V
Hercule Poirot descended¹ from his taxi, paid the man and rang the bell of 58, Queen Charlotte
Street.
After a little delay it was opened by a boy in page boy’s uniform with a freckled² face, red hair,
and an earnest manner.
Hercule Poirot said:
“Mr. Morley?”
There was in his heart a ridiculous hope that Mr. Morley might have been called away, might be
indisposed, might not be seeing patients today … All in vain. The page boy drew back, Hercule
Poirot stepped inside, and the door closed behind him with the quiet remorselessness of
unalterable doom³.
The boy said: “Name, please?”
Poirot gave it to him, a door on the right of the hall was thrown open and he stepped into the
waiting room.
It was a room furnished in quiet good taste and, to Hercule Poirot, indescribably gloomy. On the
polished (reproduction) Sheraton table were carefully arranged papers and periodicals. The
(reproduction) Hepplewhite sideboard held two Sheffield plated candlesticks and an épergne. The
mantelpiece held a bronze clock and two bronze vases. The windows were shrouded⁴ by curtains of
blue velvet⁵. The chairs were upholstered in a Jacobean design of red birds and flowers.
In one of them sat a military- looking gentleman with a fierce moustache and a yellow
complexion⁶. He looked at Poirot with an air of one considering some noxious⁷ insect. It was not so
much his gun he looked as though he wished he had with him, as his Flit spray. Poirot, eyeing him
with distaste, said to himself, “In verity⁸, there are some Englishmen who are altogether so
unpleasing and ridiculous that they should have been put out of their

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