After the Funeral: Hercule Poirot Investigates by Agatha Christie

Author:Agatha Christie [Christie, Agatha]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 0007562691
Amazon: B000FC2RRW
Publisher: William Morrow Paperbacks
Published: 2005-01-25T06:00:00+00:00

Twelve

Two elderly men sat together in a room whose furnishings were of the most modern kind. There were no curves in the room. Everything was square. Almost the only exception was Hercule Poirot himself who was full of curves. His stomach was pleasantly rounded, his head resembled an egg in shape, and his moustaches curved upwards in a flamboyant flourish.

He was sipping a glass of sirop and looking thoughtfully at Mr. Goby.

Mr. Goby was small and spare and shrunken. He had always been refreshingly nondescript in appearance and he was now so nondescript as practically not to be there at all. He was not looking at Poirot because Mr. Goby never looked at anybody.

Such remarks as he was now making seemed to be addressed to the left-hand corner of the chromium-plated fireplace curb.

Mr. Goby was famous for the acquiring of information. Very few people knew about him and very few employed his services—but those few were usually extremely rich. They had to be, for Mr. Goby was very expensive. His speciality was the acquiring of information quickly. At the flick of Mr. Goby’s double-jointed thumb, hundreds of patient questioning plodding men and women, old and young, of all apparent stations in life, were despatched to question, and probe, and achieve results.

Mr. Goby had now practically retired from business. But he occasionally “obliged” a few old patrons. Hercule Poirot was one of these.

“I’ve got what I could for you,” Mr. Goby told the fire curb in a soft confidential whisper. “I sent the boys out. They do what they can—good lads—good lads all of them, but not what they used to be in the old days. They don’t come that way nowadays. Not willing to learn, that’s what it is. Think they know everything after they’ve only been a couple of years on the job. And they work to time. Shocking the way they work to time.”

He shook his head sadly and shifted his gaze to an electric plug socket.

“It’s the Government,” he told it. “And all this education racket. It gives them ideas. They come back and tell us what they think. They can’t think, most of them, anyway. All they know is things out of books. That’s no good in our business. Bring in the answers—that’s all that’s needed—no thinking.”

Mr. Goby flung himself back in his chair and winked at a lampshade.

“Mustn’t crab the Government, though! Don’t know really what we’d do without it. I can tell you that nowadays you can walk in most anywhere with a notebook and pencil, dressed right, and speaking B.B.C., and ask people all the most intimate details of their daily lives and all their back history, and what they had for dinner on November 23rd because that was a test day for middleclass incomes—or whatever it happens to be (making it a grade above to butter them up!)—ask ’em any mortal thing you can; and nine times out of ten they’ll come across pat, and even the tenth time though they may

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