“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 someone 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’s 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.”