Chapter 8
Inspector Raglan is Confident
We looked at each other.
‘You’ll have inquiries made at the station, of course?’ I said.
‘Naturally, but I’m not over sanguine as to the result. you know what that station is like.’
I did. king’s Abbot is a mere village, but its station happens to be an important junction. Most of the big expresses stop there, and trains are shunted, re-sorted, and made up. It has two or three public telephone boxes. At that time of night, three local trains come in close upon each other, to catch the connection with the express for the north which comes in at 10.19 and leaves at 10.23. The whole place is in a bustle, and the chances of one particular person being noticed telephoning or getting into the express are very small indeed.
‘But why telephone at all?’ demanded Melrose. ‘That is what I find so extraordinary. There seems no rhyme or reason in the thing.’
Poirot carefully straightened a china ornament on one of the bookcases.
‘Be sure there was a reason,’ he said over his shoulder.
‘But what reason could it be?’
‘When we know that, we shall know everything. This case is very curious and very interesting.’
There was something almost indescribable in the way he said those last words. I felt that he was looking at the case from some peculiar angle of his own, and what he saw I could not tell. he went to the window and stood there, looking out.
‘You say it was nine o’clock, dr Sheppard, when you met this stranger outside the gate?’
He asked the question without turning round.
‘Yes,’ I replied. ‘I heard the church clock chime the hour.’
‘How long would it take him to reach the house – to reach this window, for instance?’
‘Five minutes at the outside. Two or three minutes only if he took the path at the right of the drive and came straight here.’
‘But to do that he would have to know the way. how can I explain myself? – it would mean that he had been here before – that he knew his surroundings.’
‘That is true,’ replied colonel Melrose.