Page:Murder on the Links - 1985.djvu/62

 “You think so? Eh bien, I agree with you,” said Poirot.

He seemed quite uninterested, and as though he were thinking of something else.

“At any rate,” I remarked, “you will have one bee less in your bonnet now.”

“Mon Dieu! But what an idiom! What does it mean?”

“What I meant was that now you will give up your interest in these footmarks.”

But to my surprise Poirot shook his head.

“No, no, mon ami. At last I am on the right track. I am still in the dark, but, as I hinted just now to M. Bex, these footmarks are the most important and interesting things in the case! That poor GiraudI should not be surprised if he took no notice of them whatever.”

At that moment, the front door opened, and M. Hautet and the commissary came down the steps.

“Ah, M. Poirot, we were coming to look for you,” said the magistrate. “It is getting late, but I wish to pay a visit to Madame Daubreuil. Without doubt she will be very much upset by M. Renauld’s death, and we may be fortunate enough to get a clue from her. The secret that he did not confide to his wife, it is possible that he may have told it to the woman whose love held him enslaved. We know where our Samsons are weak, don’t we?”

I admired the picturesqueness of M. Hautet’s language. I suspected that the examining magistrate was by now thoroughly enjoying his part in the mysterious drama.

“Is M. Giraud not going to accompany us?” asked Poirot.

“M. Giraud has shown clearly that he prefers to conduct the case in his own way,” said M. Hautet dryly.

One could see easily enough that Giraud’s cavalier treatment of the examining magistrate had not prejudiced the latter in his favor. We said no more, but fell into line. Poirot walked with the examining magistrate, and the commissary and I followed a few paces behind.

“There is no doubt that Françoise’s story is substantially correct,” he remarked to me in a confidential tone. “I have been telephoning headquarters. It seems that three times in