Death in the Clouds (17 page)

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 retrieve 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.’

‘My attaché case?’ said Norman Gale. He looked amused and puzzled. ‘Why, I don’t even remember now what was in it.’

Poirot smiled at him amiably.

‘Wait a little minute. I will come to that. I am telling you my first ideas.

‘To proceed—I had
four
persons who could have done the crime—from the point of view of
possibility
: the two stewards, Clancy and Gale.

‘I now looked at the case from the
opposite
angle—that of motive—if a
motive
were to coincide with a
possibility
—well, I had my murderer! But alas, I could find nothing of the kind. My friend Japp has accused me of liking to make things difficult. On the contrary, I approached this question of motive with all the simplicity in the world. To whose benefit would it be if Madame Giselle were removed? Clearly to her unknown daughter’s benefit—since that unknown daughter would inherit a fortune. There were also certain persons who were in Madame Giselle’s power, or shall we say—who
might
be in Giselle’s power, for
aught we knew. That, then, was a task of elimination. Of the passengers in the plane I could only be certain of one who was undoubtedly mixed up with Giselle. That one was Lady Horbury.

‘In Lady Horbury’s case the motive was very clear. She had visited Giselle at her house in Paris the night before. She was desperate and she had a friend, a young actor, who might easily have impersonated the American who bought the blowpipe—and might also have bribed the clerk in Universal Airlines to ensure that Giselle travelled by the 12 o’clock service.

‘I had, as it were, a problem in two halves. I did not see how it was
possible
for Lady Horbury to commit the crime; and I could not see for what
motive
the stewards, Mr Clancy, or Mr Gale should want to commit it.

‘Always, in the back of my mind, I considered the problem of Giselle’s unknown daughter and heiress. Were any of my four suspects married—and if so, could one of the wives be this Anne Morisot? If her father was English, the girl might have been brought up in England. Mitchell’s wife I soon dismissed—she was of good old Dorset stock. Davis was courting a girl whose father and mother were alive. Mr Clancy was not married. Mr Gale was obviously head over ears in love with Miss Jane Grey.

‘I may say that I investigated the antecedents of Miss Grey very carefully, having learned from her in
casual conversation that she had been brought up in an orphanage near Dublin. But I soon satisfied myself that Miss Grey was
not
Madame Giselle’s daughter.

‘I made out a table of results—the stewards had neither gained nor lost by Madame Giselle’s death—except that Mitchell was obviously suffering from shock. Mr Clancy was planning a book on the subject by which he hoped to make money. Mr Gale was fast losing his practice. Nothing very helpful there.

‘And yet, at that time,
I was convinced that Mr Gale was the murderer
—there was the empty match-box—the contents of his attaché case. Apparently he
lost
, not gained, by the death of Giselle. But those appearances might be
false
appearances.

‘I determined to cultivate his acquaintance. It is my experience that no one, in the course of conversation, can fail to give themselves away sooner or later…Everyone has an irresistible urge to talk about themselves.

‘I tried to gain Mr Gale’s confidence. I pretended to confide in him, and I even enlisted his help. I persuaded him to aid me in the fake blackmailing of Lady Horbury. And it was then that he made his first mistake.

‘I had suggested a slight disguise. He arrived to play his part with a ridiculous and impossible outfit! The whole thing was a farce. No one, I felt sure, could play
a part as
badly
as he was proposing to play one. What then was the reason for this?
Because his knowledge of his own guilt
made him chary of showing himself to be a good actor. When, however, I had adjusted his ridiculous makeup, his artistic skill showed itself. He played his part perfectly and Lady Horbury did not recognize him. I was convinced then that he could have disguised himself as an American in Paris and could also have played the necessary part in the
Prometheus
.