I wondered how I could have been so unobservant as to overlook this. Here was a clue worth having. Poirot delicately dipped his finger into liquid, and tasted it gingerly. He made a grimace.
“Cocoa—with—I think—rum in it.”
He passed on to the debris on the floor, where the table by the bed had been overturned. A reading-lamp, some books, matches, a bunch of keys, and the crushed fragments of a coffee-cup lay scattered about.
“Ah, this is curious,” said Poirot.
“I must confess that I see nothing particularly curious about it.”
“You do not? Observe the lamp—the chimney is broken in two places; they lie there as they fell. But see, the coffee-cup is absolutely smashed to powder.”
“Well,” I said wearily, “I suppose someone must have stepped on it.”
“Exactly,” said Poirot, in an odd voice. “Someone stepped on it.”
He rose from his knees, and walked slowly across to the mantelpiece, where he stood abstractedly fingering the ornaments, and straightening them—a trick of his when he was agitated.
“Mon ami,” he said, turning to me, “somebody stepped on that cup, grinding it to powder, and the reason they did so was either because it contained strychnine or—which is far more serious—because it did not contain strychnine!”