Yellow Iris: A Hercule Poirot Short Story

Yellow Iris

A Short Story

by Agatha Christie

Copyright

Published by HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF www.harpercollins.co.uk

Copyrig© 2011 Agatha Christie Ltd.

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EPub Edition © 2011 ISBN: 9780007451975

Version: 2017-04-19

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Yellow Iris

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Yellow Iris

‘Yellow Iris’ was first published in The Strand, July 1937.

Hercule Poirot stretched out his feet towards the electric radiator set in the wall. Its neat arrangement of red hot bars pleased his orderly mind.

‘A coal fire,’ he mused to himself, ‘was always shapeless and haphazard! Never did it achieve the symmetry.’

The telephone bell rang. Poirot rose, glancing at his watch as he did so. The time was close on half past eleven. He wondered who was ringing him up at this hour. It might, of course, be a wrong number.

‘And it might,’ he murmured to himself with a whimsical smile, ‘be a millionaire newspaper proprietor, found dead in the library of his country house, with a spotted orchid clasped in his left hand and a page torn from a cookbook pinned to his breast.’

Smiling at the pleasing conceit, he lifted the receiver.

Immediately a voice spoke – a soft husky woman’s voice with a kind of desperate urgency about it.