Curtain by Agatha Christie Read Free Book Online Page B

of it. It's one of the barbiturates - whose toxic dose is very near the effective one.” He smiled, the corners of his mouth sliding up his face in an unpleasant way.
    “I shouldn't have thought you could get it without a doctor's prescription,” I said.
    “You can't, old boy. Anyway, quite literally, you can't. I've got a pull in that line.”
    I suppose it was foolish of me, but I get these impulses. I said:
    “You knew Etherington, I think?”
    At once I knew that I had struck a note of some kind. His eyes grew hard and wary. He said - and his voice had changed - it was light and artificial:
    “Oh yes - I knew Etherington. Poor chap.” Then, as I did not speak, he went on: “Etherington took drugs, of course - but he overdid it. One's got to know when to stop. He didn't. Bad business. That wife of his was lucky. If the sympathy of the jury hadn't been with her, she'd have hanged.”
    He passed me over a couple of the tablets. Then he said casually:
    “Did you know Etherington well?”
    I answered with the truth.
    “No.”
    He seemed for a moment at a loss how to proceed. Then he turned it off with a light laugh:
    “Funny chap. Not exactly a Sunday school character, but he was good company sometimes.”
    I thanked him for the tablets and went back to my room.
    As I lay down again and turned off the lights, I wondered if I had been foolish.
    For it came to me very strongly that Allerton was almost certainly X. And I had let him see that I suspected the fact.

Curtain

Chapter 7
    My narrative of the days spent at Styles must necessarily be somewhat rambling. In my recollection of it, it presents itself to me as a series of conversations - of suggestive words and phrases that etched themselves into my consciousness.
    First of all, and very early on, there came the realization of Hercule Poirot's infirmity and helplessness. I did believe, as he had said, that his brain still functioned with all its old keenness, but the physical envelope had worn so thin that I realized at once that my part was destined to be a far more active one than usual. I had to be, as it were, Poirot's eyes and ears.
    True, every fine day Curtiss would pick up his master and carry him carefully downstairs to where his chair had been carried down beforehand and was awaiting him. Then he would wheel Poirot out into the garden and select a spot that was free from draughts. On other days, when the weather was not propitious, he would be carried to the drawing room.
    Wherever he might be, someone or other was sure to come and sit with him and talk, but this was not the same thing as if Poirot could have selected for himself his partner in the tête-à-tête. He could no longer single out the person he wanted to talk to.
    On the day after my arrival I was taken by Franklin to an old studio in the garden which had been fitted up in a rough-and-ready fashion for scientific purposes.
    Let me make clear here and now that I myself have not got the scientific mind. In my account of Dr Franklin's work I shall probably use all the wrong terms and arouse the scorn of those properly instructed in such matters.
    As far as I, a mere layman, could make out, Franklin was experimenting with various alkaloids derived from the Calabar bean, Physostigma venenosum. I understood more after a conversation which took place one day between Franklin and Poirot. Judith, who tried to instruct me, was, as is customary with the earnest young, almost impossibly technical. She referred learnedly to the alkaloids physostigmine, eserine, physovenine, and geneserine, and then proceeded to a most impossible-sounding substance, prostigmin or the demethylcarbonic ester of 3-hydroxyphenyl trimethyl lammonum, etc., etc., and a good deal more which, it appeared, was the same thing, only differently arrived at! It was all, at any rate, double Dutch to me, and I aroused Judith's contempt by asking what good all this was likely to do to mankind? There is no question that annoys your true