IT WAS Miss Lemon, Poirot’s efficient secretary, who took the telephone call.
Laying aside her shorthand notebook, she raised the receiver and said without emphasis, ‘Trafalgar 8137.’
Hercule Poirot leaned back in his upright chair and closed his eyes. His fingers beat a meditative soft tattoo on the edge of the table. In his head he continued to compose the polished period of the letter he had been dictating.
Placing her hand over the receiver, Miss Lemon asked in a low voice, ‘Will you accept a personal call from Lapton, Devon?’
Poirot frowned. The place meant nothing to him.
‘The name of the caller?’ he demanded cautiously.
Miss Lemon spoke into the mouthpiece.
‘Air-raid?’ she asked doubtingly. ‘Oh, yes – what was the last name again?’
Once more she turned to Hercule Poirot.
‘Mrs. Ariadne Oliver.’
Hercule Poirot’s eyebrows shot up. A memory rose up in his mind: windswept grey hair … an eagle profile …
He rose and replaced Miss Lemon at the telephone.
‘Hercule Poirot speaks,’ he announced grandiloquently.
‘Is that Mr. Hercules Porrot speaking personally?’ the suspicious voice of the telephone operator demanded.
Poirot assured her that that was the case.
‘You’re through to Mr. Porrot,’ said the voice.
Its thin reedy accents were replaced by a magnificent booming contralto which caused Poirot hastily to shift the receiver a couple of inches further from his ear.
‘Mr. Poirot, is that really you?’ demanded Mrs. Oliver.
‘Myself in person, Madame.’
‘This is Mrs. Oliver. I don’t know if you’ll remember me –’
‘But of course I remember you, Madame. Who could forget you?’
‘Well, people do sometimes,’ said Mrs. Oliver. ‘Quite often, in fact. I don’t think that I’ve got a very distinctive personality. Or perhaps it’s because I’m always doing different things to my hair. But all that’s neither here nor there. I hope I’m not interrupting you when you’re frightfully busy?’
‘No, no, you do not derange me in the least.’
‘Good gracious – I’m sure I don’t want to drive you out of your mind. The fact is, I need you.’
‘Need me?’
‘Yes, at once. Can you take an aeroplane?’
‘I do not take aeroplanes. They make me sick.’ ‘They do me, too. Anyway, I don’t suppose it would be any quicker than the train really, because I think the only airport near here is Exeter which is miles away. So come by train. Twelve o’clock from Paddington. You get out at Lapton to Nassecombe. You can do it nicely. You’ve got three quarters of an hour if my watch is right – though it isn’t usually.’
‘But where are you, Madame? What is all this about?’
‘Greenshore House, Lapton. A car or taxi will meet you at the station at Lapton.’
‘But why do you need me? What is all this about?’ Poirot repeated frantically.
‘Telephones are in such awkward places,’ said Mrs. Oliver. ‘This one’s in the hall … People passing through and talking … I can’t really hear. But I’m expecting you. Everybody will be so thrilled. Good bye.’
There was a sharp click as the receiver was replaced. The line hummed gently.
With a baffled air of bewilderment, Poirot put back the receiver and murmured something under his breath. Miss Lemon sat with her pencil poised, incurious. She repeated in muted tones the final phrase of dictation before the interruption.
‘– allow me to assure you, my dear sir, that the hypothesis you have advanced –’
Poirot waved aside the advancement of the hypothesis.
‘That was Mrs. Oliver,’ he said. ‘Ariadne Oliver, the detective novelist. You may have read –’ But he stopped, remembering that Miss Lemon only read improving books and regarded such frivolities as fictional crime with contempt. ‘She wants me to go down to Devonshire today, at once, in –’ he glanced at the clock ‘–thirty-five minutes.’
Miss Lemon raised disapproving eyebrows.
‘That will be running it rather fine,’ she said. ‘For what reason?’
‘You may well ask! She did not tell me.’
‘How very peculiar. Why not?’
‘Because,’ said Hercule Poirot thoughtfully, ‘she was afraid of being overheard. Yes, she made that quite clear.’
‘Well, really,’ said Miss Lemon, bristling in her employer’s defence. ‘The things people expect! Fancy thinking that you’d go rushing off on some wild goose chase like that! An important man like you! I have always noticed that these artists and writers are very unbalanced – no sense of proportion. Shall I telephone through a telegram: Regret unable leave London?’
Her hand went out to the telephone. Poirot’s voice arrested the gesture.
‘Du tout!’ he said. ‘On the contrary. Be so kind as to summon a taxi immediately.’ He raised his voice. ‘Georges! A few necessities of toilet in my small valise. And quickly, very quickly, I have a train to catch.’
THE TRAIN, having done one hundred and eighty-odd miles of its two hundred and twelve miles journey at top speed, puffed gently and apologetically through the last thirty and drew into Lapton station. Only one person alighted, Hercule Poirot. He negotiated with care a yawning gap between the step of the train and the platform and looked round him. At the far end of the train a porter was busy inside a luggage compartment. Poirot picked up his valise and walked back along the platform to the exit. He gave up his ticket and walked out through the booking office.
A large Humber saloon was drawn up outside and a chauffeur in uniform came forward.
‘Mr. Hercule Poirot?’ he inquired respectfully.
He took Poirot’s case from him and opened the door of the car for him. They drove away from the station, over the railway bridge and down a country road which presently disclosed a very beautiful river view.
‘The Dart, sir,’ said the chauffeur.
‘Magnifique!’ said Poirot obligingly.
The road was a long straggling country lane running between green hedges, dipping down and then up. On the upward slope two girls in shorts with bright scarves over their heads and carrying heavy rucksacks on their backs were toiling slowly upwards.
‘There’s a Youth Hostel just above us, sir,’ explained the chauffeur, who had clearly constituted himself Poirot’s guide to Devon … ‘Upper Greenshore, they call it. Come for a couple of nights at a time, they do, and very busy they are there just now. Forty or fifty a night.’
‘Ah, yes,’ said Poirot. He was reflecting, and not for the first time, that seen from the back, shorts were becoming to very few of the female sex.