daresay. They’ll have to be extra careful. It won’t be a manhiding in a bush with a pistol. Nothing so crude as that. You tell ’em to look out for the respectablepeople—the relations, the old servants, the chemist’s assistant who makes up a medicine, the winemerchant who sells him his port. Getting Alistair Blunt out of the way is worth a great manymillions, and it’s wonderful what people will do for—say a nice little income of four thousand ayear!”

“As much as that?”

“Possibly more …”

Poirot was silent a moment, then he said:

“I have had Reilly in mind from the first.”

“Irish? I.R.A.?”

“Not that so much, but there was a mark, you see, on the carpet, as though the body had beendragged along it. But if Morley had been shot by a patient he would be shot in the surgery andthere would be no need to move the body. That is why, from the first, I suspected that he had beenshot, not in the surgery, but in his office—next door. That would mean that it was not a patientwho shot him, but some member of his own household.”

“Neat,” said Mr. Barnes appreciatively.

Hercule Poirot got up and held out a hand.

“Thank you,” he said. “You have helped me a great deal.”