A tight-fitting little black coat and skirt, white satin blouse, small chic black toque perched at the fashionable outrageous angle. She had a beautiful foreign-looking face, dead white skin, large brown eyes, jet black hair. She was smoking a cigarette in a long holder. Her manicured hands had deep red nails. She wore one large emerald set in platinum. There was coquetry in her glance and voice.

“Elle est jolie-et chic,” murmured Poirot. “Husband and wife-eh?”

M. Bouc nodded. “Hungarian Embassy, I believe,” he said. “A handsome couple.”

There were only two more lunchers-Poirot’s fellow traveller MacQueen and his employer Mr. Ratchett. The latter sat facing Poirot, and for the second time Poirot studied that unprepossessing face, noting the false benevolence of the brow and the small, cruel eyes.

Doubtless M. Bouc saw a change in his friend’s expression.

“It is at your wild animal you look?” he asked.

Poirot nodded.

As his coffee was brought to him, M. Bouc rose to his feet. Having started before Poirot he had finished some time ago.

“I return to my compartment,” he said. “Come along presently and converse with me.”

“With pleasure.”

Poirot sipped his coffee and ordered a liqueur. The attendant was passing from table to table with his box of money, accepting payment for bills. The elderly American lady’s voice rose shrill and plaintive.

“My daughter said: ‘Take a book of food tickets and you’ll have no trouble-no trouble at all.’ Now, that isn’t so. Seems they have to have a ten per cent tip, and then there’s that bottle of mineral water-and a queer sort of water too. They didn’t have any Evian or Vichy, which seems queer to me.”

“It is-they must-how do you say?-serve the water of the country,” explained the sheep-faced lady.

“Well, it seems queer to me.” She looked distastefully at the heap of small change on the table in front of her. “Look at all this peculiar stuff he’s given me. Dinars or something. Just a lot of rubbish, it looks like! My daughter said-”