With a gesture of despair, Bex dismissed her. Then, his face lightening, he ran to the desk. In a minute he was hunting through the dead man’s cheque book. Then he repeated his former gesture. The last counterfoil was blank.
“Courage!” cried Poirot, clapping him on the back. “Without doubt, Madame Renauld will be able to tell us all about this mysterious person named Duveen.”
The commissary’s face cleared. “That is true. Let us proceed.”
As we turned to leave the room, Poirot remarked casually: “It was here that M. Renauld received his guest last night, eh?”
“It was—but how did you know?”
“By this. I found it on the back of the leather chair.”
And he held up between his finger and thumb a long black hair—a woman’s hair!
M. Bex took us out by the back of the house to where there was a small shed leaning against the house. He produced a key from his pocket and unlocked it.
“The body is here. We moved it from the scene of the crime just before you arrived, as the photographers had done with it.”
He opened the door and we passed in. The murdered man lay on the ground, with a sheet over him. M. Bex dexterously whipped off the covering. Renauld was a man of medium height, slender and lithe in figure. He looked about fifty years of age, and his dark hair was plentifully streaked with grey. He was clean shaven with a long thin nose, and eyes set rather close together, and his skin was deeply bronzed, as that of a man who had spent most of his life beneath tropical skies. His lips were drawn back from his teeth and an expression of absolute amazement and terror was stamped on the livid features.