HerculePoirot\'sChristmas

My dear James You have always been one of the most faithful and kindly of my readers, and I was therefore seriously perturbed when I received from you a word of criticism. You complained that my murders were getting too refined— anaemic, in fact. You yearned for a ‘good violent murder with lots of blood’. A murder where there was no doubt about its being murder! So this is your special story—written for you. I hope it may please. Your affectionate sister-in-law Agatha by hell, he’d go on with it! He’d planned this for years. He’d always meant to do—what he was going to do. Yes, he’d go on with it! That momentary reluctance, that sudden questioning of himself: ‘Why? Is it worth it? Why dwell on the past? Why not wipe out the whole thing?’—all that was only weakness. He was not a boy—to be turned his this way and that by the whim of the moment. He was a man of forty, assured, purposeful. He would go on with it. He would do what he had come to England to do. He got on the train and passed along the corridor looking for a place. He had waved aside a porter and was carrying his own raw-hide suitcase. He looked into carriage after carri......