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 “And how do you propose to get them all together?” I asked.

“By awaiting the supreme moment. By lying perdu until they are ready to strike.”

“That may mean a long wait,” I grumbled.

“Always impatient, the good Hastings! But no, it will not be so long. The one man they were afraid of—myself—is out of the way. I give them two or three months at most.”

His speaking of some one being got out of the way reminded me of Ingles and his tragic death, and I remembered that I had never told Poirot about the dying Chinaman in St. Giles’ Hospital.

He listened with keen attention to my story.

“Ingles’s servant, eh? And the few words he uttered were in Italian? Curious.”

“That’s why I suspected it might have been a plant on the part of the Big Four.”

“Your reasoning is at fault, Hastings. Employ the little gray cells. If your enemies wished to deceive you they would assuredly have seen to it that the Chinaman spoke in intelligible pigeon English. No, the message was genuine. Tell me again all that you heard?”

“First of all he made a reference to Handel’s Largo, and then he said something that sounded like ‘carrozzo’—that’s a carriage, isn’t it?”