“My friend,” he broke out at last, “I have a little idea, a very strange, and probably utterly impossible idea. And yet⁠—it fits in.”

I shrugged my shoulders. I privately thought that Poirot was rather too much given to these fantastic ideas. In this case, surely, the truth was only too plain and apparent.

“So that is the explanation of the blank label on the box,” I remarked. “Very simple, as you said. I really wonder that I did not think of it myself.”

Poirot did not appear to be listening to me.

“They have made one more discovery, la-bas ,” he observed, jerking his thumb over his shoulder in the direction of Styles. “ Mr. Wells told me as we were going upstairs.”

“What was it?”