The Adventure of the Christmas Pudding

I
'I regret exceedingly-' said M. Hercule Poirot.

He was interrupted. Not rudely interrupted. The interruption was suave, dexterous, persuasive rather than contradictory.

'Please don't refuse offhand, M. Poirot. There are grave issues of State. Your co-operation will be appreciated in the highest quarters.'

'You are too kind,' Hercule Poirot waved a hand, 'but I really cannot undertake to do as you ask. At this season of the year-'

Again Mr Jesmond interrupted. 'Christmas time,' he said, persuasively. 'An old-fashioned Christmas in the English countryside.'

Hercule Poirot shivered. The thought of the English countryside at this season of the year did not attract him.

'A good old-fashioned Christmas!' Mr Jesmond stressed it.

'Me-I am not an Englishman,' said Hercule Poirot. 'In my country, Christmas, it is for the children. The New Year, that is what we celebrate.'

'Ah,' said Mr Jesmond, 'but Christmas in England is a great institution and I assure you at Kings Lacey you would see it at its best. It's a wonderful old house, you know. Why, one wing of it dates from the fourteenth century.'

Again Poirot shivered. The thought of a fourteenth-century English manor house filled him with apprehension. He had suffered too often in the historic country houses of England. He looked round appreciatively at his comfortable modern flat with its radiators and the latest patent devices for excluding any kind of draught.

'In the winter,' he said firmly, 'I do not leave London.'

'I don't think you quite appreciate, M. Poirot, what a very serious matter this is.' Mr Jesmond glanced at his companion and then back at Poirot.

Poirot's second visitor had up to now said nothing but a polite and formal 'How do you do.' He sat now, gazing down at his well-polished shoes, with an air of the utmost dejection on his coffee-coloured face. He was a young man, not more than twenty-three, and he was clearly in a state of complete misery.

'Yes, yes,' said Hercule Poirot. 'Of course the matter is serious. I do appreciate that. His Highness has my heartfelt sympathy.'

'The position is one of the utmost delicacy,' said Mr Jesmond.

Poirot transferred his gaze from the young man to his older companion. If one wanted to sum up Mr Jesmond in a word, the word would have been discretion. Everything about Mr Jesmond was discreet. His well-cut but inconspicuous clothes, his pleasant, well-bred voice which rarely soared out of an agreeable monotone, his light-brown hair just thinning a little at the temples, his pale serious face. It seemed to Hercule Poirot that he had known not one Mr Jesmond but a dozen Mr Jesmonds in his time, all using sooner or later the same phrase-'a position of the utmost delicacy'.

'The police,' said Hercule Poirot, 'can be very discreet, you know.'

Mr Jesmond shook his head firmly.

'Not the police,' he said. 'To recover the-er-what we want to recover will almost inevitably invoke taking proceedings in the law courts and we know so little. We suspect, but we do not know.'

'You have my sympathy,' said Hercule Poirot again.