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Dr Bessner injected the needle. Cornelia said, with quiet competence:
‘It’s all right, Mr Doyle. Miss Bowers is going to stay with her all night…’
A grateful look flashed over Simon’s face. His body relaxed. His eyes closed. Suddenly he jerked them open.
‘Fanthorp?’
‘Yes, Doyle.’
‘The pistol… Ought not to leave it… lying about… The servents will find it in the morning…’
Fanthorp nodded.
‘Quite right. I’ll go and get hold of it now.’
He went out of the cabin and along the deck. Miss Bowers appeared at the door of Jacqueline’s cabin.
‘She’ll be all right now,’ she announced. ‘I’ve given her a morphine injection.’
‘But you’ll stay with her?’
‘Oh, yes. Morphia excites some people. I shall stay all night.’
Fanthorp went on to the lounge.
Some three minutes later there was a tap on Bessner’s cabin door.
‘Dr Bessner?’
‘Yes?’ The stout man appeared.
Fanthorp beckoned him out on the deck.
‘Look here – I can’t find that pistol…’
‘What is that?’
‘The pistol. It dropped out of the girl’s hand. She kicked it away and it went under a settee. It isn’t under that settee now.’
They stared at each other.
‘But who can have taken it?’
Fanthorp shrugged his shoulders.
Bessner said:
‘It is curious, that. But I do not see what we can do about it.’
Puzzled and vaguely alarmed, the two men separated.
Chapter 12
Hercule Poirot was just wiping the lather from his freshly shaved face when there was a quick tap on the door and hard on top of it Colonel Race entered unceremoniously. He closed the door behind him. He said:
‘Your instinct was quite correct. It’s happened.’
Poirot straightened up and asked sharply:
‘What has happened?’
‘Linnet Doyle’s dead – shot through the head last night.’
Poirot was silent for a minute, two memories vividly before him – a girl in a garden at Aswan saying in a hard breathless voice, ‘I’d like to put my dear little pistol against her head and just press the trigger,’ and another more recent memory, the same voice saying: ‘One feels one can’t go on – the kind of day when something breaks’-and that strange momentary flash of appeal in her eyes. What had been the matter with him not to respond to that appeal? He had been blind, deaf, stupid with his need for sleep…
Race went on:
‘I’ve got some slight official standing – they sent for me, put it in my hands. The boat’s due to start in half an hour, but it will be delayed till I give the word. There’s a possibility, of course, that the murderer came from the shore.’
Poirot shook his head.
Race acquiesced in the gesture.
‘I agree. One can pretty well rule that out. Well, man, it’s up to you. This is your show.’
Poirot had been attiring himself with a neat-fingered celerity. He said now:
‘I am at your disposal.’
‘Bessner should be there by now. I sent the steward for him.’
There were four cabins de luxe, with bathrooms, on the boat. Of the two on the port side one was occupied by Dr Bessner, the other by Andrew Pennington. On the starboard side the first was occupied by Miss Van Schuyler, and the one next to it by Linnet Doyle. Her husband’s dressing cabin was next door.
A steward was standing outside the door of Linnet Doyle’s cabin. He opened the door for them and they passed inside. Dr Bessner was bending over the bed. He looked up and grunted as the other two entered.
‘What can you tell us, Doctor, about this business?’ asked Race.
Bessner rubbed his unshaven jaw meditatively.
‘Ach! She was shot – shot at close quarters. See – here just above the ear – that is where the bullet entered. A very little bullet – I should say a.22. The pistol, it was held close against her head – see, there is blackening here, the skin is scorched.’
Again in a sick wave of memory Poirot thought of those words uttered in Aswan.
Bessner went on.
‘She was asleep – there was no struggle – the murderer crept up in the dark and shot her as she lay there.’
‘Ah! non!’ Poirot cried out. His sense of psychology was outraged. Jacqueline de Bellefort creeping into a darkened cabin, pistol in hand – no, it did not ‘fit’, that picture.
Bessner stared at him with his thick lenses.
‘But that is what happened, I tell you.’
‘Yes, yes. I did not mean what you thought. I was not contradicting you.’
Bessner gave a satisfied grunt.
Poirot came up and stood beside him. Linnet Doyle was lying on her side. Her attitude was natural and peaceful. But above the ear was a tiny hole with an incrustation of dried blood round it.
Poirot shook his head sadly. Then his gaze fell on the white painted wall just in front of him and he drew in his breath sharply. Its white neatness was marred by a big wavering letter J scrawled in some brownish-red medium.
Poirot stared at it, then he leaned over the dead girl and very gently picked up her right hand. One finger of it was stained a brownish-red.
‘Non d’un nom d’un nom!’ ejaculated Hercule Poirot.
‘Eh? What is that?’
Dr Bessner looked up.
‘Ach! That.’
Race said:
‘Well, I’m damned. What do you make of that, Poirot?’
Poirot swayed a little on his toes.
‘You ask me what I make of it. Eh bien, it is very simple, is it not? Madame Doyle is dying; she wishes to indicate her murderer, and so she writes with her finger, dipped in her own blood, the initial letter of her murderer’s name. Oh, yes, it is astonishingly simple.’
‘Ach, but-’
Dr Bessner was about to break out, but a peremptory gesture from Race silenced him.
‘So it strikes you that?’ he asked slowly.
Poirot turned round on him, nodding his head.
‘Yes, yes. It is, as I say, of an astonishing simplicity! It is so familiar, is it not? It has been done so often, in the pages of the romance of crime! It is now, indeed, a little vieux jeu! It leads one to suspect that our murderer is – old-fashioned!’
Race drew a long breath.
‘I see,’ he said. ‘I thought at first-’ He stopped.
Poirot said with a very faint smile:
‘That I believed in all the old clichеs of melodrama? But pardon, Dr Bessner, you were about to say-?’
Bessner broke out gutturally:
‘What do I say? Pah! I say it is absurd – it is the nonsense! The poor lady she died instantaneously. To dip her finger in the blood (and as you see, there is hardly any blood) and write the latter J upon the wall. Bah – it is the nonsense – the melodramatic nonsense!’
‘C’est de l’enfantillage,’ agreed Poirot.
‘But it was done with a purpose,’ suggested Race.
‘That – naturally,’ agreed Poirot, and his face was grave.
Race said. ‘What does J stand for?’
Poirot replied promptly:
‘J stands for Jacqueline de Bellefort, a young lady who declared to me less than a week ago that she would like nothing better than to-’ he paused and then deliberately quoted, ‘ “to put my dear little pistol close against her head and then just press with my finger…” ’
‘Gott im Himmel! exclaimed Dr Bessner.
There was a momentary silence. Then Race drew a deep breath and said:
‘Which is just what was done here?’
Bessner nodded.
‘That is so, yes. It was a pistol of very small calibre – as I say, probably a.22. The bullet has got to be extracted, of course, before we can say definitely.’
Race nodded in swift comprehension. Then he said:
‘What about time of death?’
Bessner stroked his jaw again. His finger made a rasping sound.
‘I would not care to be too precise. It is now eight o’clock. I will say, with due regard to the temperature last night, that she has been dead certainly six hours and probably not longer than eight.’
‘That puts it between midnight and two a. m.’
‘That is so.’
There was a pause. Race looked around.
‘What about her husband? I suppose he sleeps in the cabin next door.’
‘At the moment,’ said Dr Bessner, ‘he is asleep in my cabin.’
Both men looked very surprised.
Bessner nodded his head several times.
‘Ach, so. I see you have not been told about that. Mr Doyle was shot last night in the saloon.’
‘Shot? By whom?’
