One advantage of being a medical practitioner is that you can usually tell when people are lying to you. I should have known from Mrs. Folliott’s manner, if from nothing else, that she did mind answering my questions—minded intensely. She was thoroughly uncomfortable and upset, and there was plainly some mystery in the background. I judged her to be a woman quite unused to deception of any kind, and consequently rendered acutely uneasy when forced to practice it. A child could have seen through her.
But it was also clear that she had no intention of telling me anything further. Whatever the mystery centering around Ursula Bourne might be, I was not going to learn it through Mrs. Folliott.
Defeated, I apologized once more for disturbing her, took my hat and departed.
I went to see a couple of patients and arrived home about six o’clock. Caroline was sitting beside the wreck of tea things. She had that look of suppressed exultation on her face which I know only too well. It is a sure sign with her, of either the getting or the giving of information. I wondered which it had been.
“I’ve had a very interesting afternoon,” began Caroline as I dropped into my own particular easy chair, and stretched out my feet to the inviting blaze in the fireplace.
“Have you?” I asked. “Miss Ganett drop in to tea?”
Miss Ganett is one of the chief of our newsmongers.
“Guess again,” said Caroline with intense complacency.
I guessed several times, working slowly through all the members of Caroline’s Intelligence Corps. My sister received each guess with a triumphant shake of the head. In the end she volunteered the information herself.
“M. Poirot!” she said. “Now what do you think of that?”