"I do not think so. Unless, that is, somebody saw something or knows something - but if so, surely, they would have come forward to say so ... ?"

FIFTEEN

My memory is a little vague about the events of the days immediately following the inquest on Mrs. Franklin. There was, of course, the funeral, which I may say was attended by a large number of the curious of Styles St. Mary. It was on that occasion that I was addressed by an old woman with rheumy eyes and an unpleasantly ghoulish manner.

She accosted me just as we were filing out of the cemetery.

"Remember you, sir, don't I?"

"Well - er, possibly - "

She went on, hardly listening to what I said.

"Twenty years ago and over. When the old lady died up at the Court. That was the first murder we had to Styles. Won't be the last, I say. Old Mrs. Inglethorp, her husband done her in, so we all said. Sure of it, we was." She leered at me cunningly. "Maybe it's the husband this time."

"What do you mean?" I said sharply. "Didn't you hear the verdict was suicide?"

"That's what the coroner said. But he might be wrong, don't you think?" She nudged me. "Doctors, they know how to do away with their wives. And she wasn't much good to him seemingly."

I turned on her angrily and she slunk away, murmuring she hadn't meant anything, only it seemed odd-like, didn't it, happening a second time? "And it's queer you should be there both times, sir, isn't it now?" For one fantastic moment I wondered if she suspected me of having really committed both crimes. It was most disturbing. It certainly made me realize what a queer, haunting thing local suspicion is.

And it was not, after all, so far wrong. For somebody had killed Mrs. Franklin. As I say, I remember very little of those days. Poirot's health, for one thing, was giving me grave concern. Curtiss came to me with his wooden face slightly disturbed and reported that Poirot had had a somewhat alarming heart attack.

"Seems to me, sir, he ought to see a doctor."

I went posthaste to Poirot, who negatived the suggestion most vigorously. It was, I thought, a little unlike him. He had always been, in my opinion, extremely fussy about his health. Distrusting draughts, wrapping up his neck in silk and wool, showing a horror of getting his feet damp, and taking his temperature and retiring to bed at the least suspicion of a chill - "for otherwise it may be for me a fluxion de poitrine!" In most little ailments, he had, I knew, always consulted a doctor immediately.

Now, when he was really ill, the position seemed reversed. Yet perhaps that was the real reason. Those other ailments had been trifling. Now, when he was indeed a sick man, he feared, perhaps, admitting the reality of his illness. He made light of it because he was afraid.