One, Two, Buckle My Shoe

Mrs Bolitho was a tall, commanding female with a deep voice. Miss Sainsbury Seale was a woman of forty odd with indecisively bleached hair rolled up in untidy curls. Her clothes were shapeless and rather artistic, and her pince-nez were always dropping off. She was a great talker.

She said now wistfully:

‘But really, you know, it doesn’t ache at all.’

‘Nonsense, you told me you hardly slept a wink last night.’

‘No, I didn’t—no, indeed—but perhaps, now, the nerve has actually died.’

‘All the more reason to go to the dentist,’ said Mrs Bolitho firmly. ‘We all like to put it off, but that’s just cowardice. Better make up one’s mind and get it over!’

Something hovered on Miss Sainsbury Seale’s lips. Was it the rebellious murmur of: ‘Yes, but it’s not your tooth!’

All she actually said, however, was:

‘I expect you’re right. And Mr Morley is such a careful man and really never hurts one at all.’

The meeting of the Board of Directors was over. It had passed off smoothly. The report was good. There should have been no discordant note. Yet to the sensitive Mr Samuel Rotherstein there had been something, some nuance in the chairman’s manner.

There had been, once or twice, a shortness, an acerbity, in his tone—quite uncalled for by the proceedings.

Some secret worry, perhaps? But somehow Rotherstein could not connect a secret worry with Alistair Blunt. He was such an unemotional man. He was so very normal. So essentially British.

There was, of course, always liver … Mr Rotherstein’s liver gave him a bit of trouble from time to time. But he’d never known Alistair complain of his liver. Alistair’s health was as sound as his brain and his grasp of finance. It was not annoying heartiness—just quiet well-being.

And yet—there was something—once or twice the chairman’s hand had wandered to his face. He had sat supporting his chin. Not his normal attitude. And once or twice he had seemed actually—yes, distrait.

They came out of the board room and passed down the stairs.

Rotherstein said:

‘Can’t give you a lift, I suppose?’

Alistair Blunt smiled and shook his head.

‘My car’s waiting.’ He glanced at his watch. ‘I’m not going back to the city.’ He paused. ‘As a matter of fact I’ve got an appointment with the dentist.’

The mystery was solved.

Hercule Poirot descended from his taxi, paid the man and rang the bell of 58, Queen Charlotte Street.

After a little delay it was opened by a boy in page-boy’s uniform with a freckled face, red hair, and an earnest manner.

Hercule Poirot said:

‘Mr Morley?’

There was in his heart a ridiculous hope that Mr Morley might have been called away, might be indisposed, might not be seeing patients today … All in vain. The page-boy drew back, Hercule Poirot stepped inside, and the door closed behind him with the quiet remorselessness of unalterable doom.

The boy said: ‘Name, please?’

Poirot gave it to him, a door on the right of the hall was thrown open and he stepped into the waiting-room.

It was a room furnished in quiet good taste and, to Hercule Poirot, indescribably gloomy. On the polished (reproduction) Sheraton table were carefully arranged papers and periodicals. The (reproduction) Hepplewhite sideboard held two Sheffield plated candlesticks and an épergne. The mantelpiece held a bronze clock and two bronze vases. The windows were shrouded by curtains of blue velvet. The chairs were upholstered in a Jacobean design of red birds and flowers.

In one of them sat a military-looking gentleman with a fierce moustache and a yellow complexion. He looked at Poirot with an air of one considering some noxious insect. It was not so much his gun he looked as though he wished he had with him, as his Flit spray. Poirot, eyeing him with distaste, said to himself, ‘In verity, there are some Englishmen who are altogether so unpleasing and ridiculous that they should have been put out of their misery at birth.’

The military gentleman, after a prolonged glare, snatched up The Times, turned his chair so as to avoid seeing Poirot, and settled down to read it.

Poirot picked up Punch.

He went through it meticulously, but failed to find any of the jokes funny.

The page-boy came in and said, ‘Colonel Arrow-Bumby?’—and the military gentleman was led away.

Poirot was speculating on the probabilities of there really being such a name, when the door opened to admit a young man of about thirty.

As the young man stood by the table, restlessly flicking over the covers of magazines, Poirot looked at him sideways. An unpleasant and dangerous looking young man, he thought, and not impossibly a murderer. At any rate he looked far more like a murderer than any of the murderers Hercule Poirot had arrested in the course of his career.

The page-boy opened the door and said to mid-air:

‘Mr Peerer.’

Rightly construing this as a summons to himself, Poirot rose. The boy led him to the back of the hall and round the corner to a small lift in which he took him up to the second floor. Here he led him along a passage, opened a door which led into a little anteroom, tapped at a second door; and without waiting for a reply opened it and stood back for Poirot to enter.

Poirot entered to a sound of running water and came round the back of the door to discover Mr Morley washing his hands with professional gusto at a basin on the wall.

There are certain humiliating moments in the lives of the greatest of men. It has been said that no man is a hero to his valet. To that may be added that few men are heroes to themselves at the moment of visiting their dentist.

Hercule Poirot was morbidly conscious of this fact.

He was a man who was accustomed to have a good opinion of himself. He was Hercule Poirot, superior in most ways to other men. But in this moment he was unable to feel superior in any way whatever. His morale was down to zero. He was just that ordinary, craven figure, a man afraid of the dentist’s chair.

Mr Morley had finished his professional ablutions. He was speaking now in his encouraging professional manner.

‘Hardly as warm as it should be, is it, for the time of year?’

Gently he led the way to the appointed spot—to The Chair! Deftly he played with its head rest, running it up and down.

Hercule Poirot took a deep breath, stepped up, sat down and relaxed his head to Mr Morley’s professional fiddlings.

‘There,’ said Mr Morley with hideous cheerfulness. ‘That quite comfortable? Sure?’

In sepulchral tones Poirot said that it was quite comfortable.

Mr Morley swung his little table nearer, picked up his little mirror, seized an instrument and prepared to get on with the job.

Hercule Poirot grasped the arms of the chair, shut his eyes and opened his mouth.