IV

I went downstairs in a daze. The thing was so inexplicable I may be for-given, I hope, for not seeing the next inevitable step. I was dazed. My mindwas not working properly.

And yet it was so logical. Norton had been killed – why? To prevent, orso I believed, his telling what he had seen.

But he had confided that knowledge to one other person.

So that person, too, was in danger …

And was not only in danger, but was helpless.

I should have known.

I should have foreseen …

‘Cher ami!’ Poirot had said to me as I left the room.

They were the last words I was ever to hear him say. For when Curtisscame to attend to his master he found that master dead …