‘There is a third possibility,’ Poirot pointed out.

Bland nodded.

‘Yes,’ he said, ‘I’ve thought of that. I keep thinking of that, in fact. You mean the body’s there – at Nasse, hidden somewhere where we’ve never thought of looking. It could be, you know. It just could be. With an old house, and with grounds like that, there are places you’d never think of – that you’d never know were there.’

He paused a moment, ruminated, and then said:

‘There’s a house I was in only the other day. They’d built an air-raid shelter, you know, in the war. A flimsy sort of more or less home-made job in the garden, by the wall of the house, and had made a way from it into the house – into the cellar. Well, the war ended, the shelters tumbled down, they heaped it up in irregular mounds and made a kind of rockery of it. Walking through that garden now, you’d never think that the place had once been an air-raid shelter and that there was a chamber underneath. Looks as though it was always meant to be a rockery. And all the time, behind a wine bin in the cellar, there’s a passage leading into it. That’s what I mean. That kind of thing. Some sort of way into some kind of place that no outsider would know about. I don’t suppose there’s an actual Priest’s Hole or anything of that kind?’

‘Hardly – not at that period.’

‘That’s what Mr Weyman says – he says the house was built about 1790 or thereabouts. No reason for priests to hide themselves by that date. All the same, you know, there might be – somewhere, some alteration in the structure – something that one of the family might know about. What do you think, M. Poirot?’

‘It is possible, yes,’ said Poirot. ‘Mais oui, decidedly it is an idea. If one accepts the possibility, then the next thing is – who would know about it? Anyone staying in the house might know, I suppose?’

‘Yes. Of course it would let out De Sousa.’ The inspector looked dissatisfied. De Sousa was still his preferred suspect. ‘As you say, anyone who lived in the house, such as a servant or one of the family, might know about it. Someone just staying in the house would be less likely. People who only came in from outside, like the Legges, less likely still.’

‘The person who would certainly know about such a thing, and who could tell you if you asked her, would be Mrs Folliat,’ said Poirot.