Death in the Clouds

by Agatha Christie

  He rose.

  ‘What now, my friend?’ asked Fournier.

  ‘Again the telephone,’ said Poirot.

  ‘The transatlantic to Quebec?’

  ‘This time it is merely a call to London.’

  ‘To Scotland Yard?’

  ‘No, to Lord Horbury’s house in Grosvenor Square. If only I have the good fortune to find Lady Horbury at home.’

  ‘Be careful, my friend. If any suspicion gets round to Anne Morisot that we have been making inquiries about her it would not suit our affairs. Above all, we must not put her upon her guard.’

  ‘Have no fears. I will be discreet. I ask only one little question—a question of a most harmless nature.’ He smiled. ‘You shall come with me if you like.’

  ‘No, no.’

  ‘But yes. I insist.’

  The two men went off, leaving Jane in the lounge.

  It took some little time to put the call through; but Poirot’s luck was in. Lady Horbury was lunching at home.

  ‘Good. Will you tell Lady Horbury that it is M. Hercule Poirot speaking from Paris.’ There was a pause. ‘That is you, Lady Horbury? No, no, all is well. I assure you all is well. It is not that matter at all. I want you to answer me a question. Yes…When you go from Paris to England by air does your maid usually go with you, or does she go by train? By train…And so on that particular occasion…I see…You are sure? Ah, she has left you. I see. She left you very suddenly at a moment’s notice. Mais oui, base ingratitude. It is too true. A most ungrateful class! Yes, yes, exactly. No, no, you need not worry. Au revoir. Thank you.’

  He replaced the receiver and turned to Fournier, his eyes green and shining.

  ‘Listen, my friend, Lady Horbury’s maid usually travelled by train and boat. On the occasion of Giselle’s murder Lady Horbury decided at the last moment that Madeleine had better go by air, too.’

  He took the Frenchman by the arm.

  ‘Quick, my friend,’ he said. ‘We must go to her hotel. If my little idea is correct—and I think it is—there is no time to be lost.’

  Fournier stared at him. But before he could frame a question Poirot had turned away and was heading for the revolving doors leading out of the hotel.

  Fournier hastened after him.

  ‘But I do not understand. What is all this?’

  The commissionaire was holding open the door of a taxi. Poirot jumped in and gave the address of Anne Morisot’s hotel.

  ‘And drive quickly, but quickly!’

  Fournier jumped in after him.

  ‘What fly is this that has bitten you? Why this mad rush—this haste?’

  ‘Because, my friend, if, as I say, my little idea is correct—Anne Morisot is in imminent danger.’

  ‘You think so?’

  Fournier could not help a sceptical tone creeping into his voice.

  ‘I am afraid,’ said Poirot. ‘Afraid. Bon Dieu—how this taxi crawls!’

  The taxi at the moment was doing a good forty miles an hour and cutting in and out of traffic with a miraculous immunity due to the excellent eye of the driver.

  ‘It crawls to such an extent that we shall have an accident in a minute,’ said Fournier drily. ‘And Mademoiselle Grey, we have left her planted there awaiting our return from the telephone, and instead we leave the hotel without a word. It is not very polite, that!’

  ‘Politeness or impoliteness—what does it matter in an affair of life and death?’

  ‘Life or death?’ Fournier shrugged his shoulders.

  He thought to himself:

  ‘It is all very well, but this obstinate madman may endanger the whole business. Once the girl knows that we are on her track—’

  He said in a persuasive voice:

  ‘See now, M. Poirot, be reasonable. We must go carefully.’

  ‘You do not understand,’ said Poirot. ‘I am afraid—afraid—’

  The taxi drew up with a jerk at the quiet hotel where Anne Morisot was staying.

  Poirot sprang out and nearly collided with a young man just leaving the hotel.

  Poirot stopped dead for a moment, looking after him.

  ‘Another face that I know—but where—? Ah, I remember—it is the actor Raymond Barraclough.’

  As he stepped forward to enter the hotel, Fournier placed a restraining hand on his arm.

  ‘M. Poirot, I have the utmost respect, the utmost admiration for your methods—but I feel very strongly that no precipitate action must be taken. I am responsible here in France for the conduct of this case…’

  Poirot interrupted him:

  ‘I comprehend your anxiety; but do not fear any “precipitate action” on my part. Let us make inquiries at the desk. If Madame Richards is here and all is well—then no harm is done—and we can discuss together our future action. You do not object to that?’

  ‘No, no, of course not.’

  ‘Good.’

  Poirot passed through the revolving door and went up to the reception desk. Fournier followed him.

  ‘You have a Mrs Richards staying here, I believe,’ said Poirot.

  ‘No, Monsieur. She was staying here, but she left today.’

  ‘She has left?’ demanded Fournier.

  ‘Yes, Monsieur.’

  ‘When did she leave?’

  The clerk glanced up at the clock.

  ‘A little over half an hour ago.’

  ‘Was her departure unexpected? Where has she gone?’

  The clerk stiffened at the questions and was disposed to refuse to answer; but when Fournier’s credentials were produced the clerk changed his tone and was eager to give any assistance in his power.

  No, the lady had not left an address. He thought her departure was the result of a sudden change of plans. She had formerly said she was making a stay of about a week.

  More questions. The concierge was summoned, the luggage porters, the lift boys.

  According to the concierge a gentleman had called to see the lady. He had come while she was out, but had awaited her return, and they had lunched together. What kind of gentleman? An American gentleman—very American. She had seemed surprised to see him. After lunch the lady gave orders for her luggage to be brought down and put in a taxi.

  Where had she driven to? She had driven to the Gare du Nord—at least that is the order she had given to the taximan. Did the American gentleman go with her? No, she had gone alone.

  ‘The Gare du Nord,’ said Fournier. ‘That means England on the face of it. The two o’clock service. But it may be a blind. We must telephone to Boulogne and also try and get hold of that taxi.’

  It was as though Poirot’s fears had communicated themselves to Fournier.

  The Frenchman’s face was anxious.

  Rapidly and efficiently he set the machinery of the law in motion.

  It was five o’clock when Jane, sitting in the lounge of the hotel with a book, looked up to see Poirot coming towards her.

  She opened her mouth reproachfully, but the words remained unspoken. Something in his face stopped her.

  ‘What was it?’ she said. ‘Has anything happened?’

  Poirot took both her hands in his.

  ‘Life is very terrible, Mademoiselle,’ he said.

  Something in his tone made Jane feel frightened.

  ‘What is it?’ she said again.

  Poirot said slowly:

  ‘When the boat train reached Boulogne they found a woman in a first-class carriage—dead.’

  The colour ebbed from Jane’s face.

  ‘Anne Morisot?’

  ‘Anne Morisot. In her hand was a little blue glass bottle which had contained hydrocyanic acid.’

  ‘Oh!’ said Jane. ‘Suicide?’

  Poirot did not answer for a moment or two. Then he said, with the air of one who chooses his words carefully:

  ‘Yes, the police think it was suicide.’

  ‘And you?’

  Poirot slowly spread out his hands in an expressive gesture.

  ‘W
hat else—is there to think?’

  ‘She killed herself—why? Because of remorse—or because she was afraid of being found out?’

  Poirot shook his head.

  ‘Life can be very terrible,’ he said. ‘One needs much courage.’

  ‘To kill oneself? Yes, I suppose one does.’

  ‘Also to live,’ said Poirot, ‘one needs courage.’

  Chapter 26

  After Dinner Speech

  The next day Poirot left Paris. Jane stayed behind with a list of duties to perform. Most of these seemed singularly meaningless to her, but she carried them out to the best of her powers. She saw Jean Dupont twice. He mentioned the expedition which she was to join, and Jane did not dare to undeceive him without orders from Poirot, so she hedged as best she could and turned the conversation to other matters.

  Five days later she was recalled to England by a telegram.

  Norman met her at Victoria and they discussed recent events.

  Very little publicity had been given to the suicide. There had been a paragraph in the papers stating that a Canadian lady, a Mrs Richards, had committed suicide in the Paris-Boulogne express, but that was all. There had been no mention of any connexion with the aeroplane murder.

  Both Norman and Jane were inclined to be jubilant. Their troubles, they hoped, were at an end. Norman was not so sanguine as Jane.

  ‘They may suspect her of doing her mother in, but now that she’s taken this way out they probably won’t bother to go on with the case; and unless it is proved publicly I don’t see what good it is going to be to all of us poor devils. From the point of view of the public we shall remain under suspicion just as much as ever!’

  He said as much to Poirot, whom he met a few days later in Piccadilly.

  Poirot smiled.

  ‘You are like all the rest. You think I am an old man who accomplishes nothing! Listen, you shall come tonight to dine with me. Japp is coming, and also our friend Mr Clancy. I have some things to say that may be interesting.’

  The dinner passed off pleasantly. Japp was patronizing and good humoured, Norman was interested, and little Mr Clancy was nearly as thrilled as when he had recognized the fatal thorn.

  It seemed clear that Poirot was not above trying to impress the little author.

  After dinner, when coffee had been drunk, Poirot cleared his throat in a slightly embarrassed manner, not free from self-importance.

  ‘My friends,’ he said, ‘Mr Clancy here has expressed interest in what he would call “my methods, Watson”. (C’est c¸a, n’est-ce pas?) I propose, if it will not bore you all’—he paused significantly, and Norman and Japp said quickly, ‘No, no,’ and ‘Most interesting’—‘to give you a little résumé of my methods in dealing with this case.’

  He paused and consulted some notes. Japp whispered to Norman:

  ‘Fancies himself, doesn’t he? Conceit’s that little man’s middle name.’

  Poirot looked at him reproachfully and said, ‘Ahem!’

  Three politely interested faces were turned to him, and he began:

  ‘I will start at the beginning, my friends. I will go back to the air liner Prometheus on its ill-fated journey from Paris to Croydon. I am going to tell you my precise ideas and impressions at the time—passing on to how I came to confirm or modify them in the light of future events.

  ‘When, just before we reached Croydon, Dr Bryant was approached by the steward and went with him to examine the body, I accompanied him. I had a feeling that it might—who knows?—be something in my line. I have, perhaps, too professional a point of view where deaths are concerned. They are divided, in my mind, into two classes—deaths which are my affair and deaths which are not my affair—and though the latter class is infinitely more numerous—nevertheless whenever I come in contact with death I am like the dog who lifts his head and sniffs the scent.

  ‘Dr Bryant confirmed the steward’s fear that the woman was dead. As to the cause of death, naturally he could not pronounce on that without a detailed examination. It was at this point that a suggestion was made—by M. Jean Dupont—that death was due to shock following on a wasp sting. In furtherance of this hypothesis, he drew attention to a wasp that he himself had slaughtered shortly before.

  ‘Now that was a perfectly plausible theory—and one quite likely to be accepted. There was the mark on the dead woman’s neck—closely resembling the mark of a sting—and there was the fact that a wasp had been in the plane.

  ‘But at that moment I was fortunate enough to look down and espy what might at first have been taken for the body of yet another wasp. In actuality it was a native thorn with a little teased yellow and black silk on it.

  ‘At this point Mr Clancy came forward and made the statement that it was a thorn shot from a blowpipe after the manner of some native tribe. Later, as you all know, the blowpipe itself was discovered.

  ‘By the time we reached Croydon several ideas were working in my mind. Once I was definitely on the firm ground, my brain began to work once more with its normal brilliance.’

  ‘Go it, M. Poirot,’ said Japp with a grin. ‘Don’t have any false modesty.’

  Poirot threw him a look and went on.

  ‘One idea presented itself very strongly to me (as it did to everyone else), and that was the audacity of a crime being committed in such a manner—and the astonishing fact that nobody noticed its being done!

  ‘There were two other points that interested me. One was the convenient presence of the wasp. The other was the discovery of the blowpipe. As I remarked after the inquest to my friend Japp, why on earth did the murderer not get rid of it by passing it out through the ventilating hole in the window? The thorn itself might be difficult to trace or identify, but a blowpipe which still retained a portion of its price label was a very different matter.

  ‘What was the solution? Obviously that the murderer wanted the blowpipe to be found.

  ‘But why? Only one answer seemed logical. If a poisoned dart and a blowpipe were found, it would naturally be assumed that the murder had been committed by a thorn shot from a blowpipe. Therefore in reality the murder had not been committed that way.

  ‘On the other hand, as medical evidence was to show, the cause of death was undoubtedly the poisoned thorn. I shut my eyes and asked myself—what is the surest and most reliable way of placing a poisoned thorn in the jugular vein? And the answer came immediately: By hand.

  ‘And that immediately threw light on the necessity for the finding of the blowpipe. The blowpipe inevitably conveyed the suggestion of distance. If my theory was right, the person who killed Madame Giselle was a person who went right up to her table and bent over her.

  ‘Was there such a person? Yes, there were two people. The two stewards. Either of them could go up to Madame Giselle, lean towards her, and nobody would notice anything unusual.

  ‘Was there anyone else?

  ‘Well, there was Mr Clancy. He was the only person in the car who had passed immediately by Madame Giselle’s seat—and I remembered that it was he who had first drawn attention to the blowpipe and thorn theory.’

  Mr Clancy sprang to his feet.

  ‘I protest,’ he cried. ‘I protest. This is an outrage.’

  ‘Sit down,’ said Poirot. ‘I have not finished yet. I have to show you all the steps by which I arrived at my conclusion.

  ‘I had now three persons as possible suspects—Mitchell, Davis, and Mr Clancy. None of them at first sight appeared likely murderers, but there was much investigation to be done.

  ‘I next turned my mind to the possibilities of the wasp. It was suggestive, that wasp. To begin with, no one had noticed it until about the time coffee was served. That in itself was rather curious. I constructed a certain theory of the crime. The murderer presented to the world two separate solutions of the tragedy. On the first or simplest, Madame Giselle was stung by a wasp and had succumbed to heart failure. The success of that solution depended on whether or no the murderer was in a position to retrie
ve the thorn. Japp and I agreed that that could be done easily enough—so long as no suspicion of foul play had arisen. There was the particular colouring of silk which I had no doubt was deliberately substituted for the original cerise so as to simulate the appearance of a wasp.

  ‘Our murderer, then, approaches the victim’s table, inserts the thorn and releases the wasp! The poison is so powerful that death would occur almost immediately. If Giselle cried out—it would probably not be heard owing to the noise of the plane. If it was just noticed, well, there was the wasp buzzing about to explain the cry. The poor woman had been stung.

  ‘That, as I say, was plan No. 1. But supposing that, as actually happened, the poisoned thorn was discovered before the murderer could retrieve it. In that case the fat is in the fire. The theory of the natural death is impossible. Instead of getting rid of the blowpipe through the window, it is put in a place where it is bound to be discovered when the plane is searched; and at once it will be assumed that the blowpipe was the instrument of the crime. The proper atmosphere of distance will be created and when the blowpipe is traced it will focus suspicion in a definite and prearranged direction.

  ‘I had now my theory of the crime, and I had three suspects with a barely possible fourth—M. Jean Dupont, who had outlined the “Death by a Wasp Sting theory”, and who was sitting on the gangway so near Giselle that he might just possibly have moved from it without being noticed. On the other hand, I did not really think he would have dared to take such a risk.

  ‘I concentrated on the problem of the wasp. If the murderer had brought the wasp on to the plane and released it at the psychological moment—he must have had something in the nature of a small box in which to keep it.

  ‘Hence my interest in the contents of the passengers’ pockets and hand luggage.

  ‘And here I came up against a totally unexpected development. I found what I was looking for—but as it seemed to me on the wrong person. There was an empty small-sized Bryant & May’s match-box in Mr Norman Gale’s pocket. But by everybody’s evidence Mr Gale had never passed down the gangway of the car. He had only visited the toilet compartment and returned to his own seat.

  ‘Nevertheless, although it seems impossible, there was a method by which Mr Gale could have commited the crime—as the contents of his attaché case showed.’