The Clocks - Agatha Christie [66]
“There must be. Somebody has always seen something. It is an axiom.”
“It may be an axiom but it isn’t so in this case. And I’ve got further details for you. There has been another murder.”
“Indeed? So soon? That is interesting. Tell me.”
I told him. He questioned me closely until he got every single detail out of me. I told him, too, of the postcard I had passed on to Hardcastle.
“Remember—four one three—or four thirteen,” he repeated. “Yes—it is the same pattern.”
“What do you mean by that?”
Poirot closed his eyes.
“That postcard lacks only one thing, a fingerprint dipped in blood.”
I looked at him doubtfully.
“What do you really think of this business?”
“It grows much clearer—as usual, the murderer cannot let well alone.”
“But who’s the murderer?”
Poirot craftily did not reply to that.
“Whilst you are away, you permit that I make a few researches?”
“Such as?”
“Tomorrow I shall instruct Miss Lemon to write a letter to an old lawyer friend of mine, Mr. Enderby. I shall ask her to consult the marriage records at Somerset House. She will also send for me a certain overseas cable.”
“I’m not sure that’s fair,” I objected. “You’re not just sitting and thinking.”
“That is exactly what I am doing! What Miss Lemon is to do, is to verify for me the answers that I have already arrived at. I ask not for information, but for confirmation.”
“I don’t believe you know a thing, Poirot! This is all bluff. Why, nobody knows yet who the dead man is—”
“I know.”
“What’s his name?”
“I have no idea. His name is not important. I know, if you can understand, not who he is but who he is.”
“A blackmailer?”
Poirot closed his eyes.
“A private detective?”
Poirot opened his eyes.
“I say to you a little quotation. As I did last time. And after that I say no more.”
He recited with the utmost solemnity:
“Dilly, dilly, dilly—Come and be killed.”
Twenty-one
Detective Inspector Hardcastle looked at the calendar on his desk. 20th September. Just over ten days. They hadn’t been able to make as much progress as he would have liked because they were held up with that initial difficulty: the identification of a dead body. It had taken longer than he would have thought possible. All the leads seemed to have petered out, failed. The laboratory examination of the clothes had brought in nothing particularly helpful. The clothes themselves had yielded no clues. They were good quality clothes, export quality, not new but well cared for. Dentists had not helped, nor laundries, nor cleaners. The dead man remained a “mystery man!” And yet, Hardcastle felt, he was not really a “mystery man.” There was nothing spectacular or dramatic about him. He was just a man whom nobody had been able to come forward and recognize. That was the pattern of it, he was sure. Hardcastle sighed as he thought of the telephone calls and letters that had necessarily poured in after the publication in the public press of the photograph with the caption below it: DO YOU KNOW THIS MAN? Astonishing the amount of people who thought they did know this man. Daughters who wrote in a hopeful vein of fathers from whom they’d been estranged for years. An old woman of ninety was sure that the photograph in question was her son who had left home thirty years ago. Innumerable wives had been sure that it was a missing husband. Sisters had not been quite so anxious to claim brothers. Sisters, perhaps, were less hopeful thinkers. And, of course, there were vast numbers of people who had seen that very man in Lincolnshire, Newcastle, Devon, London, on a tube, in a bus, lurking on a pier, looking sinister at the corner of a road, trying to hide his face as he came out of the cinema. Hundreds of leads, the more promising of them patiently followed up and not yielding anything.
But today, the inspector felt slightly more hopeful. He looked again at the letter on his desk. Merlina Rival. He didn’t like the Christian name very much. Nobody in their senses, he thought, could christen a child Merlina. No doubt it was a fancy name adopted by the lady herself. But he liked the feel