Goodbye—goodbye—goodbye.

J.N.

Inspector Colgate said:

“Might be worth while to find out if J.N. really did go to China. Otherwise—well, he might be the person we’re looking for. Crazy about the woman, idealizing her, suddenly finding out he’d been played for a sucker. It sounds to me as though this is the boy Miss Brewster mentioned. Yes, I think this might be useful.”

Hercule Poirot nodded. He said: “Yes, that letter is important. I find it very important.”

He turned round and stared at the room—at the bottles on the dressing table—at the open wardrobe and at a big Pierrot doll that lolled insolently on the bed.

They went into Kenneth Marshall’s room.

It was next door to his wife’s but with no communicating door and no balcony. It faced the same way and had two windows, but it was much smaller. Between the two windows a gilt mirror hung on the wall. In the corner beyond the right-hand window was the dressing table. On it were two ivory brushes, a clothes brush and a bottle of hair lotion. In the corner by the left-hand window was a writing table. An open typewriter stood on it and papers were ranged in a stack beside it.

Colgate went through them rapidly.

He said:

“All seems straightforward enough. Ah, here’s the letter he mentioned this morning. Dated the 24th—that’s yesterday. And here’s the envelope postmarked Leathercombe Bay this morning. Seems all square. Now we’ll have an idea if he could have prepared that answer of his beforehand.

He sat down.

Colonel Weston said:

“We’ll leave you to it, for a moment. We’ll just glance through the rest of the rooms. Everyone’s been kept out of this corridor until now, and they’re getting a bit restive about it.”

They went next into Linda Marshall’s room. It faced east, looking out over the rocks down to the sea below.

Weston gave a glance round. He murmured:

“Don’t suppose there’s anything to see here. But it’s possible Marshall might have put something in his daughter’s room that he didn’t want us to find. Not likely, though. It isn’t as though there had been a weapon or anything to get rid of.”

He went out again.

Hercule Poirot stayed behind. He found something that interested him in the grate. Something had been burnt there recently. He knelt down, working patiently. He laid out his finds on a sheet of paper. A large irregular blob of candle grease—some fragments of green paper or cardboard, possibly a pull-off calendar for with it was an unburnt fragment bearing a large figure 5 and a scrap of printing…noble deeds… There was also an ordinary pin and some burnt animal matter which might have been hair.

Poirot arranged them neatly in a row and stared at them.

He murmured:

“Do noble deeds, not dream them all day long. C’est possible. But what is one to make of this collection? C’est fantastique!”

And then he picked up the pin and his eyes grew sharp and green.