astonishment. The confession of ignorance drawn from him over the match end had, I thought, been bound to humiliate him, but here he was self satisfied as ever, laying down the law to the great Giraud without a tremor.
The detective twisted his moustache, eyeing my friend in a somewhat bantering fashion.
“You don’t agree with me, eh? Well, what strikes you particularly about the case. Let’s hear your views.”
“One thing presents itself to me as being significant. Tell me, M. Giraud, does nothing strike you as familiar about this case? Is there nothing it reminds you of?”
“Familiar? Reminds me of? I can’t say off-hand. I don’t think so, though.”
“You are wrong,” said Poirot quietly. “A crime almost precisely similar has been committed before.”
“When? And where?”
“Ah, that, unfortunately, I cannot for the moment remember—but I shall do so. I had hoped you might be able to assist me.”
Giraud snorted incredulously.
“There have been many affairs of masked men! I cannot remember the details of them all. These crimes all resemble each other more or less.”
“There is such a thing as the individual touch.” Poirot suddenly assumed his lecturing manner, and addressed us collectively. “I am speaking to you now of the psychology of crime. M. Giraud knows quite well that each criminal has his particular method, and that the police, when called in to investigate—say a case of burglary—can often make a shrewd guess at the offender, simply by the peculiar method he has employed. (Japp would tell you the same, Hastings.) Man is an unoriginal animal. Unoriginal within the law in his daily respectable life, equally unoriginal outside the law. If a man commits a crime, any other crime he commits will resemble it closely. The English murderer who disposed of his wives in succession by drowning them in their baths was a case in point. Had he varied his methods, he might have escaped detection to this day. But he obeyed
