Читать книгу The Killings at Kingfisher Hill онлайн | страница 5

‘Doesn’t she look splendid? Blue and orange like the kingfisher bird! Bright as a button! Look at the shape of her! Beautiful, I’d say. Wouldn’t you agree, M. Poirot? Nothing like her on the road. The last word in luxury, truly she is! Look at those doors! Fit together perfectly. A spectacular feat of design and engineering. Look at them!’

‘Very fine indeed,’ I told him, knowing we would only be allowed to board once we had admired the vehicle sufficiently. Poirot made a gruff noise in his throat, unwilling to feign approval.

Bixby was a thin, angular man with bulbous staring eyes. Spotting two women wrapped in hats and coats walking on the other side of the road, he drew our attention to them and declared, ‘Those ladies are too late! Ho-ha! They should have reserved their seats in advance. If you want to travel with the Kingfisher Coach Company, you can’t afford to leave it to chance, or there’ll be no room for you. Ha! Sorry, ladies!’ he bellowed suddenly.

The two women must have heard him, but paid no attention as they walked purposefully onwards. They would barely have noticed our presence had Bixby not called out to them. They had no interest in the Kingfisher Coach Company, nor in this four-wheeled blue and orange representative thereof. Bixby’s frankly desperate and undignified behaviour made me wonder if his firm was as successful as he kept telling us all that it was.

‘Did you hear that? Mr Bixby just had to turn away two ladies,’ a man near me said to his companion, who replied, ‘Quite right too, if they weren’t expected. He said we’re all here, didn’t he, after he’d marked us off on his list? I don’t know why people don’t plan ahead.’ Irritable as I was that day, it irked me that Bixby’s inelegant deception had fooled at least two people.

I nodded along and made appreciative noises at what I hoped were the correct moments as he explained how his firm had come into being: something about most people not taking the initiative and not being able to imagine something that didn’t already exist … something about owning property at Kingfisher Hill himself, profits from a previous venture, the inconvenience of getting to London despite it being relatively close geographically … something about not letting fear stop him, even with the national and global economies being in their present catastrophic state …