ELEVEN, TWELVE, MEN MUST DELVE¹
I
After passing a troubled night, Hercule Poirot was up and about early on the next day. The
weather was perfect and he retraced² his steps of last night.
The herbaceous borders were in full beauty and though Poirot himself leaned to a more orderly
type of flower arrangement—a neat arrangement of beds of scarlet³ geraniums such as are seen at
Ostend—he nevertheless realized that here was the perfection of the English garden spirit.
He pursued his way through a rose garden, where the neat layout of the beds delighted him—
and through the winding⁴ ways of an alpine⁵ rock garden, coming at last to the walled kitchen
gardens.
Here he observed a sturdy woman clad in a tweed coat and skirt, black browed, with short
cropped black hair who was talking in a slow, emphatic⁶ Scots voice to what was evidently the
head gardener. The head gardener, Poirot observed, did not appear to be enjoying the
conversation.
A sarcastic⁷ inflection made itself heard in Miss Helen Montressor’s voice, and Poirot escaped
nimbly down a side path.
A gardener who had been, Poirot shrewdly suspected, resting on his spade, began digging with
fervour. Poirot approached nearer. The man, a young fellow, dug with ardour, his back to Poirot
who paused to observe him.
“Good morning,” said Poirot amiably⁸.
A muttered “Morning, sir,” was the response, but the man did not stop working.
Poirot was a little surprised. In his experience a gardener, though anxious to appear zealously⁹ at
work as you approached, was usually only too willing to pause and pass the time of day when

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