Free Curtain: Poirot's Last Case by Agatha Christie Page A

were someone else whom I could trust, but I suppose I shall have to put up with you and your absurd ideas of fair play. Since you cannot use your grey cells as you do not possess them, at any rate use your eyes, your ears and your nose if need be in so far as the dictates of honour allow.’
    II
    It was on the following day that I ventured to broach an idea which had come into my mind more than once. I did so a little dubiously, for one never knows how Poirot may react!
    I said: ‘I’ve been thinking, Poirot, I know I’m not much of a fellow. You’ve said I’m stupid – well, in a way it’s true. And I’m only half the man I was. Since Cinders’s death –’
    I stopped. Poirot made a gruff noise indicative of sympathy.
    I went on: ‘But there is a man here who could help us – just the kind of man we need. Brains, imagination, resource – used to taking decisions and a man of wide experience. I’m talking of Boyd Carrington. He’s the man we want, Poirot. Take him into your confidence. Put the whole thing before him.’
    Poirot opened his eyes and said with immense decision: ‘Certainly not.’
    ‘But why not? You can’t deny that he’s clever – a good deal cleverer than I am.’
    ‘THAT,’ said Poirot with biting sarcasm, ‘would be easy. But dismiss the idea from your mind, Hastings. We take no one into our confidence. That is understood – hein ? You comprehend, I forbid you to speak of this matter.’
    ‘All right, if you say so, but really Boyd Carrington –’
    ‘Ah, ta ta! Boyd Carrington. Why are you so obsessed with Boyd Carrington? What is he, after all? A big man who is pompous and pleased with himself because people have called him “Your Excellency”. A man with – yes, a certain amount of tact and charm of manner. But he is not so wonderful, your Boyd Carrington. He repeats himself, he tells the same story twice – and what is more, his memory is so bad that he tells back to you the story that you have told to him! A man of outstanding ability? Not at all. An old bore, a windbag – enfin – the stuffed shirt!’
    ‘Oh,’ I said as enlightenment came to me.
    It was quite true that Boyd Carrington’s memory was not good. And he had actually been guilty of a gaffe which I now saw had annoyed Poirot a good deal. Poirot had told him a story of his police days in Belgium, and only a couple of days afterwards, when several of us were assembled in the garden, Boyd Carrington had in bland forgetfulness told the same story back again to Poirot, prefacing it with the remark: ‘I remember the Chef de la Sû reté in Paris telling me . . .’
    I now perceived that this had rankled! Tactfully, I said no more, and withdrew.
    III
    I wandered downstairs and out into the garden. There was no one about and I strolled through a grove of trees and up to a grassy knoll which was surmounted by a somewhat earwiggy summer-house in an advanced stage of decrepitude. Here I sat down, lit my pipe, and settled to think things out.
    Who was there at Styles who had a fairly definite motive for murdering somebody else – or who might be made out to have one?
    Putting aside the somewhat obvious case of Colonel Luttrell, who, I was afraid, was hardly likely to take a hatchet to his wife in the middle of a rubber, justifiable though that course might be, I could not at first think of anyone.
    The trouble was that I did not really know enough about these people. Norton, for instance, and Miss Cole? What were the usual motives for murder? Money? Boyd Carrington was, I fancied, the only rich man of the party. If he died, who would inherit that money? Anyone at present in the house? I hardly thought so, but it was a point that might bear enquiry. He might, for instance, have left his money to research, making Franklin a trustee. That, with the doctor’s rather injudicious remarks on the subject of eliminating eighty per cent of the human race, might make out a fairly damning case against the red-haired doctor. Or