One, Two, Buckle My Shoe (Hercule Poirot, #23)

by Agatha Christie

An unpleasant and dangerous looking young man, he thought, and not impossibly a murderer. At any rate he looked far more like a murderer than any of the murderers Hercule Poirot had arrested in the course of his career.

There are certain humiliating moments in the lives of the greatest of men. It has been said that no man is a hero to his valet. To that may be added that few men are heroes to themselves at the moment of visiting their dentist.

He was a man who was accustomed to have a good opinion of himself. He was Hercule Poirot, superior in most ways to other men. But in this moment he was unable to feel superior in any way whatever. His morale was down to zero. He was just that ordinary, craven figure, a man afraid of the dentist’s chair.

The ordeal of the drill was terror rather than pain.

“I’ll tell you something that I’ve always noticed, M. Poirot. The big people—the important people—they’re always on time—never keep you waiting.

“Before I came up, every one looked to me like a criminal! Now, perhaps, it will be different!”

One of the richest and most powerful men in England—but he still had to go to the dentist just like anybody else, and no doubt felt just the same as anybody else about it!

“Barnes? A funny precise little man. Retired Civil Servant. Lives out Ealing way.”

He went very little into society, had a house in Kent and one in Norfolk where he spent weekends—not with gay parties, but with a few quiet stodgy friends.

She was tall, thin, and her face had an intelligence and aliveness that redeemed its lack of actual beauty.

“Sleuths on the doorstep rather suggest bombs in the attic, don’t they?”

Oh! and I remember—a very peculiar looking foreigner came out of the house just as I arrived.” Japp coughed. Poirot said with dignity: “That was I, Madame.” “Oh dear!” Miss Sainsbury Seale peered at him.

“Liars,” he said, “are neither so circumstantial nor so inconsequential.

Poirot was silent. He tried to visualize Mr. Morley in the role of seducer to a luscious-eyed Greek maiden, but failed lamentably.

“Oh well, you never know what may happen on a cruise!”

these quantitive analyses seem to take a month of Sundays

He felt, quite positively, that this was indeed a dangerous young man. A lean hungry face, an aggressive jaw, the eyes of a fanatic. It was a face, though, that women might find attractive. He was untidily, even shabbily dressed, and he ate with a careless voraciousness that was, so the man watching him thought, significant. Poirot summed him up to himself. “It is a wolf with ideas….”

He had the slightly harassed look of a man whose womenfolk have been too much for him.

She went so white that it startled him. He had not believed that that deep tan could change to such a greenish hue.

“Tchah!” “What did you say?” “I made, mon ami, an exclamation of annoyance!” “Oh! that was it. I thought you’d caught cold.

Hercule Poirot occasionally indulged in the fancy that he knew by the ring of his telephone bell what kind of message was impending.

Alistair Blunt’s own sanctum was a low, long room at the back of the house, with windows opening upon the garden. It was comfortable, with deep armchairs and settees and just enough pleasant untidiness to make it livable.

“I am very odd. That is to say, I am methodical, orderly and logical—and I do not like distorting facts to support a theory—that, I find—is unusual!”

“I loathe the sight of you—you bloody little bourgeois detective!” She swept away from him in a whirl of expensive model drapery.

Presently, like some fantastic moon, a round object rose gently over the top of the kitchen garden wall. It was the egg-shaped head of Hercule Poirot,

It’s all hot air! I find myself up against it the whole time—a new heaven and a new earth. What does it mean? They can’t tell you themselves! They’re just drunk on words.”

Poirot nodded his head. He was essentially in sympathy with the banker. He, too, approved of solvency.

That shows you how illogical the human animal is. It’s crazy, isn’t it?” “The gap between theory and practice is a wide one.”

“I do not take sides. I am on the side only of the truth.”

none of Mrs. Fletcher’s family of six (two having died in infancy) had ever occasioned their parents the least anxiety.

“Don’t you realize, Poirot, that the safety and happiness of the whole nation depends on me?” “I am not concerned with nations, Monsieur. I am concerned with the lives of private individuals who have the right not to have their lives taken from them.”

Poirot sighed. He said: “The world is yours. The New Heaven and the New Earth. In your new world, my children, let there be freedom and let there be pity … That is all I ask.”

“Don’t you think so?” “Yes, I do.” “Well, then—” “We may be wrong,” said Hercule Poirot. “I never thought of that,” said Mr. Barnes. “So we may.”