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suspicion of foreigners. He led the conversation away from murder and focused on the victim of it. He asked questions about “poor Auntie,” her health, her habits, her preferences in food and drink, her politics, her late husband, her attitude to life, to sex, to sin, to religion, to children, to animals.
    Whether any of this irrelevant matter would be of use, he had no idea. He was looking through a haystack to find a needle. But, incidentally, he was learning something about Bessie Burch.
    Bessie did not really know very much about her aunt. It had been a family tie, honoured as such, but without intimacy. Now and again, once a month or so, she and Joe had gone over on a Sunday, to have midday dinner with Auntie, and more rarely, Auntie had come over to see them. They had exchanged presents at Christmas. They'd known that Auntie had a little something put by, and that they'd get it when she died.
    “But that's not to say we were needing it,” Mrs Butch explained with rising colour. “We've got something put by ourselves. And we buried her beautiful. A real nice funeral it was. Flowers and everything.”
    Auntie had been fond of knitting. She didn't like dogs, they messed up a place, but she used to have a cat - a ginger. It strayed away and she hadn't had one since, but the woman at the post office had been going to give her a kitten. Kept her house very neat and didn't like litter. Kept brass a treat and washed down the kitchen floor every day. She made quite a nice thing of going out to work. One shilling and tenpence an hour - two shillings from Holmeleigh, that was Mr Carpenter's of the Works' house. Rolling in money, the Carpenters were. Tried to get Auntie to come more days in the week, but Auntie wouldn't disappoint her other ladies because she'd gone to them before she went to Mr Carpenter's, and it wouldn't have been right.
    Poirot mentioned Mrs Summerhayes at Long Meadows.
    Oh yes, Auntie went to her - two days a week. They'd come back from India where they'd had a lot of native servants and Mrs Summerhayes didn't know a thing about a house. They tried to market-garden, but they didn't know anything about that, either. When the children came home for the holidays, the house was just pandemonium. But Mrs Summerhayes was a nice lady and Auntie liked her.
    So the portrait grew. Mrs McGinty knitted, and scrubbed floors and polished brass, she liked cats and didn't like dogs. She liked children, but not very much. She kept herself to herself.
    She attended church on Sunday, but didn't take part in any church activities. Sometimes, but rarely, she went to the pictures. She didn't hold with goings on - and had given up working for an artist and his wife when she had discovered they weren't properly married. She didn't read books, but she enjoyed the Sunday paper and she liked old magazines when her ladies gave them to her. Although she didn't go much to the pictures, she was interested in hearing about film stars and their doings. She wasn't interested in politics, but voted Conservative like her husband had always done. Never spent much on clothes, but got quite a lot given her from her ladies, and was of a saving disposition.
    Mrs McGinty was, in fact, very much the Mrs McGinty that Poirot had imagined she would be. And Bessie Burch, her niece, was the Bessie Burch of Superintendent Spence's notes.
    Before Poirot took his leave, Joe Burch came home for the lunch hour. A small, shrewd man, less easy to be sure about than his wife. There was a faint nervousness in his manner. He showed less signs of suspicion and hostility than his wife. Indeed he seemed anxious to appear cooperative. And that, Poirot reflected, was very faintly out of character. For why should Joe Burch be anxious to placate an importunate foreign stranger? The reason could only be that that stranger had brought with him a letter from Superintendent Spence of the County Police.
    So Joe Burch was anxious to stand in well with the police? Was it that