Problem at Sea: A Hercule Poirot Short Story

Hercule Poirot bowed. ‘Your methods of extracting the scandalous matter. Admirable!’

Miss Henderson laughed in an unashamed manner. ‘That touch about the Guards? I knew that would bring the old boy up spluttering and gasping.’ She leaned forward confidentially. ‘I admit I like scandal – the more ill-natured, the better!’

Poirot looked thoughtfully at her – her slim well-preserved figure, her keen dark eyes, her grey hair; a woman of forty-five who was content to look her age.

Ellie said abruptly: ‘I have it! Aren’t you the great detective?’

Poirot bowed. ‘You are too amiable, mademoiselle.’ But he made no disclaimer.

‘How thrilling,’ said Miss Henderson. ‘Are you “hot on the trail” as they say in books? Have we a criminal secretly in our midst? Or am I being indiscreet?’

‘Not at all. Not at all. It pains me to disappoint your expectations, but I am simply here, like everyone else, to amuse myself.’

He said it in such a gloomy voice that Miss Henderson laughed.

‘Oh! Well, you will be able to get ashore tomorrow at Alexandria. You have been to Egypt before?’

‘Never, mademoiselle.’

Miss Henderson rose somewhat abruptly.

‘I think I shall join the General on his constitutional,’ she announced.

Poirot sprang politely to his feet.

She gave him a little nod and passed on to the deck.

A faint puzzled look showed for a moment in Poirot’s eyes, then, a little smile creasing his lips, he rose, put his head through the door and glanced down the deck. Miss Henderson was leaning against the rail talking to a tall, soldierly-looking man.

Poirot’s smile deepened. He drew himself back into the smoking-room with the same exaggerated care with which a tortoise withdraws itself into its shell. For the moment he had the smoking-room to himself, though he rightly conjectured that that would not last long.

It did not. Mrs Clapperton, her carefully waved platinum head protected with a net, her massaged and dieted form dressed in a smart sports suit, came through the door from the bar with the purposeful air of a woman who has always been able to pay top price for anything she needed.

She said: ‘John –? Oh! Good morning, M. Poirot – have you seen John?’

‘He’s on the starboard deck, madame. Shall I –?’

She arrested him with a gesture. ‘I’ll sit here a minute.’ She sat down in a regal fashion in the chair opposite him. From the distance she had looked a possible twenty-eight. Now, in spite of her exquisitely made-up face, her delicately plucked eyebrows, she looked not her actual forty-nine years, but a possible fifty-five. Her eyes were a hard pale blue with tiny pupils.