云中命案 7

Chapter 7,Probabilities,With the departure of Ma?tre Thibault, the three men drew their chairs a little closer to the table.,‘Now, then,’ said Japp, ‘let’s get down to it.’ He unscrewed the cap of his fountain-pen. ‘Therewere eleven passengers in that plane—in the rear car, I mean; the other doesn’t come into it—eleven passengers and two stewards ¹—that’s thirteen people we’ve got. One of the remainingtwelve did the old woman in. Some of the passengers were English, some were French. The latter Ishall hand over to M. Fournier. The English ones I’ll take on. Then there are inquiries ⁴ to be madein Paris—that’s your job too, Fournier.’,‘And not only in Paris,’ said Fournier. ‘In the summer Giselle did a lot of business at the Frenchwatering-places—Deauville, Le Pinet, Wimereux. She went down south too, to Antibes and Nice,and all those places.’,‘A good point; one or two of the people in the Prometheus mentioned Le Pinet, I remember.,‘To begin with, we can eliminate M. Poirot here. That brings the number down to eleven.’,Poirot shook his head sadly.,‘You are of too trustful a nature, my friend. You should trust nobody—nobody at all.’,‘Well, we’ll leave you in if you like,’ said Japp good-temperedly. ‘Then there are the stewards.,Seems to me very unlikely it should be either of them from the probability point of view. They’renot likely to have borrowed money on a grand scale and they’ve both got a good record—decent,sober men, both of them. It would surprise me very much if either of them had anything to do withthis. On the other hand, from the possibility point of view we’ve got to include them. They wereup and down the car. They could actually have taken up a position from which they could haveused that blowpipe—from the right angle, I mean—though I don’t believe that a steward ³ couldshoot a poisoned dart ⁶ out of a blowpipe in a car full of people without someone noticing him do it.,The stewards will inspect the course to see if racing is possible. 那些干事将检视赛马场看是否适宜比赛 。,The stew must be boiled up before serving.炖肉必须煮熟才能上桌。