Читать книгу Agatha Christie: The Collection. The Mysterious Affair at Styles, Poirot Investigates, The Murder on the Links, The Secret Adversary, The Man in the Brown Suit онлайн

104 страница из 281

“Ah! Thank you, mademoiselle; good morning.”

As we walked briskly away from the house, I glanced at him more than once. I had often before noticed that, if anything excited him, his eyes turned green like a cat’s. They were shining like emeralds now.

“My friend,” he broke out at last, “I have a little idea, a very strange, and probably utterly impossible idea. And yet — it fits in.”

I shrugged my shoulders. I privately thought that Poirot was rather too much given to these fantastic ideas. In this case, surely, the truth was only too plain and apparent.

“So that is the explanation of the blank label on the box,” I remarked. “Very simple, as you said. I really wonder that I did not think of it myself.”

Poirot did not appear to be listening to me.

“They have made one more discovery, là-bas,” he observed, jerking his thumb over his shoulder in the direction of Styles. “Mr. Wells told me as we were going upstairs.”

“What was it?”

“Locked up in the desk in the boudoir, they found a will of Mrs. Inglethorp’s, dated before her marriage, leaving her fortune to Alfred Inglethorp. It must have been made just at the time they were engaged. It came quite as a surprise to Wells — and to John Cavendish also. It was written on one of those printed will forms, and witnessed by two of the servants — not Dorcas.”