“Do you mean to say,” I asked, slowly adapting myself to the new idea, “that Dr. Bauerstein is a spy?”
Poirot nodded.
“Have you never suspected it?”
“It never entered my head.”
“It did not strike you as peculiar that a famous London doctor should bury himself in a little village like this, and should be in the habit of walking about at all hours of the night, fully dressed?”
“No,” I confessed, “I never thought of such a thing.”
“He is, of course, a German by birth,” said Poirot thoughtfully,
made up. On the contrary, Mrs. Inglethorp had taken the last dose on the day of her death.
So the question of the tonic was finally abandoned, and the Coroner proceeded with his task. Having elicited from Dorcas how she had been awakened by the violent ringing of her mistress’s bell, and had subsequently