One, two, buckle my shoe - Agatha Christie [69]
Alistair Blunt said:
‘What are you suggesting, M. Poirot?’
Poirot said quietly:
‘I am suggesting, M. Blunt, that when you married Rebecca Arnholt, you were married already. That, dazzled by the vista, not so much of wealth, as of power, you suppressed that fact and deliberately committed bigamy. That your real wife acquiesced in the situation.’
‘And who was this real wife?’
‘Mrs Albert Chapman was the name she went under at King Leopold Mansions — a handy spot, not five minutes’ walk from your house on the Chelsea Embankment. You borrowed the name of a real secret agent, realizing that it would give support to her hints of a husband engaged in intelligence work. Your scheme succeeded perfectly. No suspicion was ever aroused. Nevertheless, the fact remained, you had never been legally married to Rebecca Arnholt and you were guilty of bigamy. You never dreamt of danger after so many years. It came out of the blue — in the form of a tiresome woman who remembered you after nearly twenty years, as her friend’s husband. Chance brought her back to this country, chance let her meet you in Queen Charlotte Street — it was chance that your niece was with you and heard what she said to you. Otherwise I might never have guessed.’
‘I told you about that myself, my dear Poirot.’
‘No, it was your niece who insisted on telling me and you could not very well protest too violently in case it might arouse suspicions. And after that meeting, one more evil chance (from your point of view) occurred. Mabelle Sainsbury Seale met Amberiotis, went to lunch with him and babbled to him of this meeting with a friend’s husband — “after all these years!” — “Looked older, of course, but had hardly changed!” That, I admit, is pure guess-work on my part but I believe it is what happened. I do not think that Mabelle Sainsbury Seale realized for a moment that the Mr Blunt her friend had married was the shadowy figure behind the finance of the world. The name, after all, is not an uncommon one. But Amberiotis, remember, in addition to his espionage activities, was a blackmailer. Blackmailers have an uncanny nose for a secret. Amberiotis wondered. Easy to find out just who the Mr Blunt was. And then, I have no doubt, he wrote to you or telephoned…Oh, yes — a gold mine for Amberiotis.’
Poirot paused. He went on:
‘There is only one effectual method of dealing with a really efficient and experienced blackmailer. Silence him.
‘It was not a case, as I had had erroneously suggested to me, of “Blunt must go”. It was, on the contrary, “Amberiotis must go”. But the answer was the same! The easiest way to get at a man is when he is off his guard, and when is a man more off his guard than in the dentist’s chair?’
Poirot paused again. A faint smile came to his lips. He said:
‘The truth about the case was mentioned very early. The page-boy, Alfred, was reading a crime story called Death at Eleven Forty-Five. We should have taken that as an omen. For, of course, that is just about the time when Morley was killed. You shot him just as you were leaving. Then you pressed his buzzer, turned on the taps of the wash basin and left the room. You timed it so that you came down the stairs just as Alfred was taking the false Mabelle Sainsbury Seale to the lift. You actually opened the front door, perhaps you passed out, but as the lift doors shut and the lift went up you slipped inside again and went up the stairs.
‘I know, from my own visits, just what Alfred did when he took up a patient. He knocked on the door, opened it, and stood back to let the patient pass in. Inside the water was running — inference, Morley was washing his hands as usual. But Alfred couldn’t actually see him.
‘As soon as Alfred had gone down again in the lift, you slipped along into the surgery. Together you and your accomplice lifted the body and carried it into the adjoining office. Then a quick hunt through the files, and the charts of Mrs Chapman and Miss Sainsbury Seale were cleverly falsified. You put on a white linen coat, perhaps your wife applied a trace of make-up.