‘At your service.’

‘M. Poirot, I want to talk to you. I must talk to you.’

‘But certainly, Madame, will you not sit down?’

‘No, no, not here. I want to talk to you privately. We’ll go right upstairs to my suite.’

Bryan Martin had joined her, he spoke now with a deprecating laugh. 

‘You must wait a little, Jane. We’re in the middle of supper. So is M. Poirot.’

But Jane Wilkinson was not so easily turned from her purpose.

‘Why, Bryan, what does that matter? We’ll have supper sent up to the suite. Speak to them about it, will you? And, Bryan-’

She went after him as he was turning away and appeared to urge some course upon him. He stood out about it, I gathered, shaking his head and frowning. But she spoke even more emphatically and finally with a shrug of the shoulders he gave way.

Once or twice during her speech to him she had glanced at the table where Carlotta Adams sat, and I wondered if what she were suggesting had anything to do with the American girl.

Her point gained, Jane came back, radiant.

‘We’ll go right up now,’ she said, and included me in a dazzling smile.

The question of our agreeing or not agreeing to her plan didn’t seem to occur to her mind. She swept us off without a shade of apology.

‘It’s the greatest luck just seeing you here this evening, M. Poirot,’ she said as she led the way to the lift. ‘It’s wonderful how everything seems to turn out right for me. I’d just been thinking and wondering what on earth I was going to do and I looked up and there you were at the next table, and I said to myself: “M. Poirot will tell me what to do.”’

She broke off to say ‘Second Floor’ to the lift-boy.

‘If I can be of aid to you-’ began Poirot.

‘I’m sure you can. I’ve heard you’re just the most marvellous man that ever existed. Somebody’s got to get me out of the tangle I’m in and I feel you’re just the man to do it.’