there may be something beneath it which the good Françoise overlooked.’”
“Françoise?”
“Or Denise, or Léonie. Whoever did this room. Since there is no dust, the room must have been done this morning. I reconstruct the incident like this. Yesterday, possibly last night, M. Renauld drew a check to the order of someone named Duveen. Afterward it was torn up, and scattered on the floor. This morning—" But M. Bex was already pulling impatiently at the bell.
Françoise answered it. Yes, there had been a lot of pieces of paper on the floor. What had she done with them? Put them in the kitchen stove of course! What else?
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 checkbook. 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
31
