The ABC Murders (Hercule Poirot, #13)

by Agatha Christie

I stared at him, puzzled. Without a word he walked into his bedroom and returned with a bottle in his hand which he handed to me. I took it, for the moment uncomprehending. It bore the words: Revivit.—To bring back the natural tone of the hair. Revivit is not a dye. In five shades, Ash, Chestnut, Titian, Brown, Black. “Poirot,” I cried. “You have dyed your hair!” “Ah, the comprehension comes to you!” “So that’s why your hair looks so much blacker than it did last time I was back.” “Exactly.” “Dear me,” I said, recovering from the shock. “I suppose next time I come home I shall find you wearing false moustaches—or are you doing so now?” Poirot winced. His moustaches had always been his sensitive point. He was inordinately proud of them. My words touched him on the raw. “No, no, indeed, mon ami. That day, I pray the good God, is still far off. The false moustache! Quel horreur!” He tugged at them vigorously to assure me of their genuine character. “Well, they are very luxuriant still,” I said. “N’est ce pas? Never, in the whole of London, have I seen a pair of moustaches to equal mine.” A good job too, I thought privately.

“In truth, it has been very like that. Each time I say: this is the end. But no, something else arises! And I will admit it, my friend, the retirement I care for it not at all. If the little grey cells are not exercised, they grow the rust.” “I see,” I said. “You exercise them in moderation.” “Precisely. I pick and choose. For Hercule Poirot nowadays only the cream of crime.”

“I admit,” I said, “that a second murder in a book often cheers things up. If the murder happens in the first chapter, and you have to follow up everybody’s alibi until the last page but one—well, it does get a bit tedious.”

You yourself are English and yet you do not seem to appreciate the quality of the English reaction to a direct question. It is invariably one of suspicion and the natural result is reticence. If I had asked those people for information they would have shut up like oysters. But by making a statement (and a somewhat out of the way and preposterous one) and by your contradiction of it, tongues are immediately loosened. We know also that that particular time was a ‘busy time’—that is, that everyone would be intent on their own concerns and that there would be a fair number of people passing along the pavements. Our murderer chose his time well, Hastings.”

“Mon ami, what will you? You fix upon me a look of dog-like devotion and demand of me a pronouncement à la Sherlock Holmes! Now for the truth—I do not know what the murderer looks like, nor where he lives, nor how to set hands upon him.” “If

“Who are you? You don’t belong to the police?” “I am better than the police,” said Poirot. He said it without conscious arrogance. It was, to him, a simple statement of fact.

He was, I knew, deeply unhappy over the case. He refused to leave London, preferring to be on the spot in case of emergency. In those hot dog days even his moustaches drooped—neglected for once by their owner.

“Mais qu’est ce que vous faites là?” “I was packing for you. I thought it would save time.” “Vous éprouvez trop d’émotion, Hastings. It affects your hands and your wits. Is that a way to fold a coat? And regard what you have done to my pyjamas. If the hairwash breaks what will befall them?” “Good heavens, Poirot,” I cried, “this is a matter of life and death. What does it matter what happens to our clothes?” “You have no sense of proportion, Hastings. We cannot catch a train earlier than the time that it leaves, and to ruin one’s clothes will not be the least helpful in preventing a murder.” Taking his suitcase from me firmly, he took the packing into his own hands. He explained that we were to take the letter and envelope to Paddington with us.

“How odd all this is, Poirot,” I exclaimed, struck suddenly by an idea. “Do you know, this is the first crime of this kind that you and I have worked on together? All our murders have been—well, private murders, so to speak.” “You are quite right, my friend. Always, up to now, it has fallen to our lot to work from the inside. It has been the history of the victim that was important. The important points have been: ‘Who benefited by the death? What opportunities had those round him to commit the crime?’ It has always been the ‘crime intime.’ Here, for the first time in our association, it is cold-blooded, impersonal murder. Murder from the outside.” I shivered.

“Precisely. And therefore not to be arrived at in a minute. When I know what the murderer is like, I shall be able to find out who he is. And

Crime is terribly revealing. Try and vary your methods as you will, your tastes, your habits, your attitude of mind, and your soul is revealed by your actions. There

Nobody in the world could put a gentle nuance of irony into a couple of words better than Poirot. About thirty-five years fell away from Franklin Clarke. He looked suddenly like a shy schoolboy.

“Sooner or later, by reason of your association with one another, something will come to light, will take on a significance as yet undreamed of. It is like the jig-saw puzzle—each of you may have a piece apparently without meaning, but which when reunited may show a definite portion of the picture as a whole.”

“Words, mademoiselle, are only the outer clothing of ideas.”

I’m not ashamed to say it—reread a book of E. Nesbit’s that I used to love as a kid.

“Yes. To hum a tune is extremely dangerous. It reveals the subconscious mind. The tune you hummed dates, I think, from the days of the war. Comme ça,” Poirot sang in an abominable falsetto voice: “Some of the time I love a brunette, Some of the time I love a blonde (Who comes from Eden by way of Sweden). “What could be more revealing? Mais je crois que la blonde l’emporte sur la brunette!” “Really, Poirot,” I cried, blushing slightly.

Mad, poor creature—the murderer, I mean. It’s all the noise and the speed nowadays—people can’t stand it. I’ve always been sorry for mad people—their heads must feel so queer. And then, being shut up—it must be so terrible. But what else can one do? If they kill people…”

A beautiful evening…A really beautiful evening…. A quotation from Browning came into his head. “God’s in His heaven. All’s right with the world.” He had always been fond of that quotation.

A middle-aged gentleman strongly resembling the frog footman in Alice in Wonderland was led in. He was highly excited and his voice was shrill with emotion.

“Now’s your chance, M. Poirot,” he said. “Crome’s in a fog. Exert those cellular arrangements of yours I used to hear so much about. Show us the way he did it.” Japp departed. “What about it, Poirot?” I said. “Are the little grey cells equal to the task?”

“We will talk! Je vous assure, Hastings—there is nothing so dangerous for anyone who has something to hide as conversation! Speech, so a wise old Frenchman said to me once, is an invention of man’s to prevent him from thinking. It is also an infallible means of discovering that which he wishes to hide. A human being, Hastings, cannot resist the opportunity to reveal himself and express his personality which conversation gives him. Every time he will give himself away.”

Her he complimented in a flowing Gallic style on the shape of her ankles. “The legs of the English—always they are too thin! But you, mademoiselle, have the perfect leg. It has shape—it has an ankle!” Milly Higley giggled a good deal and told him not to go on so. She knew what French gentlemen were like.

And catch a fox And put him in a box And never let him go.” “And catch a fox and put him in a box and never let him go!”

“I am Hercule Poirot….” Poirot said the words very gently…and watched for the effect. Mr. Cust raised his head a little. “Oh, yes?”

But what is often called an intuition is really an impression based on logical deduction or experience. When an expert feels that there is something wrong about a picture or a piece of furniture or the signature on a cheque he is really basing that feeling on a host of small signs and details. He has no need to go into them minutely—his experience obviates that—the net result is the definite impression that something is wrong. But it is not a guess, it is an impression based on experience.