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Giselle had her own code. She kept faith with those who kept faith with her. She gave her promise to her clients that she would deal honestly with them. She was ruthless, but she was also a woman of her word.”
    Japp shook his head dumbly. The four men were silent, ruminating on the strange character of the dead woman. Maоtre Thibault rose.
    “I must leave you, messieurs. I have to keep an appointment. If there is any further information I can give you at any time, you know my address.”
    He shook hands with them ceremoniously and left the apartment.

Death in the Clouds

Chapter 7
    With the departure of Maоtre 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. “There were eleven passengers in that Plane - in rear car, I mean - the other doesn't come into it - eleven passengers and two stewards - that's thirteen people we've got. One of those thirteen did the old woman in. Some of the passengers were English, some were French. The latter I shall hand over to M. Fournier. The English ones I'll take on. Then there are inquiries to be made in 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 French watering places - Deasuville, 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. Well, that's one line. Then we've got to get down to the actual murder itself - prove who could possibly be in a position to use that blowpipe He unrolled a sketch plan of the aeroplane and placed it in the center of the table. ”Now then, we're ready for the preliminary work. And to begin with, let's go through the people one by one, and decide on the probabilities and - even more important - the possibilities."
    “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're not 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 with this. On the other hand, from the possibility point of view we've got to include them. They were up and down the car. They could actually have taken up a position from which they could have used the blowpipe - from the right angle, I mean - though I don't believe that a steward could shoot a poisoned dart out of a blowpipe in a car full of people without someone noticing him do it. I know by experience that most people are blind as bats, but there are limits. Of course, in a way, the same thing applies to every blessed person. It was madness - absolute madness - to commit a crime that way. Only about a chance in a hundred that it would come off without being spotted. The fellow that did it must have had the luck of the devil. Of all the damn fool ways to commit a murder -”
    Poirot, who had been sitting with his eyes down, smoking quietly, interposed a question:
    “You think it was a foolish way of committing a murder, yes?”
    “Of course it was. It was absolute madness.”
    “And yet it succeeded. We sit here, we three, we talk about it, but we have no knowledge of who committed the crime! That is success!”
    “That's pure luck,” argued Japp. “The murderer ought to have been spotted five or six times over.”
    Poirot shook his head in a dissatisfied manner.
    Fournier looked at him curiously.
    “What is it that is in your mind, M. Poirot?”
    “Mon ami,” said Poirot, “my point is