‘With every pleasure steamer on the Helm looking on?’

‘It would be just another piece of horse-play. Risky, but possible. But I think it far more likely myself that she hid the body somewhere, and just threw the hat into the Helm. It’s possible, you see, that she, knowing the house and grounds well, might know some place where you could conceal a body. She may have managed to dispose of it in the river later. Who knows? That is, of course, if she did it,’ added Inspector Bland as an afterthought. ‘But, actually, sir, I stick to De Sousa –’

Major Merrall had been noting down points on a pad. He looked up now, clearing his throat.

‘It comes to this, then. We can summarize it as follows: we’ve got five or six people who could have killed Marlene Tucker. Some of them are more likely than others, but that’s as far as we can go. In a general way, we know why she was killed. She was killed because she saw something. But until we know exactly what it was she saw – we don’t know who killed her.’

‘Put like that, you make it sound a bit difficult, sir.’

‘Oh, it is difficult. But we shall get there – in the end.’

‘And meantime that chap will have left England – laughing in his sleeve – having got away with two murders.’

‘You’re fairly sure about him, aren’t you? I don’t say you’re wrong. All the same…’

The chief constable was silent for a moment or two, then he said, with a shrug of his shoulders:

‘Anyway, it’s better than having one of these psychopathic murderers. We’d probably be having a third murder on our hands by now.’

‘They do say things go in threes,’ said the inspector gloomily.

He repeated that remark the following morning when he heard that old Merdell, returning home from a visit to his favourite pub across the river at Gitcham, must have exceeded his usual potations and had fallen in the river when boarding the quay. His boat was found adrift, and the old man’s body was recovered that evening.

The inquest was short and simple. The night had been dark and overcast, old Merdell had had three pints of beer and, after all, he was ninety-two.

The verdict brought in was Accidental Death.

Chapter 16

Chapter 16

I

Hercule Poirot sat in a square chair in front of the square fireplace in the square room of his London flat. In front of him were various objects that were not square: that were instead violently and almost impossibly curved. Each of them, studied separately, looked as if it could not have any conceivable function in a sane world. They appeared improbable, irresponsible, and wholly fortuitous. In actual fact, of course, they were nothing of the sort.