Problem at Pollensa Bay - Agatha Christie [17]
‘I don’t understand what they have to do with it.’
‘You do not? Listen–there were only four footprints in the bed, but when you were picking the flowers you must have made many more than that. So in between your picking the flowers and your coming to get the rosebud someone must have smoothed over the bed. Not a gardener–no gardener works after seven. Then it must be someone guilty–it must be the murderer–the murder was committed before the shot was heard.’
‘But why did nobody hear the real shot?’ asked Harry.
‘A silencer. They will find that and the revolver thrown into the shrubbery.’
‘What a risk!’
‘Why a risk? Everyone was upstairs dressing for dinner. It was a very good moment. The bullet was the only contretemps, and even that, as he thought, passed off well.’
Poirot picked it up. ‘He threw it under the mirror when I was examining the window with Mr Dalehouse.’
‘Oh!’ Diana wheeled on Marshall. ‘Marry me, John, and take me away.’
Barling coughed. ‘My dear Diana, under the terms of my friend’s will–’
‘I don’t care,’ the girl cried. ‘We can draw pictures on pavements.’
‘There’s no need to do that,’ said Harry. ‘We’ll go halves, Di. I’m not going to bag things because Uncle had a bee in his bonnet.’
Suddenly there was a cry. Mrs Lytcham Roche had sprung to her feet.
‘M. Poirot–the mirror–he–he must have deliberately smashed it.’
‘Yes, madame.’
‘Oh!’ She stared at him. ‘But it is unlucky to break a mirror.’
‘It has proved very unlucky for Mr Geoffrey Keene,’ said Poirot cheerfully.
Yellow Iris
I
Hercule Poirot stretched out his feet towards the electric radiator set in the wall. Its neat arrangement of red hot bars pleased his orderly mind.
‘A coal fire,’ he mused to himself, ‘was always shapeless and haphazard! Never did it achieve the symmetry.’
The telephone bell rang. Poirot rose, glancing at his watch as he did so. The time was close on half past eleven. He wondered who was ringing him up at this hour. It might, of course, be a wrong number.
‘And it might,’ he murmured to himself with a whimsical smile, ‘be a millionaire newspaper proprietor, found dead in the library of his country house, with a spotted orchid clasped in his left hand and a page torn from a cookbook pinned to his breast.’
Smiling at the pleasing conceit, he lifted the receiver.
Immediately a voice spoke–a soft husky woman’s voice with a kind of desperate urgency about it.
‘Is that M. Hercule Poirot? Is that M. Hercule Poirot?’
‘Hercule Poirot speaks.’
‘M. Poirot–can you come at once–at once–I’m in danger–in great danger–I know it…’
Poirot said sharply:
‘Who are you? Where are you speaking from?’
The voice came more faintly but with an even greater urgency.
‘At once…it’s life or death…the Jardin des Cygnes…at once…table with yellow irises…’
There was a pause–a queer kind of gasp–the line went dead.
Hercule Poirot hung up. His face was puzzled. He murmured between his teeth:
‘There is something here very curious.’
II
In the doorway of the Jardin des Cygnes, fat Luigi hurried forward.
‘Buona sera, M. Poirot. You desire a table–yes?’
‘No, no, my good Luigi. I seek here for some friends. I will look round–perhaps they are not here yet. Ah, let me see, that table there in the corner with the yellow irises–a little question by the way, if it is not indiscreet. On all the other tables there are tulips–pink tulips–why on that one table do you have yellow irises?’
Luigi shrugged his expressive shoulders.
‘A command, Monsieur! A special order! Without doubt, the favourite flowers of one of the ladies. That table it is the table of Mr Barton Russell–an American–immensely rich.’
‘Aha, one must