"Always impatient, the good Hastings! But no, it will not be so long. The one man they were afraid of—myself—is out of the way. I give them two or three months at most."
His speaking of some one being got out of the way reminded me of Ingles and his tragic death, and I remembered that I had never told Poirot about the dying Chinaman in St. Giles' Hospital.
He listened with keen attention to my story.
"Ingles's servant, eh? And the few words he uttered were in Italian? Curious."
"That's why I suspected it might have been a plant on the part of the Big Four."
"Your reasoning is at fault, Hastings. Employ the little gray cells. If your enemies wished to deceive you they would assuredly have seen to it that the Chinaman spoke in intelligible pigeon English. No, the message was genuine. Tell me again all that you heard?"
"First of all he made a reference to Handel's Largo, and then he said something that sounded like 'carrozzo'—that's a carriage, isn't it?"
"Nothing else?"
"Well, just at the end he murmured something like 'Cara' somebody or other—some woman's name. Zia, I think. But I don't suppose that that had any bearing on the rest of it."
"You would not suppose so, Hastings. Cara Zia is very important, very important indeed."