“Admirably symmetrical,” he murmured to himself.
Mr. Barnes was at home and Poirot was shown into a small, precise dining room and here presently Mr. Barnes came to him.
Mr. Barnes was a small man with twinkling eyes and a nearly bald head. He peeped over the top of his glasses at his visitor while in his left hand he twirled the card that Poirot had given the maid.
He said in a small, prim, almost falsetto voice:
“Well, well, M. Poirot? I am honoured, I am sure.”
“You must excuse my calling upon you in this informal manner,” said Poirot punctiliously.
“Much the best way,” said Mr. Barnes. “And the time is admirable, too. A quarter to seven—very sound time at this period of the year for catching anyone at home.” He waved his hand. “Sit down, M. Poirot. I’ve no doubt we’ve got a good deal to talk about. 58, Queen Charlotte Street, I suppose?”
Poirot said:
“You suppose rightly—but why should you suppose anything of the kind?”
“My dear sir,” said Mr. Barnes, “I’ve been retired from the Home Office for some time now—but I’ve not gone quite rusty yet. If there’s any hush-hush business, it’s far better not to use the police. Draws attention to it all!”
Poirot said:
“I will ask yet another question. Why should you suppose this is a hush-hush business?”
“Isn’t it?” asked the other. “Well, if it isn’t, in my opinion it ought to be.” He leant forward and tapped with his pince-nez on the arm of the chair. “In Secret Service work it’s never the little fry you want—it’s the big bugs at the top—but to get them you’ve got to be careful not to alarm the little fry.”
“It seems to me, Mr. Barnes, that you know more than I do,” said Hercule Poirot.
“Don’t know anything at all,” replied the other, “just put two and two together.”
“One of those two being?”
“Amberiotis,” said Mr. Barnes promptly. “You forget I sat opposite him in the waiting room for a minute or two. He didn’t know me. I was always an insignificant chap. Not a bad thing sometimes. But I knew him all right—and I could guess what he was up to over here.”
“Which was?”
Mr. Barnes twinkled more than ever.
“We’re very tiresome people in this country. We’re conservative, you know, conservative to the backbone. We grumble a lot, but we don’t really want to smash our democratic government and try newfangled experiments. That’s what’s so heartbreaking to the wretched foreign agitator who’s working full time and over! The whole trouble is—from their point of view—that we really are, as a country, comparatively solvent. Hardly any other country in Europe is at the moment! To upset England—really upset it—you’ve got to play hell with its finance—that’s what it comes to! And you can’t play hell with its finance when you’ve got men like Alistair Blunt at the helm.”
Mr. Barnes paused and then went on:
“Blunt is the kind of man who in private life would always pay his bills and live within his income—whether he’d got two-pence a year or several million makes no difference. He is that type of fellow. And he just simply thinks that there’s no reason why a country shouldn’t be the same! No costly experiments. No frenzied expenditure on possible Utopias. That’s why”—he paused—“that’s why certain people have made up their minds that Blunt must go.”
“Ah,” said Poirot.
Mr. Barnes nodded.
“Yes,” he said. “I know what I’m talking about. Quite nice people some of ’em. Long-haired, earnest-eyed, and full of ideals of a better world. Others not so nice, rather nasty in fact. Furtive little rats with beards and foreign accents. And another lot again of the Big Bully type. But they’ve all got the same idea: Blunt Must Go!”
He tilted his chair gently back and forward again.
“Sweep away the old order! The Tories, the Conservatives, the Diehards, the hardheaded s
uspicious Business Men, that’s the idea. Perhaps these people are right—I don’t know—but I know one thing—you’ve got to have something to put in place of the old order—something that will work—not just something that sounds all right. Well, we needn’t go into that. We are dealing with concrete facts, not abstract theories. Take away the props and the building will come down. Blunt is one of the props of Things as They Are.”
He leaned forward.
“They’re out after Blunt all right. That I know. And it’s my opinion that yesterday morning they nearly got him. I may be wrong—but it’s been tried before. The method, I mean.”