She went out of the room. He looked round him once more. A piece of needlework, a petit point chair seat, lay on a table with a needle sticking in it. Against the wall was a bookcase with books. There was a little cluster of miniatures on the wall and a faded photograph in a silver frame of a man in uniform with a stiff moustache and a weak chin.

Mrs Folliat came back into the room with a cup and saucer in her hand.

Poirot said, ‘Your husband, Madame?’

‘Yes.’

Noticing that Poirot’s eyes swept along the top of the bookcase as though in search of further photographs, she said brusquely:

‘I’m not fond of photographs. They make one live in the past too much. One must learn to forget. One must cut away the dead wood.’

Poirot remembered how the first time he had seen Mrs Folliat she had been clipping with sécateurs at a shrub on the bank. She had said then, he remembered, something about dead wood. He looked at her thoughtfully, appraising her character. An enigmatical woman, he thought, and a woman who, in spite of the gentleness and fragility of her appearance, had a side to her that could be ruthless. A woman who could cut away dead wood not only from plants but from her own life…

She sat down and poured out a cup of tea, asking: ‘Milk? Sugar?’

‘Three lumps if you will be so good, Madame?’

She handed him his cup and said conversationally:

‘I was surprised to see you. Somehow I did not imagine you would be passing through this part of the world again.’

‘I am not exactly passing through,’ said Poirot.

‘No?’ She queried him with slightly uplifted eyebrows.

‘My visit to this part of the world is intentional.’

She still looked at him in inquiry.

‘I came here partly to see you, Madame.’

‘Really?’

‘First of all – there has been no news of the young Lady Stubbs?’

Mrs Folliat shook her head.

‘There was a body washed up the other day in Cornwall,’ she said. ‘George went there to see if he could identify it. But it was not her.’ She added: ‘I am very sorry for George. The strain has been very great.’

‘Does he still believe that his wife may be alive?’

Slowly Mrs Folliat shook her head.

‘I think,’ she said, ‘that he has given up hope. After all, if Hattie were alive, she couldn’t possibly conceal herself successfully with the whole of the Press and the police looking for her. Even if something like loss of memory had happened to her – well, surely the police would have found her by now?’

‘It would seem so, yes,’ said Poirot. ‘Do the police still search?’

‘I suppose so. I do not really know.’

‘But Sir George has given up hope.’