The buxom dame waddled across to the lift briskly enough. Her husband, who had been talking to me, looked at Poirot inquiringly.
“Madame your wife is so amiable as to insist on showing me her pearl necklace,” explained the latter.
“Oh, the pearls!” Opalsen smiled in a satisfied fashion. “Well, they are worth seeing. Cost a pretty penny too! Still, the money’s there all right; I could get what I paid for them any day—perhaps more. May have to, too, if things go on as they are now. Money’s confoundedly tight in the City. All this infernal E.P.D.” He rambled on, launching into technicalities where I could not follow him.
He was interrupted by a small page-boy who approached and murmured something in his ear.
“Eh—what? I’ll come at once. Not taken ill, is she? Excuse me, gentlemen.”
He left us abruptly. Poirot leaned back and lit one of his tiny Russian cigarettes. Then, carefully and meticulously, he arranged the empty coffee-cups in a neat row, and beamed happily on the result.
The minutes passed. The Opalsens did not return.
“Curious,” I remarked, at length. “I wonder when they will come back.”
Poirot watched the ascending spirals of smoke, and then said thoughtfully:
“They will not come back.”