One, Two, Buckle My Shoe

by Agatha Christie

  “It was a puzzle—a tangle. In desperation I seized on Mrs. Chapman’s address book—a dentist was the only person who could prove definitely who the dead woman was—or was not. By coincidence, Mrs. Chapman’s dentist was Mr. Morley. Morley was dead, but identification was still possible. You know the result. The body was identified in the Coroner’s Court by Mr. Morley’s successor as that of Mrs. Albert Chapman.”

  Blunt was fidgeting with some impatience, but Poirot took no notice. He went on:

  “I was left now with a psychological problem. What sort of a woman was Mabelle Sainsbury Seale? There were two answers to that question. The first was the obvious one borne out by her whole life in India and by the testimony of her personal friends. That depicted her as an earnest, conscientious, slightly stupid woman. Was there another Miss Sainsbury Seale? Apparently there was. There was a woman who had lunched with a well-known foreign agent, who had accosted you in the street and claimed to be a close friend of your wife’s (a statement that was almost certainly untrue), a woman who had left a man’s house very shortly before a murder had been committed, a woman who had visited another woman on the evening when in all probability that other woman had been murdered, and who had since disappeared although she must be aware that the police force of England was looking for her. Were all these actions compatible with the character which her friends gave her? It would seem that they were not. Therefore, if Miss Sainsbury Seale were not the good, amiable creature she seemed, then it would appear that she was quite possibly a cold-blooded murderess or almost certainly an accomplice after the fact.

  “I had one more criterion—my own personal impression. I had talked to Mabelle Sainsbury Seale myself. How had she struck me? And that, M. Blunt, was the most difficult question to answer of all. Everything that she said, her way of talking, her manner, her gestures, all were perfectly in accord with her given character. But they were equally in accord with a clever actress playing a part. And, after all, Mabelle Sainsbury Seale had started life as an actress.

  “I had been much impressed by a conversation I had had with Mr. Barnes of Ealing who had also been a patient at 58, Queen Charlotte Street on that particular day. His theory, expressed very forcibly, was that the deaths of Morley and of Amberiotis were only incidental, so to speak—that the intended victim was you.”

  Alistair Blunt said:

  “Oh, come now—that’s a bit far-fetched.”

  “Is it, M. Blunt? Is it not true that at this moment there are various groups of people to whom it is vital that you should be—removed, shall we say? Shall be no longer capable of exerting your influence?”

  Blunt said:

  “Oh yes, that’s true enough. But why mix up this business of Morley’s death with that?”

  Poirot said:

  “Because there is a certain—how shall I put it?—lavishness about the case—Expense is no object—human life is no object. Yes, there is a recklessness, a lavishness—that points to a big crime!”

  “You don’t think Morley shot himself because of a mistake?”

  “I never thought so—not for a minute. No, Morley was murdered, Amberiotis was murdered, an unrecognizable woman was murdered—Why? For some big stake. Barnes’ theory was that somebody had tried to bribe Morley or his partner to put you out of the way.”

  Alistair Blunt said sharply:

  “Nonsense!”

  “Ah, but is it nonsense? Say one wishes to put someone out of the way. Yes, but that someone is forewarned, forearmed, difficult of access. To kill that person it is necessary to be able to approach him without awakening his suspicions—and where would a man be less suspicious than in a dentist’s chair?”

  “Well, that’s true, I suppose. I never thought of it like that.”

  “It is true. And once I realized it I had my first vague glimmering of the truth.”

  “So you accepted Barnes’ theory? Who is Barnes, by the way?”

  “Barnes was Reilly’s twelve o’clock patient. He is retired from the Home Office and lives in Ealing. An insignificant little man. But you are wrong when you say I accepted his theory. I did not. I only accepted the principle of it.”

  “What do you mean?”

  Hercule Poirot said:

  “All along, all the way through, I have been led astray—sometimes unwittingly, sometimes deliberately and for a purpose. All along it was presented to me, forced upon me, that this was what you might call a public crime. That is to say, that you, M. Blunt, were the focus of it all, in your public character. You, the banker, you the controller of finance, you, the upholder of conservative tradition!

  “But every public character has a private life also. That was my mistake, I forgot the private life. There existed private reasons for killing Morley—Frank Carter’s for instance.

  “There could also exist private reasons for killing you … You had relations who would inherit money when you died. You had people who loved and hated you—as a man—not as a public figure.

  “And so I came to the supreme instance of what I call ‘the forced card.’ The purported attack upon you by Frank Carter. If that attack was genuine—then it was a political crime. But was there any other explanation? There could be. There was a second man in the shrubbery. The man who rushed up and seized Carter. A man who could easily have fired that shot and then tossed the pistol to Carter’s feet so that the latter would almost inevitably pick it up and be found with it in his hand….

  “I considered the problem of Howard Raikes. Raikes had been at Queen Charlotte Street that morning of Morley’s death. Raikes was a bitter enemy of all that you stood for and were. Yes, but Raikes was something more. Raikes was the man who might marry your niece, and with you dead, your niece would inherit a very handsome income, even though you had prudently arranged that she could not touch the principal.

  “Was the whole thing, after all, a private crime—a crime for private gain, for private satisfaction? Why had I thought it a public crime? Because, not once, but many times, that idea had been suggested to me, had been forced upon me like a forced card. …

  “It was then, when that idea occurred to me, that I had my first glimmering of the truth. I was in church at the time and singing a verse of a psalm. It spoke of a snare laid with cords….

  “A snare? Laid for me? Yes, it could be … But in that case who had laid it? There was only one person who could have laid it … And that did not make sense—or did it? Had I been looking at the case upside down? Money no object? Exactly! Reckless disregard of human life? Yes again. For the stakes for which the guilty person was playing were enormous. …

  “But if this new, strange idea of mine were right, it must explain everything. It must explain, for instance, the mystery of the dual nature of Miss Sainsbury Seale. It must solve the riddle of the buckled shoe. And it must answer the question: Where is Miss Sainsbury Seale now?

  “Eh bien—it did all that and more. It showed me that Miss Sainsbury Seale was the beginning and middle and end of the case. No wonder it had seemed to me that there were two Mabelle Sainsbury Seales. There were two Mabelle Sainsbury Seales. There was the good, stupid, amiable woman who was vouched for so confidently by her friends. And there was the other—the woman who was mixed-up with two murders and who told lies and who vanished mysteriously.

  “Remember, the porter at King Leopold Mansions said that Miss Sainsbury Seale had been there once before….

  “In my reconstruction of the case, that first time was the only time. She never left King Leopold Mansions. The other Miss Sainsbury Seale took her place. That other Mabelle Sainsbury Seale, dressed in clothes of the same type and wearing a new pair of shoes with buckles because the others were too large for her, went to the Russell Square Hotel at a busy time of day, packed up the dead woman’s clothes, paid the bill and left. She went to the Glengowrie Court Hotel. None of the real Miss Sainsbury Seale’s friends saw her after that time, remember. She played the part of Mabelle Sainsbury Seale there for over a week. She wore Ma
belle Sainsbury Seale’s clothes, she talked in Mabelle Sainsbury Seale’s voice, but she had to buy a smaller pair of evening shoes, too. And then—she vanished, her last appearance being when she was seen reentering King Leopold Mansions on the evening of the day Morley was killed.”

  “Are you trying to say,” demanded Alistair Blunt, “that it was Mabelle Sainsbury Seale’s dead body in that flat, after all.”

  “Of course it was! It was a very clever double bluff—the smashed face was meant to raise a question of the woman’s identity!”

  “But the dental evidence?”

  “Ah! Now we come to it. It was not the dentist himself who gave evidence. Morley was dead. He couldn’t give evidence as to his own work. He would have known who the dead woman was. It was the charts that were put in as evidence—and the charts were faked. Both women were his patients, remember. All that had to be done was to relabel the charts, exchanging the names.”

  Hercule Poirot added:

  “And now you see what I meant when you asked me if the woman was dead and I replied, ‘That depends.’ For when you say ‘Miss Sainsbury Seale’—which woman do you mean? The woman who disappeared from the Glengowrie Court Hotel or the real Mabelle Sainsbury Seale.”

  Alistair Blunt said:

  “I know, M. Poirot, that you have a great reputation. Therefore I accept that you must have some grounds for this extraordinary assumption—for it is an assumption, nothing more. But all I can see is the fantastic improbability of the whole thing. You are saying, are you not, that Mabelle Sainsbury Seale was deliberately murdered and that Morley was also murdered to prevent his identifying her dead body. But why? That’s what I want to know. Here’s this woman—a perfectly harmless, middle-aged woman—with plenty of friends and apparently no enemies. Why on earth all this elaborate plot to get rid of her?”

  “Why? Yes, that is the question. Why? As you say, Mabelle Sainsbury Seale was a perfectly harmless creature who wouldn’t hurt a fly! Why, then, was she deliberately and brutally murdered? Well, I will tell you what I think.”

  “Yes?”

  Hercule Poirot leaned forward. He said:

  “It is my belief that Mabelle Sainsbury Seale was murdered because she happened to have too good a memory for faces.”

  “What do you mean?”

  Hercule Poirot said:

  “We have separated the dual personality. There is the harmless lady from India. But there is one incident that falls between the two roles. Which Miss Sainsbury Seale was it who spoke to you on the doorstep of Mr. Morley’s house? She claimed, you will remember, to be ‘a great friend of your wife’s.’ Now that claim was adjudged by her friends and by the light of ordinary probability to be untrue. So we can say: ‘That was a lie. The real Miss Sainsbury Seale does not tell lies.’ So it was a lie uttered by the impostor for a purpose of her own.”

  Alistair Blunt nodded.

  “Yes, that reasoning is quite clear. Though I still don’t know what the purpose was.”

  Poirot said:

  “Ah, pardon—but let us first look at it the other way round. It was the real Miss Sainsbury Seale. She does not tell lies. So the story must be true.”

  “I suppose you can look at it that way—but it seems very unlikely—”

  “Of course it is unlikely! But taking that second hypothesis as fact—the story is true. Therefore Miss Sainsbury Seale did know your wife. She knew her well. Therefore—your wife must have been the type of person Miss Sainsbury Seale would have known well. Someone in her own station of life. An Anglo-Indian—a missionary—or, to go back farther still—an actress—Therefore—not Rebecca Arnholt!

  “Now, M. Blunt, do you see what I meant when I talked of a private and a public life? You are the great banker. But you are also a man who married a rich wife. And before you married her you were only a junior partner in the firm—not very long down from Oxford.

  “You comprehend—I began to look at the case the right way up. Expense no object? Naturally not—to you. Reckless of human life—that, too, since for a long time you have been virtually a dictator and to a dictator his own life becomes unduly important and those of others unimportant.”

  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 guesswork 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 S
eale were cleverly falsified. You put on a white linen coat, perhaps your wife applied a trace of makeup. But nothing much was needed. It was Amberiotis’ first visit to Morley. He had never met you. And your photograph seldom appears in the papers. Besides, why should he have suspicions? A blackmailer does not fear his dentist. Miss Sainsbury Seale goes down and Alfred shows her out. The buzzer goes and Amberiotis is taken up. He finds the dentist washing his hands behind the door in approved fashion. He is conducted to the chair. He indicates the painful tooth. You talk the accustomed patter. You explain it will be best to freeze the gum. The procaine and adrenalin are there. You inject a big enough dose to kill. And incidentally he will not feel any lack of skill in your dentistry!

  “Completely unsuspicious, Amberiotis leaves. You bring out Morley’s body and arrange it on the floor, dragging it slightly on the carpet now that you have to manage it single-handed. You wipe the pistol and put it in his hand—wipe the door handle so that your prints shall not be the last. The instruments you used have all been passed into the sterilizer. You leave the room, go down the stairs and slip out of the front door at a suitable moment. That is your only moment of danger.

  “It should all have passed off so well! Two people who threatened your safety—both dead. A third person also dead—but that, from your point of view, was unavoidable. And all so easily explained. Morley’s suicide explained by the mistake he had made over Amberiotis. The two deaths cancel out. One of these regrettable accidents.

  “But alas for you, I am on the scene. I have doubts. I make objections. All is not going as easily as you hoped. So there must be a second line of defences. There must be, if necessary, a scapegoat. You have already informed yourself minutely, of Morley’s household. There is this man, Frank Carter, he will do. So your accomplice arranges that he shall be engaged in a mysterious fashion as gardener. If, later, he tells such a ridiculous story no one will believe it. In due course, the body in the fur chest will come to light. At first it will be thought to be that of Miss Sainsbury Seale, then the dental evidence will be taken. Big sensation! It may seem a needless complication, but it was necessary. You do not want the police force of England to be looking for a missing Mrs. Albert Chapman. No, let Mrs. Chapman be dead—and let it be Mabelle Sainsbury Seale for whom the police look. Since they can never find her. Besides, through your influence, you can arrange to have the case dropped.