She looked at Poirot for sympathy.

‘Youwill help me, won’t you, M. Poirot?’ She rose, picking up the white wrap, and stood looking appealingly into his face. I heard the noise of voices outside in the corridor. The door was ajar. ‘If you don’t-’ she went on.

‘If I don’t, Madame?’

She laughed.

‘I’ll have to call a taxi to go round and bump him off myself.’

Laughing, she disappeared through a door to an adjoining room just as Bryan Martin came in with the American girl, Carlotta Adams, and her escort, and the two people who had been supping with him and Jane Wilkinson. They were introduced to me as Mr and Mrs Widburn.

‘Hello!’ said Bryan. ‘Where’s Jane? I want to tell her I’ve succeeded in the commission she gave me.’

Jane appeared in the doorway of the bedroom. She held a lipstick in one hand.

‘Have you got her? How marvellous. Miss Adams, I do admire your performance so. I felt I just had to know you. Come in here and talk to me while I fix my face. It’s looking too perfectly frightful.’

Carlotta Adams accepted the invitation. Bryan Martin flung himself down in a chair.

‘Well, M. Poirot,’ he said. ‘You were duly captured. Has our Jane persuaded you to fight her battles? You might as well give in sooner as later. She doesn’t understand the word “No.”’

‘She has not come across it, perhaps.’ 

‘A very interesting character, Jane,’ said Bryan Martin. He lay back in his hair and puffed cigarette smoke idly towards the ceiling. ‘Taboos have no meaning for her. No morals whatever. I don’t mean she’s exactly immoral-she isn’t. Amoral is the word, I believe. Just sees one thing only in life-what Jane wants.’

He laughed.

‘I believe she’d kill somebody quite cheerfully-and feel injured if they caught her and wanted to hang her for it. The trouble is that shewould be caught. She hasn’t any brains. Her idea of a murder would be to drive up in a taxi, sail in under her own name and shoot.’