conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Do you know a plot for a book about Poirot, Mrs, Hastings entitled Poirot's Early Cases?
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: Poirot's Early Cases: Chief Inspector Japp asks Poirot to assist Scotland Yard in the strange events which took place at a recent costumed Victory Ball.\nA group of six people, headed by the young Viscount Cronshaw, attended dressed in the costume of the Commedia dell\'arte.\nLord Cronshaw was Harlequin, his uncle, the honourable Eustace Beltane, was Punchinello and Mrs Mallaby, an American widow, was Punchinella.\nIn the roles of Pierrot and Pierette were Mr and Mrs Christopher Davidson (he being a stage actor) and finally, Miss "Coco" Courtenay, an actress rumoured to be engaged to Lord Cronshaw, was Columbine.\nThe night went badly from the start when it was obvious to the party that Cronshaw and Miss Courtenay were not on speaking terms.\nThe latter was crying and asked Chris Davidson to take her home to her flat in Chelsea.\nWhen they had gone, a friend of Cronshaw\'s spotted Harlequin in a box looking down on the ball and called up to him to join them on the main floor.\nCronshaw left the box to join them but then disappeared.\nHe was found ten minutes later on the floor of the supper room, stabbed through the heart with a table knife, his body strangely stiff.\nCoco Courtenay is found dead in her bed from an overdose of cocaine; at the inquest that followed, it was found that she was addicted to the drug.\nPoirot starts to investigate, finding out to everyone\'s puzzlement that Cronshaw was emphatically opposed to drugs, that Beltane\'s costume had a hump and a ruffle and that a curtained recess exists in the supper room.\nHe arranges a get-together of the people involved at his flat where he puts on a shadowed presentation across a back-lit screen of the six costumes but then reveals that there were actually five.\nUnderneath Pierrot\'s loose garb is that of the slimmer-fitting Harlequin.\nDavidson leaps forward and curses Poirot but is quickly arrested by Japp.\nPoirot reveals that the strength with which the knife was plunged into Cronshaw meant that a man was responsible for the crime.\nThe stiffness of the body meant he had been dead for some time and not killed in the ten-minute interval between being seen in the box and then being found dead on the floor, therefore the figure seen as Harlequin was one of the others.\nIt could not have been Beltane as his costume was too elaborate to change quickly.\nDavidson killed Cronshaw earlier, hid the body in the curtained recess, then took Courtenay home where he fed her an overdose of the drug.\nHe did not stay there as he claimed but returned immediately.\nHis motive was self-preservation as it was he who had been supplying Courtenay with drugs and Cronshaw was on the point of finding out and exposing him.\nPoirot is not interested in investigating some of the cases which appear in the newspapers and which Hastings tries to bring to his attention.\nThese include a bank clerk (Mr.\nDavis) who disappears with fifty thousand pounds of securities, a suicidal man and a missing typist.\nHe is put on the spot though when visited by a Mrs Todd who is determined that he investigate her missing cook.\nChallenged, he decides, with some humour and to avoid an argument, to take the seemingly trivial case.\nEliza Dunn, a middle-aged woman, walked out of her job and the Todd\'s house in Clapham two days ago without working her notice and has not communicated with her employer since, except for sending for her trunk that day.\nInterviewing the maid in the house, Poirot finds out that the trunk was already packed, meaning that Eliza had planned to leave even though her departure was swift.\nThe other occupants of the house are Mr Todd, who works in the city, and their lodger, Mr Simpson, who works in the same bank at which Mr Davis worked.\nStruck by this coincidence as he is, Poirot cannot see a connection between an absconding bank clerk and a missing cook.\nPoirot places advertisements in the newspaper enquiring as to the whereabouts of Eliza and several days later he is successful in locating her when she visits Poirot\'s rooms.\nShe tells him a story of having come into a legacy of a house in Carlisle and an income of three hundred pounds a year, dependent upon her taking up the offer and immediately leaving domestic service.\nThis legacy was communicated to her by a man who approached her in the street as she was returning to the Todd\'s house one night, the man supposedly having come from there to see her.\nThe money came from a friend of her late grandmother who had settled in Australia and married a wealthy settler.\nEliza had immediately taken the train north and a couple of days later received her belongings from Clapham, although wrapped in paper parcels and not in her old trunk, which she supposes had been kept behind by Mrs Todd in a fit of pique.\nPoirot rushes back to Clapham with Hastings and explains matters on the way.\nSimpson knew what his colleague Davis was up to at the bank.\nHe killed the man for the securities and needed an old, inconspicuous trunk in which to hide the body and that meant diverting Eliza out of the way.\nIt was Simpson in disguise who had approached her in the street.\nOn arriving at Clapham, Simpson has already disappeared but is traced to an ocean liner bound for the US.\nThe trunk with Davis\' body inside is located at a Glasgow railway station.\nPoirot views the link between a disappearing cook and a murder to be one of his most interesting cases, and he frames the cheque sent by mr Todd for his consulting fee as a reminder of it.\nPoirot receives a visit from a Mrs Pengelley, a middle-aged woman who is afraid that she is being poisoned by her husband, a dentist.\nShe has been ill after eating but her doctor states that she is suffering from acute gastritis.\nShe and her husband live in Polgarwith, a small market town in Cornwall.\nShe has no proof of the allegation, only that she only suffers when her husband is at home, not when he is away at the weekends and a bottle of weedkiller, supposedly unused, is half-empty.\nThere could be no financial motive to suggest why Mr Pengelley should try to murder his wife but she suspects an affair with his young receptionist.\nAnother resident in the house was her niece, Freda Stanton, but that lady had a row with Mrs Pengelley the week before and left the house after living there for eight years.\nMrs Pengelley is vague as to the cause of the row but states that she has been told by a Mr Radnor to leave Freda to come to her senses.\nRadnor is described as "just a friend" and a "very pleasant young fellow".\nPoirot and Hastings travel to Cornwall the next day and are shocked to find that Mrs Pengelley died half an hour before.\nPoirot interviews the dead woman\'s doctor, who at first denies that anything could be wrong but is then astounded to learn she had gone to London to consult the detective.\nTheir last visit before leaving Cornwall is to Mrs Pengelley\'s niece.\nThey meet Freda Stanton and Jacob Radnor and discover that the couple is engaged, and that the cause of the row between Freda and her aunt was the older woman\'s own infatuation with Radnor, a far younger man.\nThe situation became so bad that Freda had no option but to move out.\nPoirot and Hastings return to London but are able to follow events in the papers as rumour spreads leading to Mrs Pengelley\'s body being exhumed and traces of arsenic found.\nHer widower is arrested and charged with murder.\nAttending the committal hearing, Poirot invites Radnor back to his flat where he produces a written confession for the man to sign.\nHe planned to get rid of both the Pengelleys, one through murder and the other by execution so his new wife, Freda, would inherit their money.\nMrs Pengelley fell for Radnor because he made sure she would, flirting with her while at the same time planting seeds in the woman\'s mind that her husband was trying to poison her.\nPoirot offers him twenty-four hours escape if he signs the confession before he hands it over to the police and dupes the man into thinking that Poirot\'s own flat is being watched.\nRadnor signs and hurries out.\nPoirot confesses to Hastings that he did not have any real evidence of Radnor\'s guilt and that the stunt was his only option to get Mr Pengelley acquitted.\nHe is sure that Scotland Yard will catch up with Radnor, despite the latter\'s twenty-four hours start.\nPoirot is called in to investigate the kidnapping of three-year-old Johnnie Waverly, the son of Marcus Waverly, from his home, Waverly Court in Surrey.\nPrior to the kidnapping, the family received anonymous letters that threatened to take the boy unless twenty-five thousand pounds was paid.\nThe police took little interest until the final letter which stated that the boy would be kidnapped at twelve o\'clock the next day.\nOn that day, mrs Waverly was mildly poisoned and a note was left on mr Waverly\'s pillow that stated, "At Twelve O\'clock".\nHorrified that someone inside the house is involved, mr Waverly sacks all of the staff except Tredwell, his long-time butler, and Miss Collins, his wife\'s trusted secretary-companion.\nAt the appointed time Waverly, his son and Inspector McNeil of Scotland Yard are in a locked room in the house with police posted in the extensive grounds.\nPrecisely at noon the police find a tramp sneaking toward the house.\nHe has cotton wool, chloroform and a post-kidnap note ready to plant.\nWhen Waverly and the Inspector dash outside to see what is happening, the boy is taken by car through a now unguarded gate.\nThey hear the village clock chiming twelve and realise that the main clock in the house had been set forward ten minutes.\nThe tramp claims Tredwell employed him but the butler has an alibi for the time that he was said to meet the tramp: he was in the house with mr Waverly.\nPoirot travels to Waverly Court and is told of the existence of a priest hole.\nIn it he finds the footprint of a small dog in one corner but no one knew of any such creature small enough in the house.\nAfter questioning the child\'s sacked nurse, Tredwell and Miss Collins, Poirot concludes his investigation.\nPoirot confronts mr Waverly.\nPoirot says that Waverly kidnapped his own son to get money from his rich but very parsimonious wife.\nThe poisoning of the wife to incapacitate her, the note on the pillow and the re-setting of the clock all point to an inside job, and only mr Waverly could sack all of the servants to reduce the level of protection around the child.\nTredwell was in on the plan and he did indeed employ the tramp.\nThe footprint of the dog in the priest\'s hole was from a toy kept there to amuse the boy until he could be spirited away afterwards.\nA shamefaced mr Waverly confesses to Poirot and reveals that the child was presently with his former nurse.\nPoirot is called in by Marcus Hardman, a collector of various antique precious objects, to investigate a jewel robbery.\nThe theft occurred from his safe when he was holding a small tea party at his house.\nHe showed his guests his collection of medieval jewels and later discovered that the safe had been rifled and the objects taken.\nFour of his guests had the opportunity to take the items – Mr Johnston, a South African millionaire only just arrived in London; Countess Vera Rossakoff, a refugee from the Russian revolution; Bernard Parker, a young and effeminate agent for Mr Hardman, and Lady Runcorn, a middle-aged society lady whose aunt is a kleptomaniac.\nPoirot examines the scene of the crime and finds a man\'s glove holding the safe open and a cigarette case with the initials "BP".\nHe visits Bernard Parker who states that the glove is his – but vehemently denies owning the cigarette case.\nNevertheless, Poirot finds the twin of the glove in the hallway of Parker\'s house.\nLater that day, Poirot receives a visit from the Countess Rossakoff who is indignant that Poirot is pursuing Parker.\nPreviously suspicious that the Countess may not be a real Russian, Poirot admits that the impressive lady is who she says she is.\nThat evening, Hastings sees Poirot studying a book on Russian grammar.\nThe next day he visits Hardman and tells him who the thief is.\nThe collector is astonished and leaves Poirot to pursue the matter without police involvement.\nPoirot and Hastings visit the Countess and Poirot calmly tells the lady that his taxi is waiting and that he would be obliged if she would give him the jewels.\nShe, equally calmly, does so.\nThey part on good terms, the Countess admitting that Poirot is one of the few men she fears.\nHe in turn is very impressed by her.\nHe tells Hastings that it was the double clue of the glove and the case which made him suspicious.\nOnly one of the clues was genuine and the other a mistake.\nAs the cigarette case was not Parker\'s, that must have been the genuine clue.\nThe case belonged to the Countess whose initials – VR – are ВР in Cyrillic, hence Poirot\'s perusal of the book on Russian grammar.\nThe Oglander family was playing bridge in the drawing room of their house in Streatham last night when the French windows burst open and a woman staggered in, blood on her dress.\nShe managed to say, "Murder.\n" and then collapsed.\nThe family fetched both a doctor and the police who called at the next-door villa to find the body of Henry Reedburn, the theatrical impresario, dead in the library with his skull split open by some unknown weapon.\nThe woman is identified as the famous dancer, Valerie Saintclair.\nPoirot receives a visit from Prince Paul of Maurania, who wants to marry the dancer.\nReedburn was in love with Valerie although his feelings were not reciprocated.\nPrince Paul and Valerie saw a clairvoyant the previous week who turned over the king of clubs in her pack of cards and said a man threatened danger to her.\nThe prince is afraid that Valerie interpreted this to mean Reedburn, and attacked him.\nPoirot and Hastings visit the scene of the crime.\nThe library runs the length of one side of the house.\nAt either end are curtained recesses with French windows, one to the garden and the other to the drive.\nIt was in the recess facing the garden that Reedburn was found.\nThe dead man had a female visitor that night that he let into the house himself but the servants did not see her.\nPoirot sees a marble seat in the recess whose arm-ends are carved in the form of lions\' heads and wonders if they could have caused the wound to Reedburn\'s head.\nThe doctor says there is no blood on the marble.\nThey proceed to the Oglander home, along the garden path.\nIn the drawing room, the table with the cards for the interrupted bridge game is still in place.\nMiss Saintclair is still in the house, ill in bed.\nShe tells them that Reedburn held a secret of hers and threatened her but she did not kill him.\nShe went to his house by prior appointment and was pleading with him when a man dressed like a tramp attacked him from behind the curtained recess.\nShe fled from the house towards the lights of the Oglander house.\nReturning to the drawing room Poirot notices that the king of clubs is missing from the cards on the bridge table.\nThey return to Reedburn\'s house and in the curtained recess that leads to the drive they find a twin of the marble seat, again with lion\'s head arms but this one has a faint bloodstain on it.\nReedburn was killed here and his body dragged to the recess facing the garden.\nPoirot has the missing king of clubs, having taken it from the card box before at the Oglander house.\nHe returns there to assure mrs Oglander that the police will not find out what happened.\nHe returns the playing card to her, telling her it was their only slip-up.\nHe tells Hastings what happened.\nThe bridge game was set up after the event as an alibi for the four members of the family.\nBy mistake one card was left in the box.\nThe son of the family killed Reedburn when he went with Valerie to plead with the blackmailer, presumably when things escalated into violence.\nValerie is the estranged daughter of the Oglander family.\nDespite the breach in the relationship, she turned to them in her moment of need.\nHer story of the tramp will stand and she is free to marry Prince Paul.\nThis is one of the few cases (aside from Murder on the Orient Express) in which Poirot allows a guilty party to avoid punishment, particularly when there is a dead body involved.\nIn the latter days of the First World War, Poirot and Hastings dine at the Carlton where they meet Captain Vincent Lemesurier and his uncle Hugo, a chemist.\nCousin Roger rushes in with the news that Vincent\'s father has had a serious fall from a horse and is not expected to last the night.\nVincent and Uncle Hugo leave.\nVincent, the eldest and only of three sons to survive the war, was not close with his father.\nRoger tells them that Vincent\'s strong reaction to the bad news is partly due to the Lemesurier curse.\nNo first born son has lived to inherit the family estate since the Middle Ages.\nThis family curse arose from an ancestor who erroneously suspected his wife of being unfaithful and his young son of not being his own.\nIn a fit of rage he killed them both.\nHis wife cursed him before she died that no first-born son of his descendants should ever inherit.\nInstead it passed to nephews, younger brothers or younger sons.\nThe next day, Poirot and Hastings learn that Vincent died, after he jumped from the moving train on the way home.\nHis death is put down to a mental breakdown, from the bad news and shell-shock.\nOver the next few years all of the inheritors of the estate die, under causes as varied as gun accident and insect sting, leaving Hugo, youngest of five brothers, to inherit the family estate.\nPoirot receives a visit from Hugo\'s young wife.\nShe is an American who does not believe in the curse.\nShe worries about the elder of her two young sons, Ronald, who is eight.\nHe has had three narrow escapes from death in the past few months.\nOne was a fall when the boy was climbing down the ivy on the wall of their home.\nShe saw for herself that the stem had been cut.\nIn the house are the family, the children\'s governess, Hugo\'s secretary, John Gardiner, and frequent visitor, cousin Major Roger Lemesurier, a favorite with the boys.\nPoirot and Hastings travel to the home in Northumberland and renew their acquaintance with Hugo.\nHe believes his first born son is doomed by the curse, while his second son will inherit.\nHugo will die soon as he has an incurable disease, which news he shares with Poirot and Hastings.\nYoung Ronald is stung by a bee, by his father\'s report, and Poirot is immediately concerned.\nHe and Hastings keep vigil all night in Ronald\'s room.\nA figure creeps into the darkened bedroom and is about to poison the young boy by injection when Poirot and Hastings overpower him.\nIt is Hugo, the boy\'s father.\nHe is responsible for the deaths until he gained the estate, and is now a madman.\nHugo is placed in an asylum, where he dies.\nMrs Lemesurier later marries John Gardiner, and the curse, if it existed, is broken.\nPoirot informs Hastings that he has no risky investments except for fourteen thousand shares in Burma Mines Ltd, which were given to him for services rendered.\nHe relates the story to Hastings.\nThe lead-silver mines were originally worked only for the silver by the Chinese in the fifteenth century.\nThe lead remained, of value now.\nThe mine\'s location was lost; the only clue to its location is in old papers in the hands of a Chinese family.\nWu Ling agreed to negotiate a sale of the papers and travelled to England to complete the transaction.\nmr Pearson was to meet Wu Ling at the train in Southampton but the train was delayed, so Pearson left.\nHe thought Wu Ling made his own way to London where he booked into the Hotel Russell Square and telephoned the company to say that he would see them the next day.\nHe failed to appear at the meeting and the hotel was contacted.\nThey said Wu Ling had gone out earlier with a friend.\nHe still failed to appear at the offices throughout the day.\nThe police were contacted and the next evening Wu Ling\'s body was found floating in the Thames.\nPoirot investigates people who shared the voyage to England with Wu Ling.\nHe finds that one of them, a young bank clerk called Charles Lester, was the man who called for Wu Ling at his hotel on the morning of the disappearance.\nMr Lester told a story of having been asked by Wu Ling to call for him at 10:30 am.\nInstead his servant appeared and asked him to accompany him to meet Wu Ling.\nTheir taxi took them to Limehouse where Lester started to get nervous and got out of the taxi before they reached their destination and that was the end of his connection with the affair.\nHowever, Wu Ling had no servant.\nThe taxi driver who took both men to a known opium den said Lester alone emerged looking ill half an hour later.\nLester is arrested but the papers about the mine are not found.\nPearson and Poirot go to Limehouse and investigate the opium den.\nThey overhear a conversation between some of the Chinese about the death of Wu Ling and that Lester certainly had the papers.\nPoirot and Pearson leave the den quietly.\nPoirot quickly finds the papers – Pearson has them.\nHe had indeed met Wu Ling in Southampton (there was only his own word that he failed to meet the visitor) and taken him direct to Limehouse where Wu Ling was killed.\nOne of the opium dealers had already been put into the Hotel Russell Square to impersonate Wu Ling.\nHearing of Lester\'s invitation to visit the hotel from Wu Ling himself, Pearson set the young man up to take the blame for the murder.\nLester entered the opium den and was drugged.\nHaving only a hazy recollection and losing his nerve, he denied entering the den.\nPearson\'s insistence in taking Poirot to Limehouse was an elaborate charade to divert the detective\'s suspicions but it had the opposite effect.\nPearson is arrested and Poirot becomes a shareholder in a Burmese mine.\nA young naval officer on the Plymouth express finds the dead body of a woman underneath a seat in his carriage.\nThe woman is identified as the Honourable Mrs Rupert Carrington, née Flossie Halliday, the daughter of Ebenezer Halliday, an American steel magnate who asks Poirot to take the case on.\nPrior to her marriage she was caught up with an adventurer called Count de la Rochefour but her father took her back to America.\nShe later married Rupert Carrington who proved an unsuitable husband, being a gambler deep in debt.\nThey were about to announce a legal separation.\nHer will leaves everything to her estranged husband who was away from town at the time of the tragedy.\nPoirot and Hastings call on Mr Halliday in Park Lane.\nHis daughter was going to a house party in the West Country.\nMrs Carrington was carrying her jewels to wear at the house party, jewels valued at almost one hundred thousand pounds.\nShe travelled by train from Paddington and changed at Bristol for the train to Plymouth.\nHer maid travelled with her in a third-class carriage.\nAt Bristol the maid, Jane Mason, received a surprise: Mrs Carrington told her to wait at the station for a few hours.\nShe would return for a later Plymouth train.\nWhen she was being given these instructions, Mason could see the back of a tall man in Mrs Carrington\'s compartment.\nAfter waiting at Bristol for most of the day, Mason checked into a hotel for the night and read of the murder in the next day\'s paper.\nMrs Carrington had been chloroformed and then stabbed and the jewels are missing.\nMason comes to confirm the facts of her part of the story.\nShe describes what Mrs Carrington was wearing at the time.\nPoirot pushes Halliday to tell him what he is holding back.\nHalliday produces a note found in his daughter\'s pocket from the Count de la Rochefour.\nIt appears that their romance has been restarted.\nInspector Japp makes enquiries into the whereabouts of Rupert Carrington and the Count de la Rochefour at the time of the murder, but nothing substantial comes to light.\nWhen Japp next visits, Poirot guesses that the knife used to kill Mrs Carrington has been found by the side of the line between Weston (the first stop after Bristol on the Plymouth line) and Taunton (the next stop after that) and that a paper boy who spoke to Mrs Carrington has been interviewed.\nJapp confirms that this is exactly what has happened.\nJapp tells Poirot something he does not know – that one of the jewels has been pawned by a known thief called Red Narky, a short man who usually works with a woman called Gracie Kidd.\nPoirot and Hastings return to Halliday\'s house, to a room on the top floor.\nRummaging through Mason\'s trunk Poirot finds clothes like the ones worn by Mrs Carrington when she was murdered.\nHalliday joins them followed by the angry Mason, whom Poirot introduces as Gracie Kidd.\nShe and Red Narky probably murdered Mrs Carrington before Bristol.\nThe story about Mrs Carrington directing her maid to wait at Bristol is false.\nThe knife was thrown off the train before Taunton to support that story.\nGracie rode the train past Bristol dressed in similar clothing to the now-dead woman and bought two items from a newsboy, drawing attention to herself in many ways.\nGracie Kidd provided herself with an alibi by making the murder by Red Narky appear to have taken place later than it did.\nThis short story was expanded five years later into the full-length novel The Mystery of the Blue Train, with a very similar plot, but names and details changed.\nHastings mentions his belief that Poirot had never known failure in his professional career.\nPoirot said that was not true and relates the one occasion when he failed to solve a crime, years earlier when he was a police detective in Brussels.\nPaul Déroulard, a French Deputy who was living in Brussels, had died from heart failure.\nAt a time of strife over the separation of church and state Déroulard was a key player as an anti-Catholic and a potential minister.\nHe lived in a Brussels home that his late wife left him.\nHe had a reputation as a ladies\' man.\nMademoiselle Virginie Mesnard, a cousin of his late wife, asks Poirot to investigate.\nShe is convinced that his death three days earlier was not natural.\nDéroulard\'s household consists of four servants, his aged and infirm aristocratic mother, herself, and on that night, two visitors: de Saint Alard, a neighbour from France, and John Wilson, an English friend.\nVirginie introduces Poirot into the household and he begins interviewing the servants about the meal served on the night of Déroulard\'s death.\nHe suspects poison, but all ate from common serving dishes.\nIn the study where the death occurred, Poirot spots an open but full and untouched box of chocolates.\nDéroulard ate some chocolates every night after dinner, finishing a box on the night of his death.\nThe servant retrieves the empty box.\nPoirot notices that the lids of the two boxes, one blue and one pink, are switched.\nAs only Déroulard ate the chocolates, the new box should not have been opened yet.\nHis doctor says Saint Alard and Déroulard had argued strenuously that evening, justifying the cause of death.\nPoirot finds the local chemist who made eye drops for the aged Madame Déroulard, for her cataracts.\nHe finds the "English chemist" who had made up the prescription of trinitrin for John Wilson, small tablets in chocolate to lower blood pressure.\nToo many tablets at once would prove fatal.\nThis development bothers Poirot.\nWilson had the opportunity but not the motive whereas the position is reversed for de Saint Alard.\nVirginie gives Poirot the address of Saint Alard in the Ardennes.\nIn the disguise of a plumber, Poirot breaks into the house and discovers an empty pill bottle from Wilson in the bathroom cupboard.\nPoirot thinks he has solved the case.\nIn Brussels, Madame Déroulard summons Poirot.\nLearning that Poirot was a police officer who had concluded his investigations, she confesses to the murder of her son.\nSome years before, she saw him push his wife down the stairs and realised "He was an evil man.\n" Afraid of the persecution that her son\'s new role would bring upon the church and for his approaches to the innocent Virginie, she resolved to kill her son.\nShe stole John Wilson\'s tablets.\nShe opened the new box of chocolates before seeing that the previous box was not yet empty.\nAfter inserting about 20 tiny tablets in one chocolate, she took the opportunity to place the empty bottle into de Saint Alard\'s pocket when he came to say his farewell, thinking that his valet would throw it away.\nPoirot told her that he had completed his investigation and the matter was closed.\nMadame Déroulard died a week later of her infirmities.\nPoirot considers his mistakes.\nThe mother\'s poor eyesight would cause her, and only her, to swap the lids.\nHe misread the psychology of a murderer - Saint Alard would never have kept the empty bottle had he been guilty.\nPoirot told Hastings to remind him with the phrase chocolate box, if he seemed conceited.\nThen, he unconsciously goes on to boast about his successes.\nHastings hesitates, considers, then graciously refrains from comment.\nPoirot is urgently summoned late at night by special messenger to \'Sharples\', the home of Lord Alloway, head of the Ministry of Defence and a potential future Prime Minister.\nArriving with Hastings, he is introduced by their host to Admiral Sir Harry Weardale, the First Sea Lord who is a guest at Sharples together with his wife and son, Leonard.\nThe secret plans for the new \'Z\'-type of submarine were stolen some three hours earlier.\nThe facts of the case are that the ladies of the party – Mrs Conroy and Lady Weardale – retired to bed at 10:00\xa0pm as did Leonard Weardale.\nLord Alloway instructed his secretary, Mr Fitzroy, to move the various papers that he and the Admiral would require for their evening\'s work from the safe out to the table in the study, while the two men walked on the terrace and finished their cigars.\nLord Alloway fancies that as they turned back on the terrace he saw a shadow move away from the open French window that leads into the study, although the Admiral is dismissive of this idea.\nGoing into the study, they discovered the submarine plans were missing.\nFitzroy claims to have been distracted by a scream outside the study.\nHe went out to find Mrs Conroy\'s maid standing on the stairs, and she claimed that she had seen a ghost.\nIt was then that the plans were probably stolen.\nPoirot examines the grass outside the study window and finds no trace of footprints, even though it rained earlier in the evening.\nThat means someone in the house is responsible.\nHe questions the household, although at Lord Alloway\'s insistence, he does not reveal to them that the plans have been stolen.\nLord Alloway points out that Fitzroy is discounted.\nHis secretary has access to the safe and could have copied the plans at any time.\nThe prime suspect is Mrs Conroy, whose past life is something of a mystery, and she moves in diplomatic circles.\nShe was specifically asked down for the weekend so that they could keep an eye on her.\nQuestioning Conroy\'s foreign maid, Poirot correctly guesses that she screamed when Leonard Weardale sneaked an unexpected kiss from her.\nShe quickly invented the ghost story when her cry attracted Fitzroy\'s attention.\nAt this juncture, Lady Weardale reappears and asks Poirot if the matter could be dropped if the plans were returned.\nHe agrees that that could be arranged and she promises that they will be within ten minutes.\nPoirot puts this offer to Lord Alloway, without mentioning any names, and leaves.\nHastings questions this unexpected turn of events, suspecting Lady Weardale\'s rumoured bridge debts are real.\nPoirot points out that as the story of the shadow of an intruder leaving the study turned out to be incorrect, the plans must have been taken by Fitzroy or by Lord Alloway himself – the logical conclusion.\nHastings is dubious but Poirot points out that the man was rumoured to be involved in share scandals years before, although he was later exonerated.\nSuppose the rumours were true, and he was being blackmailed, in all probability by Mrs Conroy, a foreign agent.\nHe would hand over fake copies of the plans with suitable adjustments to make them useless, and then pretend they had been stolen.\nThat would be why he insisted his loyal secretary was not suspected.\nLeonard Weardale was busy with the maid at the time of the supposed theft and Lady Weardale could not be the thief as she needed ten minutes to get the plans back, whereas she would need a lot less time if she had taken them and hidden them.\nPoirot\'s theory also explains why Lord Alloway did not want the guests told of the theft of the plans – he wanted the foreign power to receive the false plans.\nHastings remains unconvinced.\nHowever, on the day when Lord Alloway became Prime Minister, Poirot receives a cheque and a signed photograph dedicated to "my discreet friend".\nHe also hears that a foreign power attempted to build their own version of the submarine which ended up a failure.\nThis short story was later expanded into the novella-length story The Incredible Theft which has a similar plot.\nThere were changes to the character names and story details (eg, the plans are for a new state-of-the-art bomber rather than for a new submarine).\nFour young people, two women and two men, are returning after a night out to the home of one of the women – Patricia Garnett.\nShe is annoyed as she cannot find the key to her flat on the fourth floor of her apartment block in her handbag.\nThe porter does not have a spare key, nor is there a fire escape, but the suggestion is made that the two men, Donovan Bailey and Jimmy Faulkener, make their way up through the coal lift and let the women in.\nThey go to the basement and make their way up.\nExiting the lift, they find the kitchen in darkness and Donovan instructs Jimmy to remain where he is while he locates the light switch.\nHe does so but the light fails to work and Donovan makes his way to the sitting room where he switches on that room\'s light; they suddenly realise that they have miscounted the floors and that they are in the flat below which, according to a pile of letters, seems to belong to a Mrs Ernestine Grant.\nThey make their way up to the next floor again via the coal lift and let Pat and the second lady, Mildred Hope, into the former\'s flat.\nThey notice that Donovan has cut himself as there is blood on his hand.\nHe washes it off but cannot find a cut to explain the blood and voices his fears to Jimmy.\nAgain using the coal lift, they return to Mrs Grant\'s flat below and soon spot a foot sticking out from under a curtain – it is the dead body of Mrs Grant.\nBack on the landing with the girls, they are discussing calling the police when a voice interrupts them, agreeing with their plan of action.\nIt is the occupant of the fifth floor flat Hercule Poirot, the famous detective.\nGoing into Mrs Grant\'s flat, Poirot finds it curious that the light switch in the kitchen now works.\nHe also sees that the red tablecloth disguises a patch of blood, which Donovan touched to get the blood on his hand.\nThe body was moved after death.\nThe police arrive and Poirot and the four people return to Pat\'s flat.\nInspector Rice questions them and tells them that Mrs Grant was shot with an automatic pistol some five hours earlier in the kitchen.\nThey have found a note from someone signed "JF".\nsaying that he would be there at half-past-seven (the approximate time of death), the pistol with which she was shot and a silk handkerchief used to wipe the prints from the gun.\nPoirot is suspicious – why would the murderer wipe his prints and yet leave his own handkerchief as evidence behind.\nThe police leave but the Inspector gives Poirot permission to inspect the flat.\nHe goes down there with Donovan and Jimmy.\nPoirot searches in the kitchen bin and finds a small bottle.\nHe sniffs the corked top carefully but says that he has a cold; Donovan impetuously pulls the stopper out and sniffs the contents for him.\nDonovan drops in a faint.\nJimmy fetches his friend a drink and Donovan recovers and decides to go home.\nJimmy remains and Poirot tells him the case is solved.\nThere is no such person as John Fraser as the letter and handkerchief were put there to misdirect the police.\nThe bottle in the bin was a ruse by Poirot; it contained ethyl chloride to knock Donovan briefly unconscious.\nWhile Jimmy was getting the drink for his friend, Poirot searched Donovan\'s pockets to find Pat\'s missing flat key which Donovan had abstracted earlier in the evening and a letter sent to Mrs Grant which arrived by the late evening post.\nPoirot thought it odd that the light switch in the kitchen did not work then did work minutes later.\nDonovan needed to get Jimmy out of the kitchen into the other room whilst he found the letter; the light not working was the ruse to gain him the few minutes he needed before the mistake of being in the wrong flat was obvious to Jimmy.\nThe letter is from a firm of solicitors agreeing that the marriage between Donovan Bailey and Ernestine Grant some eight years before in Switzerland was entirely lawful.\nDonovan wanted to marry Pat but his previous marriage was stopping him.\nBy chance his first wife moved into the same block as his proposed future wife and was threatening to tell Patricia about their marriage.\nTo stop her, Donovan killed her earlier in the evening but had to return for the solicitor\'s letter.\nPoirot, as a result of spreading fame, has been overworked and Hastings suggests he rests by accompanying him on a week\'s holiday to the south Devon coastal resort of Ebermouth.\nOn their fourth day there, Poirot receives a note from the theatrical agent Joseph Aarons who asks him to travel to Charlock Bay on the north Devon coast as he needs to consult him on a matter.\nThe two are planning to go by train but Hastings sees a notice for a motor bus tour from the one resort to the other which will save time on changing trains.\nPoirot reluctantly agrees, afraid of the uncertain English climate and the drafts of air which will invade the bus.\nThey book their tickets at the office of the company concerned where Hastings is taken with another customer, an auburn-haired girl, whereas Poirot is intrigued by a young man who is attempting to grow a feeble moustache.\nThe next day on the bus the two find themselves sat with the young girl who introduces herself as Mary Durrant.\nHer aunt is in Ebermouth and runs an antiques shop where she has managed to make something of a success for herself.\nMary has started to work with her aunt as opposed to becoming a governess or a companion and she is travelling to Charlock Bay to take a valuable set of miniatures to an American collector there by the name of Baker Wood for perusal and purchase.\nThe bus stops for lunch at Monkhampton and Miss Durrant joins Poirot and Hastings at a table in a café.\nPart way through their conversation, she rushes outside and returns saying that she thought she saw through the window a man taking her suitcase with the miniatures off the bus, when she confronted him she realised his case was almost exactly like hers and that she was in error.\nShe does however describe the young man that Poirot and Hastings saw the previous day in the booking office.\nThe bus arrives in Charlock Bay and both Poirot and Hastings and Miss Durrant book into the Anchor Hotel.\nThey have barely started unpacking when a white-faced Miss Durrant appears and tells them that her suitcase has been unlocked somehow, the despatch case inside containing the miniatures has been forced open and the items stolen.\nHaving heard that Poirot is a detective, she asks him to investigate.\nPoirot telephones Mr Wood who tells him that he had a visit half-an-hour ago from someone calling on behalf of Elizabeth Penn, Mary Durrant\'s aunt, and he paid five hundred pounds for the miniatures.\nPoirot and Hastings go to visit Mr Wood, Poirot voicing his puzzlement over why the thief took the time to force the lock of despatch case while leaving it in the suitcase instead of taking the inner case away with them and opening it at their leisure.\nThe two meet Mr Wood and take an instant dislike to the brash, vulgar man.\nHe gives them a description of the seller: "a tall woman, middle-aged, grey hair, blotchy complexion and a budding moustache".\nPoirot finds out that the young man on the bus, Norton Kane, has an alibi for the period in question.\nThe next day, having sorted out Joseph Aaron\'s problem, Poirot and Hastings return to Ebermouth but, at Poirot\'s insistence, this time by train.\nThey call at Elizabeth Penn\'s shop and Poirot almost immediately accuses the elderly lady of being Mr Wood\'s visitor of the previous day in disguise and meaningfully tells the two women their scam must cease.\nMiss Penn, white-faced, agrees.\nPoirot points out to Hastings again the absurdity of the despatch case being forced but left in the suitcase; they never were in Miss Durant\'s case.\nWhen they were booking their tickets on the excursion, he saw Miss Durrant watching Mr Kane and wondered why she was so interested.\nHe expected something to happen on the trip and it did.\nMr Wood would have had to return the miniatures as they were officially stolen goods and the two women would have had his five hundred pounds and still possessed the miniatures to sell on again.\nTheir plan was to pass suspicion on to Mr Kane and have Poirot and Hastings as two duped witnesses.\nAt Japp\'s suggestion Poirot and Hastings joined him for the weekend in the small countryside town of Market Basing.\nEnjoying Sunday breakfast, the three are interrupted when the local constable requested Japp\'s help.\nWalter Protheroe, the reclusive owner of a local large mansion, was found dead in his dilapidated house, supposedly by suicide.\nThe three go to Leigh House as requested and meet dr Giles who was called in by Miss Clegg, the housekeeper.\nShe was unable to raise her master, Walter Protheroe, in his bedroom, nor could Giles.\nConstable Pollard arrived at that moment and he and the doctor broke down the oak door.\nInside they found Protheroe, shot through the head and his pistol clasped in his right hand.\nThe problem was that the bullet entered behind the left ear and such a shot was impossible.\nAs they examine the room Hastings puzzled as to why Poirot sniffed the air so keenly and also why he examined so carefully a handkerchief lodged up Protheroe\'s right sleeve.\nHastings could smell nothing in the air, nor could he see anything on the handkerchief.\nThe key is missing from the lock of the door and Japp supposes that this was the murderer\'s error in trying to make the murder look like suicide.\nA couple named Parker were staying in the house.\nMiss Clegg says their unexpected first visit did not seem to please Protheroe.\nHe kept a pistol, although she has not seen it for some time.\nShe cannot say why the windows of the room were locked and bolted contrary to custom.\nmr Parker lies about owning a cufflink found at the crime scene.\nAt the inquest a tramp comes forward to say that he heard Protheroe and Parker argue about money at midnight on the night of the death.\nProtheroe\'s true surname was Wendover; he had been involved with the treacherous sinking of a naval vessel some years earlier and Parker was blackmailing him over this.\nOn the suspicion of killing Wendover and making it look like suicide, Parker is arrested.\nPoirot summons Miss Clegg to the inn.\nHe surmises that Wendover did in fact kill himself, with his left hand holding the gun.\nClegg admits that when she found him in the morning, she judged Parker to be the cause, so she changed the pistol to his right hand to throw suspicion on the blackmailer to bring him to justice; however, she neglected to change the handkerchief up the right sleeve over to the left sleeve as well.\nShe locked and bolted the windows to prevent it looking like a potential murderer escaped by that method, therefore indicating that the murderer was someone in the house.\nThe fireplace grate was full of smoked cigarettes, yet the air was fresh.\nPoirot deduced that the windows of the room must have been open that night, otherwise the air would have smelled smoky and the tramp could not have overheard the conversation he did.\nSitting on the garden terrace of his large house on a summer evening, John Harrison is delighted to receive an unexpected visit from Hercule Poirot.\nThe detective tells him that he is in the locality to investigate a murder but amazes Harrison by admitting that the murder has not yet been committed but that it is better to prevent one happening first.\nHe then cryptically turns the conversation round to a wasps\' nest on a tree that he sees nearby and Poirot and Harrison discuss the destruction of it.\nA friend of Harrison, Claude Langton, is going to handle the task for him using petrol injected by a garden syringe but Poirot tells him that earlier that day he saw the poison book in a local chemist\'s and an earlier entry made by Langton for the purchase of cyanide, despite Langton having told Harrison that such substances should not ever be available for pest control.\nPoirot asks a quiet question: "Do you like Langton.\n" and they talk of Harrison\'s engagement to a girl called Molly Deane who was previously engaged to Langton.\nAs they discuss Langton\'s disposition towards Harrison, Poirot\'s meaning becomes quite clear to the other man – he is being warned.\nPoirot asks when Langton is returning and is told nine o\'clock that evening.\nPoirot tells him that he will return at that time, wondering as he goes if he should have waited behind.\nPoirot returns just before the appointed time to find Langton leaving, the nest still intact.\nHarrison seems to be fine and Poirot hopes that he is not feeling any ill-effects of having digested the harmless washing soda that he consumed.\nHarrison is surprised.\nPoirot tells him that he traded the cyanide Harrison had in his pocket for the soda when he visited earlier on.\nPoirot met Langton after leaving the chemist\'s and heard from him that Harrison had insisted on the use of cyanide over petrol.\nPoirot witnessed the early signs of Langton\'s romance with Molly Deane being rekindled and Harrison leaving a Harley Street consultant having obviously been given bad news.\nHarrison confirms that he has two months to live.\nHaving seen signs of Harrison\'s hatred for Langton, Poirot surmised that Harrison was planning to commit suicide and make it appear that Langton had killed him, ensuring that his rival would be hanged for murder.\nPoirot\'s earlier conversation included several traps, including the time of Langton\'s appointment.\nPoirot already knew Langton was due to return at eight-thirty but Harrison said it was nine, by which time he hoped to have committed the deed.\nHaving realised and repented of what he would have done, Harrison expresses his gratitude for Poirot having visited and spoiled his plans.\nPoirot tells Hastings that the criminals of England fear him too much, so he has no cases.\nHastings describes a recent theft from a jeweller\'s shop window in Bond Street.\nThe perpetrator was arrested on the spot.\nHowever, they found paste copies of the six stolen stones on him.\nHe had already passed the real jewels to an accomplice.\nA heavily veiled lady arrives.\nShe identifies herself as Lady Millicent Castle Vaughan, whose engagement to the Duke of Southshire was recently announced.\nAt age sixteen she wrote an indiscreet letter to a soldier.\nThe letter would surely anger her fiancé, and it is now in the possession of mr Lavington.\nHe is demanding twenty thousand pounds for its return, a sum she cannot afford.\nShe went to Lavington\'s house in Wimbledon to plead with him.\nHe showed her the letter in a Chinese puzzle box and says he keeps in a place she will never find.\nLavington calls on Poirot, but laughs at his request to return the letter.\nHe leaves for Paris, giving Lady Millicent several days to pay up.\nPoirot goes to Lavington\'s house the next day.\nHe calls in the morning, dressed as a man hired to affix burglarproof locks on the window.\nHe saws through the sash latch of a window and breaks in that night with Hastings.\nAfter a long search, Poirot finds the box hidden in a hollowed log, at the bottom of a small wood pile in the kitchen.\nThe next day, Lady Millicent calls for the letter.\nShe also insists on the puzzle box as a souvenir but Poirot prevents her taking it.\nThen, he reveals a hidden compartment in the box holding the six missing jewels from the Bond Street robbery.\nThe fake letter was a red herring for anyone who found the puzzle box.\nJapp appears from another room and identifies the lady as "Gertie", an accomplice of Lavington, whose real name was Reed.\nReed was killed in Holland a few days before for his double-cross of his gang over the jewels.\nThe gang members decided to use Poirot to retrieve the missing jewels.\nPoirot tells Hastings that it was the cheap shoes she was wearing that made him suspect that she was not who she claimed to be.\nPoirot concludes that not only is he known to the criminals of England, they try to use him when their own efforts fail.\nPoirot is undergoing the trial of a sea voyage to Egypt, supposedly as a holiday.\nNot enjoying one bit the motion of the waves, he joins in the conversations of the other passengers.\nAmong them is a General Forbes who is angrily dismissive of a man who calls himself Colonel Clapperton.\nHe states that Clapperton is a former music hall performer who, injured during the war, got himself into a society lady\'s nursing home and then received her patronage to find him a job at the War Office.\nThe other passengers on the boat are more sympathetic towards Clapperton, particularly as he demonstrates continuing patience with his shrewish and hypochondriac wife, who complains of her heart trouble while at the same time stating that she keeps extremely active, despite her husband\'s constant entreaties to take life easier.\nEven Poirot seems to incur her wrath when he responds a little too dryly to her conversation.\nSomewhat annoyed with him, she marches out of the smoking room where they have been conversing, dropping the contents of her handbag on the way.\nShe leaves behind a piece of paper – a prescription for digitalin.\nTwo young girls on the boat, Kitty Mooney and Pamela Creegan, take a shine to the Colonel and decide to "rescue" him from his wife.\nThey take him for a walk on the boat deck while his wife plays bridge, a game which the Colonel will not play.\nLater on, Poirot sees the Colonel demonstrating amazing card tricks to the two young girls who have taken him under their wing.\nAble to deal out hands of exact suits to the others, the Colonel makes them realise why he will not play cards – he would be able to cheat and win every time – or at least be suspected of doing so – and it would be better for him not to take part.\nThe boat reaches Alexandria and many of the company go ashore.\nMrs Clapperton refuses, shouting to her husband from behind her locked cabin door that she has suffered a bad night and wants to be left alone.\nWhen everyone has returned later on, Mrs Clapperton is still not answering her door.\nA steward opens it for her worried husband and they find the lady dead – stabbed through the heart with a native dagger and money and jewellery stolen.\nSeveral bead sellers were allowed on the boat at the port and they are questioned, particularly as one of their wares was found on the floor of the cabin.\nPoirot though is puzzled: the door to the cabin was locked from within and he cannot see a reason why Mrs Clapperton would open it to a bead seller, nor why such a person would murder her and lay himself so open to suspicion.\nThat evening, at Poirot\'s request, the other passengers are assembled in the lounge.\nPoirot addresses them and unwraps a ventriloquist\'s doll which speaks and repeats the words used by Mrs Clapperton from behind the locked cabin door to her husband.\nThe man himself jumps up…and promptly collapses, dead of a heart attack.\nPoirot explains: Mrs Clapperton was already dead when her husband, witnessed by Poirot, Kitty and Pamela, heard her "speak" to him from inside the cabin but it was her husband using his music hall act.\nHe showed his card trick to the others to divert attention away from his real skill.\nPoirot\'s use of the doll in the lounge was helped by a young girl ( a fellow passenger and the owner of the doll) behind a curtain providing the voice.\nPoirot is not surprised that Clapperton died of a weak heart – digitalin would have produced symptoms of dilated pupils which he did not see in Mrs Clapperton but he did see in her husband; the prescription was for him.\noirot receives a strange letter for assistance from an elderly woman, Miss Amelia Barrowby, who lives at Rosebank in Charman\'s Green.\nShe is extremely vague in defining the problem, but adds several times that discretion is paramount as family is involved.\nThe letter intrigues Poirot who has his secretary Miss Lemon draft a reply saying that he is at the lady\'s service.\nFive days later Miss Lemon spots an announcement in the "personal column" of The Morning Post about the death of Miss Barrowby.\nPoirot sends a letter to Rosebank to provoke a response from the next of kin, and he duly receives a reply from Mary Delafontaine, the dead woman\'s niece, saying that his services are no longer required.\nNevertheless, he goes to the house and admires the well-maintained garden with its spring flowers and edging of shells.\nLet into the house by a maid, the first person he meets is a young Russian girl called Katrina Reiger, who speaks cryptically of the money that by rights is hers.\nShe is interrupted by Mrs Delafontaine and her husband who dismiss Katrina and meet Poirot.\nThey seem shocked to find that he is a detective.\nPoirot interviews the local police inspector who tells him that they now know that Miss Barrowby died from a dose of strychnine but the problem is that the victim and her two family members all ate the same meal.\nThe Delafontaines are suspected as they will inherit a large sum of money, which they very much need, but it was Katrina who gave her employer her medicinal powders and it is possible the strychnine was in those.\nHowever, Katrina does not appear to benefit from Miss Barrowby\'s death, and would, in fact, have been out of a job.\nThe next day, however, brings the news that most of the estate has been left to Katrina, thereby providing a motive and she is detained by the police.\nA packet of strychnine powders is found under Katrina\'s mattress which seems to clinch the matter.\nPoirot though is not convinced and arranges matters in a methodical order in his own mind.\nIt is then he remembers the garden.\nHe sends out Miss Lemon to make particular enquiries and then interviews Katrina who confirms that she ate separately from the family, as she always did, but had the same food as them.\nPoirot, after consulting with Miss Lemon, calls at Rosebank and sees Mrs Delafontaine.\nAt the front door, he points to the unfinished row of shells – the only unsymmetrical item in that well-maintained and symmetrical garden – and points out they are oyster shells.\nMiss Lemon found the fishmonger who sold the oysters to the Delafontaines.\nThey fed Miss Barrowby poisoned oysters and planted the shells in the garden to hide from Katrina and the maid.\nMrs Delafontaine confesses that she and her husband had been pilfering money from her aunt for many years and could not let the money go to Katrina.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Reverse the sentences.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: \nMrs Delafontaine confesses that she and her husband had been pilfering money from her aunt for many years and could not let the money go to Katrina..\nThey fed Miss Barrowby poisoned oysters and planted the shells in the garden to hide from Katrina and the maid.\nMiss Lemon found the fishmonger who sold the oysters to the Delafontaines.\nAt the front door, he points to the unfinished row of shells – the only unsymmetrical item in that well-maintained and symmetrical garden – and points out they are oyster shells.\nPoirot, after consulting with Miss Lemon, calls at Rosebank and sees Mrs Delafontaine.\nHe sends out Miss Lemon to make particular enquiries and then interviews Katrina who confirms that she ate separately from the family, as she always did, but had the same food as them.\nIt is then he remembers the garden.\nPoirot though is not convinced and arranges matters in a methodical order in his own mind.\nA packet of strychnine powders is found under Katrina\'s mattress which seems to clinch the matter.\nThe next day, however, brings the news that most of the estate has been left to Katrina, thereby providing a motive and she is detained by the police.\nHowever, Katrina does not appear to benefit from Miss Barrowby\'s death, and would, in fact, have been out of a job.\nThe Delafontaines are suspected as they will inherit a large sum of money, which they very much need, but it was Katrina who gave her employer her medicinal powders and it is possible the strychnine was in those.\nPoirot interviews the local police inspector who tells him that they now know that Miss Barrowby died from a dose of strychnine but the problem is that the victim and her two family members all ate the same meal.\nThey seem shocked to find that he is a detective.\nShe is interrupted by Mrs Delafontaine and her husband who dismiss Katrina and meet Poirot.\nLet into the house by a maid, the first person he meets is a young Russian girl called Katrina Reiger, who speaks cryptically of the money that by rights is hers.\nNevertheless, he goes to the house and admires the well-maintained garden with its spring flowers and edging of shells.\nPoirot sends a letter to Rosebank to provoke a response from the next of kin, and he duly receives a reply from Mary Delafontaine, the dead woman\'s niece, saying that his services are no longer required.\nFive days later Miss Lemon spots an announcement in the "personal column" of The Morning Post about the death of Miss Barrowby.\nThe letter intrigues Poirot who has his secretary Miss Lemon draft a reply saying that he is at the lady\'s service.\nShe is extremely vague in defining the problem, but adds several times that discretion is paramount as family is involved.\noirot receives a strange letter for assistance from an elderly woman, Miss Amelia Barrowby, who lives at Rosebank in Charman\'s Green.\nPoirot is not surprised that Clapperton died of a weak heart – digitalin would have produced symptoms of dilated pupils which he did not see in Mrs Clapperton but he did see in her husband; the prescription was for him.\nPoirot\'s use of the doll in the lounge was helped by a young girl ( a fellow passenger and the owner of the doll) behind a curtain providing the voice.\nHe showed his card trick to the others to divert attention away from his real skill.\nPoirot explains: Mrs Clapperton was already dead when her husband, witnessed by Poirot, Kitty and Pamela, heard her "speak" to him from inside the cabin but it was her husband using his music hall act.\nThe man himself jumps up…and promptly collapses, dead of a heart attack.\nPoirot addresses them and unwraps a ventriloquist\'s doll which speaks and repeats the words used by Mrs Clapperton from behind the locked cabin door to her husband.\nThat evening, at Poirot\'s request, the other passengers are assembled in the lounge.\nPoirot though is puzzled: the door to the cabin was locked from within and he cannot see a reason why Mrs Clapperton would open it to a bead seller, nor why such a person would murder her and lay himself so open to suspicion.\nSeveral bead sellers were allowed on the boat at the port and they are questioned, particularly as one of their wares was found on the floor of the cabin.\nA steward opens it for her worried husband and they find the lady dead – stabbed through the heart with a native dagger and money and jewellery stolen.\nWhen everyone has returned later on, Mrs Clapperton is still not answering her door.\nMrs Clapperton refuses, shouting to her husband from behind her locked cabin door that she has suffered a bad night and wants to be left alone.\nThe boat reaches Alexandria and many of the company go ashore.\nAble to deal out hands of exact suits to the others, the Colonel makes them realise why he will not play cards – he would be able to cheat and win every time – or at least be suspected of doing so – and it would be better for him not to take part.\nLater on, Poirot sees the Colonel demonstrating amazing card tricks to the two young girls who have taken him under their wing.\nThey take him for a walk on the boat deck while his wife plays bridge, a game which the Colonel will not play.\nTwo young girls on the boat, Kitty Mooney and Pamela Creegan, take a shine to the Colonel and decide to "rescue" him from his wife.\nShe leaves behind a piece of paper – a prescription for digitalin.\nSomewhat annoyed with him, she marches out of the smoking room where they have been conversing, dropping the contents of her handbag on the way.\nEven Poirot seems to incur her wrath when he responds a little too dryly to her conversation.\nThe other passengers on the boat are more sympathetic towards Clapperton, particularly as he demonstrates continuing patience with his shrewish and hypochondriac wife, who complains of her heart trouble while at the same time stating that she keeps extremely active, despite her husband\'s constant entreaties to take life easier.\nHe states that Clapperton is a former music hall performer who, injured during the war, got himself into a society lady\'s nursing home and then received her patronage to find him a job at the War Office.\nAmong them is a General Forbes who is angrily dismissive of a man who calls himself Colonel Clapperton.\nNot enjoying one bit the motion of the waves, he joins in the conversations of the other passengers.\nPoirot is undergoing the trial of a sea voyage to Egypt, supposedly as a holiday.\nPoirot concludes that not only is he known to the criminals of England, they try to use him when their own efforts fail.\nPoirot tells Hastings that it was the cheap shoes she was wearing that made him suspect that she was not who she claimed to be.\nThe gang members decided to use Poirot to retrieve the missing jewels.\nReed was killed in Holland a few days before for his double-cross of his gang over the jewels.\nJapp appears from another room and identifies the lady as "Gertie", an accomplice of Lavington, whose real name was Reed.\nThe fake letter was a red herring for anyone who found the puzzle box.\nThen, he reveals a hidden compartment in the box holding the six missing jewels from the Bond Street robbery.\nShe also insists on the puzzle box as a souvenir but Poirot prevents her taking it.\nThe next day, Lady Millicent calls for the letter.\nAfter a long search, Poirot finds the box hidden in a hollowed log, at the bottom of a small wood pile in the kitchen.\nHe saws through the sash latch of a window and breaks in that night with Hastings.\nHe calls in the morning, dressed as a man hired to affix burglarproof locks on the window.\nPoirot goes to Lavington\'s house the next day.\nHe leaves for Paris, giving Lady Millicent several days to pay up.\nLavington calls on Poirot, but laughs at his request to return the letter.\nHe showed her the letter in a Chinese puzzle box and says he keeps in a place she will never find.\nShe went to Lavington\'s house in Wimbledon to plead with him.\nHe is demanding twenty thousand pounds for its return, a sum she cannot afford.\nThe letter would surely anger her fiancé, and it is now in the possession of mr Lavington.\nAt age sixteen she wrote an indiscreet letter to a soldier.\nShe identifies herself as Lady Millicent Castle Vaughan, whose engagement to the Duke of Southshire was recently announced.\nA heavily veiled lady arrives.\nHe had already passed the real jewels to an accomplice.\nHowever, they found paste copies of the six stolen stones on him.\nThe perpetrator was arrested on the spot.\nHastings describes a recent theft from a jeweller\'s shop window in Bond Street.\nPoirot tells Hastings that the criminals of England fear him too much, so he has no cases.\nHaving realised and repented of what he would have done, Harrison expresses his gratitude for Poirot having visited and spoiled his plans.\nPoirot already knew Langton was due to return at eight-thirty but Harrison said it was nine, by which time he hoped to have committed the deed.\nPoirot\'s earlier conversation included several traps, including the time of Langton\'s appointment.\nHaving seen signs of Harrison\'s hatred for Langton, Poirot surmised that Harrison was planning to commit suicide and make it appear that Langton had killed him, ensuring that his rival would be hanged for murder.\nHarrison confirms that he has two months to live.\nPoirot witnessed the early signs of Langton\'s romance with Molly Deane being rekindled and Harrison leaving a Harley Street consultant having obviously been given bad news.\nPoirot met Langton after leaving the chemist\'s and heard from him that Harrison had insisted on the use of cyanide over petrol.\nPoirot tells him that he traded the cyanide Harrison had in his pocket for the soda when he visited earlier on.\nHarrison is surprised.\nHarrison seems to be fine and Poirot hopes that he is not feeling any ill-effects of having digested the harmless washing soda that he consumed.\nPoirot returns just before the appointed time to find Langton leaving, the nest still intact.\nPoirot tells him that he will return at that time, wondering as he goes if he should have waited behind.\nPoirot asks when Langton is returning and is told nine o\'clock that evening.\nAs they discuss Langton\'s disposition towards Harrison, Poirot\'s meaning becomes quite clear to the other man – he is being warned.\n" and they talk of Harrison\'s engagement to a girl called Molly Deane who was previously engaged to Langton.\nPoirot asks a quiet question: "Do you like Langton.\nA friend of Harrison, Claude Langton, is going to handle the task for him using petrol injected by a garden syringe but Poirot tells him that earlier that day he saw the poison book in a local chemist\'s and an earlier entry made by Langton for the purchase of cyanide, despite Langton having told Harrison that such substances should not ever be available for pest control.\nHe then cryptically turns the conversation round to a wasps\' nest on a tree that he sees nearby and Poirot and Harrison discuss the destruction of it.\nThe detective tells him that he is in the locality to investigate a murder but amazes Harrison by admitting that the murder has not yet been committed but that it is better to prevent one happening first.\nSitting on the garden terrace of his large house on a summer evening, John Harrison is delighted to receive an unexpected visit from Hercule Poirot.\nPoirot deduced that the windows of the room must have been open that night, otherwise the air would have smelled smoky and the tramp could not have overheard the conversation he did.\nThe fireplace grate was full of smoked cigarettes, yet the air was fresh.\nShe locked and bolted the windows to prevent it looking like a potential murderer escaped by that method, therefore indicating that the murderer was someone in the house.\nClegg admits that when she found him in the morning, she judged Parker to be the cause, so she changed the pistol to his right hand to throw suspicion on the blackmailer to bring him to justice; however, she neglected to change the handkerchief up the right sleeve over to the left sleeve as well.\nHe surmises that Wendover did in fact kill himself, with his left hand holding the gun.\nPoirot summons Miss Clegg to the inn.\nOn the suspicion of killing Wendover and making it look like suicide, Parker is arrested.\nProtheroe\'s true surname was Wendover; he had been involved with the treacherous sinking of a naval vessel some years earlier and Parker was blackmailing him over this.\nAt the inquest a tramp comes forward to say that he heard Protheroe and Parker argue about money at midnight on the night of the death.\nmr Parker lies about owning a cufflink found at the crime scene.\nShe cannot say why the windows of the room were locked and bolted contrary to custom.\nHe kept a pistol, although she has not seen it for some time.\nMiss Clegg says their unexpected first visit did not seem to please Protheroe.\nA couple named Parker were staying in the house.\nThe key is missing from the lock of the door and Japp supposes that this was the murderer\'s error in trying to make the murder look like suicide.\nHastings could smell nothing in the air, nor could he see anything on the handkerchief.\nAs they examine the room Hastings puzzled as to why Poirot sniffed the air so keenly and also why he examined so carefully a handkerchief lodged up Protheroe\'s right sleeve.\nThe problem was that the bullet entered behind the left ear and such a shot was impossible.\nInside they found Protheroe, shot through the head and his pistol clasped in his right hand.\nConstable Pollard arrived at that moment and he and the doctor broke down the oak door.\nShe was unable to raise her master, Walter Protheroe, in his bedroom, nor could Giles.\nThe three go to Leigh House as requested and meet dr Giles who was called in by Miss Clegg, the housekeeper.\nWalter Protheroe, the reclusive owner of a local large mansion, was found dead in his dilapidated house, supposedly by suicide.\nEnjoying Sunday breakfast, the three are interrupted when the local constable requested Japp\'s help.\nAt Japp\'s suggestion Poirot and Hastings joined him for the weekend in the small countryside town of Market Basing.\nTheir plan was to pass suspicion on to Mr Kane and have Poirot and Hastings as two duped witnesses.\nMr Wood would have had to return the miniatures as they were officially stolen goods and the two women would have had his five hundred pounds and still possessed the miniatures to sell on again.\nHe expected something to happen on the trip and it did.\nWhen they were booking their tickets on the excursion, he saw Miss Durrant watching Mr Kane and wondered why she was so interested.\nPoirot points out to Hastings again the absurdity of the despatch case being forced but left in the suitcase; they never were in Miss Durant\'s case.\nMiss Penn, white-faced, agrees.\nThey call at Elizabeth Penn\'s shop and Poirot almost immediately accuses the elderly lady of being Mr Wood\'s visitor of the previous day in disguise and meaningfully tells the two women their scam must cease.\nThe next day, having sorted out Joseph Aaron\'s problem, Poirot and Hastings return to Ebermouth but, at Poirot\'s insistence, this time by train.\nPoirot finds out that the young man on the bus, Norton Kane, has an alibi for the period in question.\nHe gives them a description of the seller: "a tall woman, middle-aged, grey hair, blotchy complexion and a budding moustache".\nThe two meet Mr Wood and take an instant dislike to the brash, vulgar man.\nPoirot and Hastings go to visit Mr Wood, Poirot voicing his puzzlement over why the thief took the time to force the lock of despatch case while leaving it in the suitcase instead of taking the inner case away with them and opening it at their leisure.\nPoirot telephones Mr Wood who tells him that he had a visit half-an-hour ago from someone calling on behalf of Elizabeth Penn, Mary Durrant\'s aunt, and he paid five hundred pounds for the miniatures.\nHaving heard that Poirot is a detective, she asks him to investigate.\nThey have barely started unpacking when a white-faced Miss Durrant appears and tells them that her suitcase has been unlocked somehow, the despatch case inside containing the miniatures has been forced open and the items stolen.\nThe bus arrives in Charlock Bay and both Poirot and Hastings and Miss Durrant book into the Anchor Hotel.\nShe does however describe the young man that Poirot and Hastings saw the previous day in the booking office.\nPart way through their conversation, she rushes outside and returns saying that she thought she saw through the window a man taking her suitcase with the miniatures off the bus, when she confronted him she realised his case was almost exactly like hers and that she was in error.\nThe bus stops for lunch at Monkhampton and Miss Durrant joins Poirot and Hastings at a table in a café.\nMary has started to work with her aunt as opposed to becoming a governess or a companion and she is travelling to Charlock Bay to take a valuable set of miniatures to an American collector there by the name of Baker Wood for perusal and purchase.\nHer aunt is in Ebermouth and runs an antiques shop where she has managed to make something of a success for herself.\nThe next day on the bus the two find themselves sat with the young girl who introduces herself as Mary Durrant.\nThey book their tickets at the office of the company concerned where Hastings is taken with another customer, an auburn-haired girl, whereas Poirot is intrigued by a young man who is attempting to grow a feeble moustache.\nPoirot reluctantly agrees, afraid of the uncertain English climate and the drafts of air which will invade the bus.\nThe two are planning to go by train but Hastings sees a notice for a motor bus tour from the one resort to the other which will save time on changing trains.\nOn their fourth day there, Poirot receives a note from the theatrical agent Joseph Aarons who asks him to travel to Charlock Bay on the north Devon coast as he needs to consult him on a matter.\nPoirot, as a result of spreading fame, has been overworked and Hastings suggests he rests by accompanying him on a week\'s holiday to the south Devon coastal resort of Ebermouth.\nTo stop her, Donovan killed her earlier in the evening but had to return for the solicitor\'s letter.\nBy chance his first wife moved into the same block as his proposed future wife and was threatening to tell Patricia about their marriage.\nDonovan wanted to marry Pat but his previous marriage was stopping him.\nThe letter is from a firm of solicitors agreeing that the marriage between Donovan Bailey and Ernestine Grant some eight years before in Switzerland was entirely lawful.\nDonovan needed to get Jimmy out of the kitchen into the other room whilst he found the letter; the light not working was the ruse to gain him the few minutes he needed before the mistake of being in the wrong flat was obvious to Jimmy.\nPoirot thought it odd that the light switch in the kitchen did not work then did work minutes later.\nWhile Jimmy was getting the drink for his friend, Poirot searched Donovan\'s pockets to find Pat\'s missing flat key which Donovan had abstracted earlier in the evening and a letter sent to Mrs Grant which arrived by the late evening post.\nThe bottle in the bin was a ruse by Poirot; it contained ethyl chloride to knock Donovan briefly unconscious.\nThere is no such person as John Fraser as the letter and handkerchief were put there to misdirect the police.\nJimmy remains and Poirot tells him the case is solved.\nJimmy fetches his friend a drink and Donovan recovers and decides to go home.\nDonovan drops in a faint.\nHe sniffs the corked top carefully but says that he has a cold; Donovan impetuously pulls the stopper out and sniffs the contents for him.\nPoirot searches in the kitchen bin and finds a small bottle.\nHe goes down there with Donovan and Jimmy.\nThe police leave but the Inspector gives Poirot permission to inspect the flat.\nPoirot is suspicious – why would the murderer wipe his prints and yet leave his own handkerchief as evidence behind.\nsaying that he would be there at half-past-seven (the approximate time of death), the pistol with which she was shot and a silk handkerchief used to wipe the prints from the gun.\nThey have found a note from someone signed "JF".\nInspector Rice questions them and tells them that Mrs Grant was shot with an automatic pistol some five hours earlier in the kitchen.\nThe police arrive and Poirot and the four people return to Pat\'s flat.\nThe body was moved after death.\nHe also sees that the red tablecloth disguises a patch of blood, which Donovan touched to get the blood on his hand.\nGoing into Mrs Grant\'s flat, Poirot finds it curious that the light switch in the kitchen now works.\nIt is the occupant of the fifth floor flat Hercule Poirot, the famous detective.\nBack on the landing with the girls, they are discussing calling the police when a voice interrupts them, agreeing with their plan of action.\nAgain using the coal lift, they return to Mrs Grant\'s flat below and soon spot a foot sticking out from under a curtain – it is the dead body of Mrs Grant.\nHe washes it off but cannot find a cut to explain the blood and voices his fears to Jimmy.\nThey notice that Donovan has cut himself as there is blood on his hand.\nThey make their way up to the next floor again via the coal lift and let Pat and the second lady, Mildred Hope, into the former\'s flat.\nHe does so but the light fails to work and Donovan makes his way to the sitting room where he switches on that room\'s light; they suddenly realise that they have miscounted the floors and that they are in the flat below which, according to a pile of letters, seems to belong to a Mrs Ernestine Grant.\nExiting the lift, they find the kitchen in darkness and Donovan instructs Jimmy to remain where he is while he locates the light switch.\nThey go to the basement and make their way up.\nThe porter does not have a spare key, nor is there a fire escape, but the suggestion is made that the two men, Donovan Bailey and Jimmy Faulkener, make their way up through the coal lift and let the women in.\nShe is annoyed as she cannot find the key to her flat on the fourth floor of her apartment block in her handbag.\nFour young people, two women and two men, are returning after a night out to the home of one of the women – Patricia Garnett.\nThere were changes to the character names and story details (eg, the plans are for a new state-of-the-art bomber rather than for a new submarine).\nThis short story was later expanded into the novella-length story The Incredible Theft which has a similar plot.\nHe also hears that a foreign power attempted to build their own version of the submarine which ended up a failure.\nHowever, on the day when Lord Alloway became Prime Minister, Poirot receives a cheque and a signed photograph dedicated to "my discreet friend".\nHastings remains unconvinced.\nPoirot\'s theory also explains why Lord Alloway did not want the guests told of the theft of the plans – he wanted the foreign power to receive the false plans.\nLeonard Weardale was busy with the maid at the time of the supposed theft and Lady Weardale could not be the thief as she needed ten minutes to get the plans back, whereas she would need a lot less time if she had taken them and hidden them.\nThat would be why he insisted his loyal secretary was not suspected.\nHe would hand over fake copies of the plans with suitable adjustments to make them useless, and then pretend they had been stolen.\nSuppose the rumours were true, and he was being blackmailed, in all probability by Mrs Conroy, a foreign agent.\nHastings is dubious but Poirot points out that the man was rumoured to be involved in share scandals years before, although he was later exonerated.\nPoirot points out that as the story of the shadow of an intruder leaving the study turned out to be incorrect, the plans must have been taken by Fitzroy or by Lord Alloway himself – the logical conclusion.\nHastings questions this unexpected turn of events, suspecting Lady Weardale\'s rumoured bridge debts are real.\nPoirot puts this offer to Lord Alloway, without mentioning any names, and leaves.\nHe agrees that that could be arranged and she promises that they will be within ten minutes.\nAt this juncture, Lady Weardale reappears and asks Poirot if the matter could be dropped if the plans were returned.\nShe quickly invented the ghost story when her cry attracted Fitzroy\'s attention.\nQuestioning Conroy\'s foreign maid, Poirot correctly guesses that she screamed when Leonard Weardale sneaked an unexpected kiss from her.\nShe was specifically asked down for the weekend so that they could keep an eye on her.\nThe prime suspect is Mrs Conroy, whose past life is something of a mystery, and she moves in diplomatic circles.\nHis secretary has access to the safe and could have copied the plans at any time.\nLord Alloway points out that Fitzroy is discounted.\nHe questions the household, although at Lord Alloway\'s insistence, he does not reveal to them that the plans have been stolen.\nThat means someone in the house is responsible.\nPoirot examines the grass outside the study window and finds no trace of footprints, even though it rained earlier in the evening.\nIt was then that the plans were probably stolen.\nHe went out to find Mrs Conroy\'s maid standing on the stairs, and she claimed that she had seen a ghost.\nFitzroy claims to have been distracted by a scream outside the study.\nGoing into the study, they discovered the submarine plans were missing.\nLord Alloway fancies that as they turned back on the terrace he saw a shadow move away from the open French window that leads into the study, although the Admiral is dismissive of this idea.\nLord Alloway instructed his secretary, Mr Fitzroy, to move the various papers that he and the Admiral would require for their evening\'s work from the safe out to the table in the study, while the two men walked on the terrace and finished their cigars.\nThe facts of the case are that the ladies of the party – Mrs Conroy and Lady Weardale – retired to bed at 10:00\xa0pm as did Leonard Weardale.\nThe secret plans for the new \'Z\'-type of submarine were stolen some three hours earlier.\nArriving with Hastings, he is introduced by their host to Admiral Sir Harry Weardale, the First Sea Lord who is a guest at Sharples together with his wife and son, Leonard.\nPoirot is urgently summoned late at night by special messenger to \'Sharples\', the home of Lord Alloway, head of the Ministry of Defence and a potential future Prime Minister.\nHastings hesitates, considers, then graciously refrains from comment.\nThen, he unconsciously goes on to boast about his successes.\nPoirot told Hastings to remind him with the phrase chocolate box, if he seemed conceited.\nHe misread the psychology of a murderer - Saint Alard would never have kept the empty bottle had he been guilty.\nThe mother\'s poor eyesight would cause her, and only her, to swap the lids.\nPoirot considers his mistakes.\nMadame Déroulard died a week later of her infirmities.\nPoirot told her that he had completed his investigation and the matter was closed.\nAfter inserting about 20 tiny tablets in one chocolate, she took the opportunity to place the empty bottle into de Saint Alard\'s pocket when he came to say his farewell, thinking that his valet would throw it away.\nShe opened the new box of chocolates before seeing that the previous box was not yet empty.\nShe stole John Wilson\'s tablets.\n" Afraid of the persecution that her son\'s new role would bring upon the church and for his approaches to the innocent Virginie, she resolved to kill her son.\nSome years before, she saw him push his wife down the stairs and realised "He was an evil man.\nLearning that Poirot was a police officer who had concluded his investigations, she confesses to the murder of her son.\nIn Brussels, Madame Déroulard summons Poirot.\nPoirot thinks he has solved the case.\nIn the disguise of a plumber, Poirot breaks into the house and discovers an empty pill bottle from Wilson in the bathroom cupboard.\nVirginie gives Poirot the address of Saint Alard in the Ardennes.\nWilson had the opportunity but not the motive whereas the position is reversed for de Saint Alard.\nThis development bothers Poirot.\nToo many tablets at once would prove fatal.\nHe finds the "English chemist" who had made up the prescription of trinitrin for John Wilson, small tablets in chocolate to lower blood pressure.\nPoirot finds the local chemist who made eye drops for the aged Madame Déroulard, for her cataracts.\nHis doctor says Saint Alard and Déroulard had argued strenuously that evening, justifying the cause of death.\nAs only Déroulard ate the chocolates, the new box should not have been opened yet.\nPoirot notices that the lids of the two boxes, one blue and one pink, are switched.\nThe servant retrieves the empty box.\nDéroulard ate some chocolates every night after dinner, finishing a box on the night of his death.\nIn the study where the death occurred, Poirot spots an open but full and untouched box of chocolates.\nHe suspects poison, but all ate from common serving dishes.\nVirginie introduces Poirot into the household and he begins interviewing the servants about the meal served on the night of Déroulard\'s death.\nDéroulard\'s household consists of four servants, his aged and infirm aristocratic mother, herself, and on that night, two visitors: de Saint Alard, a neighbour from France, and John Wilson, an English friend.\nShe is convinced that his death three days earlier was not natural.\nMademoiselle Virginie Mesnard, a cousin of his late wife, asks Poirot to investigate.\nHe had a reputation as a ladies\' man.\nHe lived in a Brussels home that his late wife left him.\nAt a time of strife over the separation of church and state Déroulard was a key player as an anti-Catholic and a potential minister.\nPaul Déroulard, a French Deputy who was living in Brussels, had died from heart failure.\nPoirot said that was not true and relates the one occasion when he failed to solve a crime, years earlier when he was a police detective in Brussels.\nHastings mentions his belief that Poirot had never known failure in his professional career.\nThis short story was expanded five years later into the full-length novel The Mystery of the Blue Train, with a very similar plot, but names and details changed.\nGracie Kidd provided herself with an alibi by making the murder by Red Narky appear to have taken place later than it did.\nGracie rode the train past Bristol dressed in similar clothing to the now-dead woman and bought two items from a newsboy, drawing attention to herself in many ways.\nThe knife was thrown off the train before Taunton to support that story.\nThe story about Mrs Carrington directing her maid to wait at Bristol is false.\nShe and Red Narky probably murdered Mrs Carrington before Bristol.\nHalliday joins them followed by the angry Mason, whom Poirot introduces as Gracie Kidd.\nRummaging through Mason\'s trunk Poirot finds clothes like the ones worn by Mrs Carrington when she was murdered.\nPoirot and Hastings return to Halliday\'s house, to a room on the top floor.\nJapp tells Poirot something he does not know – that one of the jewels has been pawned by a known thief called Red Narky, a short man who usually works with a woman called Gracie Kidd.\nJapp confirms that this is exactly what has happened.\nWhen Japp next visits, Poirot guesses that the knife used to kill Mrs Carrington has been found by the side of the line between Weston (the first stop after Bristol on the Plymouth line) and Taunton (the next stop after that) and that a paper boy who spoke to Mrs Carrington has been interviewed.\nInspector Japp makes enquiries into the whereabouts of Rupert Carrington and the Count de la Rochefour at the time of the murder, but nothing substantial comes to light.\nIt appears that their romance has been restarted.\nHalliday produces a note found in his daughter\'s pocket from the Count de la Rochefour.\nPoirot pushes Halliday to tell him what he is holding back.\nShe describes what Mrs Carrington was wearing at the time.\nMason comes to confirm the facts of her part of the story.\nMrs Carrington had been chloroformed and then stabbed and the jewels are missing.\nAfter waiting at Bristol for most of the day, Mason checked into a hotel for the night and read of the murder in the next day\'s paper.\nWhen she was being given these instructions, Mason could see the back of a tall man in Mrs Carrington\'s compartment.\nShe would return for a later Plymouth train.\nAt Bristol the maid, Jane Mason, received a surprise: Mrs Carrington told her to wait at the station for a few hours.\nHer maid travelled with her in a third-class carriage.\nShe travelled by train from Paddington and changed at Bristol for the train to Plymouth.\nMrs Carrington was carrying her jewels to wear at the house party, jewels valued at almost one hundred thousand pounds.\nHis daughter was going to a house party in the West Country.\nPoirot and Hastings call on Mr Halliday in Park Lane.\nHer will leaves everything to her estranged husband who was away from town at the time of the tragedy.\nThey were about to announce a legal separation.\nShe later married Rupert Carrington who proved an unsuitable husband, being a gambler deep in debt.\nPrior to her marriage she was caught up with an adventurer called Count de la Rochefour but her father took her back to America.\nThe woman is identified as the Honourable Mrs Rupert Carrington, née Flossie Halliday, the daughter of Ebenezer Halliday, an American steel magnate who asks Poirot to take the case on.\nA young naval officer on the Plymouth express finds the dead body of a woman underneath a seat in his carriage.\nPearson is arrested and Poirot becomes a shareholder in a Burmese mine.\nPearson\'s insistence in taking Poirot to Limehouse was an elaborate charade to divert the detective\'s suspicions but it had the opposite effect.\nHaving only a hazy recollection and losing his nerve, he denied entering the den.\nLester entered the opium den and was drugged.\nHearing of Lester\'s invitation to visit the hotel from Wu Ling himself, Pearson set the young man up to take the blame for the murder.\nOne of the opium dealers had already been put into the Hotel Russell Square to impersonate Wu Ling.\nHe had indeed met Wu Ling in Southampton (there was only his own word that he failed to meet the visitor) and taken him direct to Limehouse where Wu Ling was killed.\nPoirot quickly finds the papers – Pearson has them.\nPoirot and Pearson leave the den quietly.\nThey overhear a conversation between some of the Chinese about the death of Wu Ling and that Lester certainly had the papers.\nPearson and Poirot go to Limehouse and investigate the opium den.\nLester is arrested but the papers about the mine are not found.\nThe taxi driver who took both men to a known opium den said Lester alone emerged looking ill half an hour later.\nHowever, Wu Ling had no servant.\nTheir taxi took them to Limehouse where Lester started to get nervous and got out of the taxi before they reached their destination and that was the end of his connection with the affair.\nInstead his servant appeared and asked him to accompany him to meet Wu Ling.\nMr Lester told a story of having been asked by Wu Ling to call for him at 10:30 am.\nHe finds that one of them, a young bank clerk called Charles Lester, was the man who called for Wu Ling at his hotel on the morning of the disappearance.\nPoirot investigates people who shared the voyage to England with Wu Ling.\nThe police were contacted and the next evening Wu Ling\'s body was found floating in the Thames.\nHe still failed to appear at the offices throughout the day.\nThey said Wu Ling had gone out earlier with a friend.\nHe failed to appear at the meeting and the hotel was contacted.\nHe thought Wu Ling made his own way to London where he booked into the Hotel Russell Square and telephoned the company to say that he would see them the next day.\nmr Pearson was to meet Wu Ling at the train in Southampton but the train was delayed, so Pearson left.\nWu Ling agreed to negotiate a sale of the papers and travelled to England to complete the transaction.\nThe mine\'s location was lost; the only clue to its location is in old papers in the hands of a Chinese family.\nThe lead remained, of value now.\nThe lead-silver mines were originally worked only for the silver by the Chinese in the fifteenth century.\nHe relates the story to Hastings.\nPoirot informs Hastings that he has no risky investments except for fourteen thousand shares in Burma Mines Ltd, which were given to him for services rendered.\nMrs Lemesurier later marries John Gardiner, and the curse, if it existed, is broken.\nHugo is placed in an asylum, where he dies.\nHe is responsible for the deaths until he gained the estate, and is now a madman.\nIt is Hugo, the boy\'s father.\nA figure creeps into the darkened bedroom and is about to poison the young boy by injection when Poirot and Hastings overpower him.\nHe and Hastings keep vigil all night in Ronald\'s room.\nYoung Ronald is stung by a bee, by his father\'s report, and Poirot is immediately concerned.\nHugo will die soon as he has an incurable disease, which news he shares with Poirot and Hastings.\nHe believes his first born son is doomed by the curse, while his second son will inherit.\nPoirot and Hastings travel to the home in Northumberland and renew their acquaintance with Hugo.\nIn the house are the family, the children\'s governess, Hugo\'s secretary, John Gardiner, and frequent visitor, cousin Major Roger Lemesurier, a favorite with the boys.\nShe saw for herself that the stem had been cut.\nOne was a fall when the boy was climbing down the ivy on the wall of their home.\nHe has had three narrow escapes from death in the past few months.\nShe worries about the elder of her two young sons, Ronald, who is eight.\nShe is an American who does not believe in the curse.\nPoirot receives a visit from Hugo\'s young wife.\nOver the next few years all of the inheritors of the estate die, under causes as varied as gun accident and insect sting, leaving Hugo, youngest of five brothers, to inherit the family estate.\nHis death is put down to a mental breakdown, from the bad news and shell-shock.\nThe next day, Poirot and Hastings learn that Vincent died, after he jumped from the moving train on the way home.\nInstead it passed to nephews, younger brothers or younger sons.\nHis wife cursed him before she died that no first-born son of his descendants should ever inherit.\nIn a fit of rage he killed them both.\nThis family curse arose from an ancestor who erroneously suspected his wife of being unfaithful and his young son of not being his own.\nNo first born son has lived to inherit the family estate since the Middle Ages.\nRoger tells them that Vincent\'s strong reaction to the bad news is partly due to the Lemesurier curse.\nVincent, the eldest and only of three sons to survive the war, was not close with his father.\nVincent and Uncle Hugo leave.\nCousin Roger rushes in with the news that Vincent\'s father has had a serious fall from a horse and is not expected to last the night.\nIn the latter days of the First World War, Poirot and Hastings dine at the Carlton where they meet Captain Vincent Lemesurier and his uncle Hugo, a chemist.\nThis is one of the few cases (aside from Murder on the Orient Express) in which Poirot allows a guilty party to avoid punishment, particularly when there is a dead body involved.\nHer story of the tramp will stand and she is free to marry Prince Paul.\nDespite the breach in the relationship, she turned to them in her moment of need.\nValerie is the estranged daughter of the Oglander family.\nThe son of the family killed Reedburn when he went with Valerie to plead with the blackmailer, presumably when things escalated into violence.\nBy mistake one card was left in the box.\nThe bridge game was set up after the event as an alibi for the four members of the family.\nHe tells Hastings what happened.\nHe returns the playing card to her, telling her it was their only slip-up.\nHe returns there to assure mrs Oglander that the police will not find out what happened.\nPoirot has the missing king of clubs, having taken it from the card box before at the Oglander house.\nReedburn was killed here and his body dragged to the recess facing the garden.\nThey return to Reedburn\'s house and in the curtained recess that leads to the drive they find a twin of the marble seat, again with lion\'s head arms but this one has a faint bloodstain on it.\nReturning to the drawing room Poirot notices that the king of clubs is missing from the cards on the bridge table.\nShe fled from the house towards the lights of the Oglander house.\nShe went to his house by prior appointment and was pleading with him when a man dressed like a tramp attacked him from behind the curtained recess.\nShe tells them that Reedburn held a secret of hers and threatened her but she did not kill him.\nMiss Saintclair is still in the house, ill in bed.\nIn the drawing room, the table with the cards for the interrupted bridge game is still in place.\nThey proceed to the Oglander home, along the garden path.\nThe doctor says there is no blood on the marble.\nPoirot sees a marble seat in the recess whose arm-ends are carved in the form of lions\' heads and wonders if they could have caused the wound to Reedburn\'s head.\nThe dead man had a female visitor that night that he let into the house himself but the servants did not see her.\nIt was in the recess facing the garden that Reedburn was found.\nAt either end are curtained recesses with French windows, one to the garden and the other to the drive.\nThe library runs the length of one side of the house.\nPoirot and Hastings visit the scene of the crime.\nThe prince is afraid that Valerie interpreted this to mean Reedburn, and attacked him.\nPrince Paul and Valerie saw a clairvoyant the previous week who turned over the king of clubs in her pack of cards and said a man threatened danger to her.\nReedburn was in love with Valerie although his feelings were not reciprocated.\nPoirot receives a visit from Prince Paul of Maurania, who wants to marry the dancer.\nThe woman is identified as the famous dancer, Valerie Saintclair.\nThe family fetched both a doctor and the police who called at the next-door villa to find the body of Henry Reedburn, the theatrical impresario, dead in the library with his skull split open by some unknown weapon.\n" and then collapsed.\nShe managed to say, "Murder.\nThe Oglander family was playing bridge in the drawing room of their house in Streatham last night when the French windows burst open and a woman staggered in, blood on her dress.\nThe case belonged to the Countess whose initials – VR – are ВР in Cyrillic, hence Poirot\'s perusal of the book on Russian grammar.\nAs the cigarette case was not Parker\'s, that must have been the genuine clue.\nOnly one of the clues was genuine and the other a mistake.\nHe tells Hastings that it was the double clue of the glove and the case which made him suspicious.\nHe in turn is very impressed by her.\nThey part on good terms, the Countess admitting that Poirot is one of the few men she fears.\nShe, equally calmly, does so.\nPoirot and Hastings visit the Countess and Poirot calmly tells the lady that his taxi is waiting and that he would be obliged if she would give him the jewels.\nThe collector is astonished and leaves Poirot to pursue the matter without police involvement.\nThe next day he visits Hardman and tells him who the thief is.\nThat evening, Hastings sees Poirot studying a book on Russian grammar.\nPreviously suspicious that the Countess may not be a real Russian, Poirot admits that the impressive lady is who she says she is.\nLater that day, Poirot receives a visit from the Countess Rossakoff who is indignant that Poirot is pursuing Parker.\nNevertheless, Poirot finds the twin of the glove in the hallway of Parker\'s house.\nHe visits Bernard Parker who states that the glove is his – but vehemently denies owning the cigarette case.\nPoirot examines the scene of the crime and finds a man\'s glove holding the safe open and a cigarette case with the initials "BP".\nFour of his guests had the opportunity to take the items – Mr Johnston, a South African millionaire only just arrived in London; Countess Vera Rossakoff, a refugee from the Russian revolution; Bernard Parker, a young and effeminate agent for Mr Hardman, and Lady Runcorn, a middle-aged society lady whose aunt is a kleptomaniac.\nHe showed his guests his collection of medieval jewels and later discovered that the safe had been rifled and the objects taken.\nThe theft occurred from his safe when he was holding a small tea party at his house.\nPoirot is called in by Marcus Hardman, a collector of various antique precious objects, to investigate a jewel robbery.\nA shamefaced mr Waverly confesses to Poirot and reveals that the child was presently with his former nurse.\nThe footprint of the dog in the priest\'s hole was from a toy kept there to amuse the boy until he could be spirited away afterwards.\nTredwell was in on the plan and he did indeed employ the tramp.\nThe poisoning of the wife to incapacitate her, the note on the pillow and the re-setting of the clock all point to an inside job, and only mr Waverly could sack all of the servants to reduce the level of protection around the child.\nPoirot says that Waverly kidnapped his own son to get money from his rich but very parsimonious wife.\nPoirot confronts mr Waverly.\nAfter questioning the child\'s sacked nurse, Tredwell and Miss Collins, Poirot concludes his investigation.\nIn it he finds the footprint of a small dog in one corner but no one knew of any such creature small enough in the house.\nPoirot travels to Waverly Court and is told of the existence of a priest hole.\nThe tramp claims Tredwell employed him but the butler has an alibi for the time that he was said to meet the tramp: he was in the house with mr Waverly.\nThey hear the village clock chiming twelve and realise that the main clock in the house had been set forward ten minutes.\nWhen Waverly and the Inspector dash outside to see what is happening, the boy is taken by car through a now unguarded gate.\nHe has cotton wool, chloroform and a post-kidnap note ready to plant.\nPrecisely at noon the police find a tramp sneaking toward the house.\nAt the appointed time Waverly, his son and Inspector McNeil of Scotland Yard are in a locked room in the house with police posted in the extensive grounds.\nHorrified that someone inside the house is involved, mr Waverly sacks all of the staff except Tredwell, his long-time butler, and Miss Collins, his wife\'s trusted secretary-companion.\nOn that day, mrs Waverly was mildly poisoned and a note was left on mr Waverly\'s pillow that stated, "At Twelve O\'clock".\nThe police took little interest until the final letter which stated that the boy would be kidnapped at twelve o\'clock the next day.\nPrior to the kidnapping, the family received anonymous letters that threatened to take the boy unless twenty-five thousand pounds was paid.\nPoirot is called in to investigate the kidnapping of three-year-old Johnnie Waverly, the son of Marcus Waverly, from his home, Waverly Court in Surrey.\nHe is sure that Scotland Yard will catch up with Radnor, despite the latter\'s twenty-four hours start.\nPoirot confesses to Hastings that he did not have any real evidence of Radnor\'s guilt and that the stunt was his only option to get Mr Pengelley acquitted.\nRadnor signs and hurries out.\nPoirot offers him twenty-four hours escape if he signs the confession before he hands it over to the police and dupes the man into thinking that Poirot\'s own flat is being watched.\nMrs Pengelley fell for Radnor because he made sure she would, flirting with her while at the same time planting seeds in the woman\'s mind that her husband was trying to poison her.\nHe planned to get rid of both the Pengelleys, one through murder and the other by execution so his new wife, Freda, would inherit their money.\nAttending the committal hearing, Poirot invites Radnor back to his flat where he produces a written confession for the man to sign.\nHer widower is arrested and charged with murder.\nPoirot and Hastings return to London but are able to follow events in the papers as rumour spreads leading to Mrs Pengelley\'s body being exhumed and traces of arsenic found.\nThe situation became so bad that Freda had no option but to move out.\nThey meet Freda Stanton and Jacob Radnor and discover that the couple is engaged, and that the cause of the row between Freda and her aunt was the older woman\'s own infatuation with Radnor, a far younger man.\nTheir last visit before leaving Cornwall is to Mrs Pengelley\'s niece.\nPoirot interviews the dead woman\'s doctor, who at first denies that anything could be wrong but is then astounded to learn she had gone to London to consult the detective.\nPoirot and Hastings travel to Cornwall the next day and are shocked to find that Mrs Pengelley died half an hour before.\nRadnor is described as "just a friend" and a "very pleasant young fellow".\nMrs Pengelley is vague as to the cause of the row but states that she has been told by a Mr Radnor to leave Freda to come to her senses.\nAnother resident in the house was her niece, Freda Stanton, but that lady had a row with Mrs Pengelley the week before and left the house after living there for eight years.\nThere could be no financial motive to suggest why Mr Pengelley should try to murder his wife but she suspects an affair with his young receptionist.\nShe has no proof of the allegation, only that she only suffers when her husband is at home, not when he is away at the weekends and a bottle of weedkiller, supposedly unused, is half-empty.\nShe and her husband live in Polgarwith, a small market town in Cornwall.\nShe has been ill after eating but her doctor states that she is suffering from acute gastritis.\nPoirot receives a visit from a Mrs Pengelley, a middle-aged woman who is afraid that she is being poisoned by her husband, a dentist.\nPoirot views the link between a disappearing cook and a murder to be one of his most interesting cases, and he frames the cheque sent by mr Todd for his consulting fee as a reminder of it.\nThe trunk with Davis\' body inside is located at a Glasgow railway station.\nOn arriving at Clapham, Simpson has already disappeared but is traced to an ocean liner bound for the US.\nIt was Simpson in disguise who had approached her in the street.\nHe killed the man for the securities and needed an old, inconspicuous trunk in which to hide the body and that meant diverting Eliza out of the way.\nSimpson knew what his colleague Davis was up to at the bank.\nPoirot rushes back to Clapham with Hastings and explains matters on the way.\nEliza had immediately taken the train north and a couple of days later received her belongings from Clapham, although wrapped in paper parcels and not in her old trunk, which she supposes had been kept behind by Mrs Todd in a fit of pique.\nThe money came from a friend of her late grandmother who had settled in Australia and married a wealthy settler.\nThis legacy was communicated to her by a man who approached her in the street as she was returning to the Todd\'s house one night, the man supposedly having come from there to see her.\nShe tells him a story of having come into a legacy of a house in Carlisle and an income of three hundred pounds a year, dependent upon her taking up the offer and immediately leaving domestic service.\nPoirot places advertisements in the newspaper enquiring as to the whereabouts of Eliza and several days later he is successful in locating her when she visits Poirot\'s rooms.\nStruck by this coincidence as he is, Poirot cannot see a connection between an absconding bank clerk and a missing cook.\nThe other occupants of the house are Mr Todd, who works in the city, and their lodger, Mr Simpson, who works in the same bank at which Mr Davis worked.\nInterviewing the maid in the house, Poirot finds out that the trunk was already packed, meaning that Eliza had planned to leave even though her departure was swift.\nEliza Dunn, a middle-aged woman, walked out of her job and the Todd\'s house in Clapham two days ago without working her notice and has not communicated with her employer since, except for sending for her trunk that day.\nChallenged, he decides, with some humour and to avoid an argument, to take the seemingly trivial case.\nHe is put on the spot though when visited by a Mrs Todd who is determined that he investigate her missing cook.\nDavis) who disappears with fifty thousand pounds of securities, a suicidal man and a missing typist.\nThese include a bank clerk (Mr.\nPoirot is not interested in investigating some of the cases which appear in the newspapers and which Hastings tries to bring to his attention.\nHis motive was self-preservation as it was he who had been supplying Courtenay with drugs and Cronshaw was on the point of finding out and exposing him.\nHe did not stay there as he claimed but returned immediately.\nDavidson killed Cronshaw earlier, hid the body in the curtained recess, then took Courtenay home where he fed her an overdose of the drug.\nIt could not have been Beltane as his costume was too elaborate to change quickly.\nThe stiffness of the body meant he had been dead for some time and not killed in the ten-minute interval between being seen in the box and then being found dead on the floor, therefore the figure seen as Harlequin was one of the others.\nPoirot reveals that the strength with which the knife was plunged into Cronshaw meant that a man was responsible for the crime.\nDavidson leaps forward and curses Poirot but is quickly arrested by Japp.\nUnderneath Pierrot\'s loose garb is that of the slimmer-fitting Harlequin.\nHe arranges a get-together of the people involved at his flat where he puts on a shadowed presentation across a back-lit screen of the six costumes but then reveals that there were actually five.\nPoirot starts to investigate, finding out to everyone\'s puzzlement that Cronshaw was emphatically opposed to drugs, that Beltane\'s costume had a hump and a ruffle and that a curtained recess exists in the supper room.\nCoco Courtenay is found dead in her bed from an overdose of cocaine; at the inquest that followed, it was found that she was addicted to the drug.\nHe was found ten minutes later on the floor of the supper room, stabbed through the heart with a table knife, his body strangely stiff.\nCronshaw left the box to join them but then disappeared.\nWhen they had gone, a friend of Cronshaw\'s spotted Harlequin in a box looking down on the ball and called up to him to join them on the main floor.\nThe latter was crying and asked Chris Davidson to take her home to her flat in Chelsea.\nThe night went badly from the start when it was obvious to the party that Cronshaw and Miss Courtenay were not on speaking terms.\nIn the roles of Pierrot and Pierette were Mr and Mrs Christopher Davidson (he being a stage actor) and finally, Miss "Coco" Courtenay, an actress rumoured to be engaged to Lord Cronshaw, was Columbine.\nLord Cronshaw was Harlequin, his uncle, the honourable Eustace Beltane, was Punchinello and Mrs Mallaby, an American widow, was Punchinella.\nA group of six people, headed by the young Viscount Cronshaw, attended dressed in the costume of the Commedia dell\'arte.Poirot's Early Cases: Chief Inspector Japp asks Poirot to assist Scotland Yard in the strange events which took place at a recent costumed Victory Ball