A fashionable London party leaves behind one guest who never goes home. The morning after a small evening gathering hosted by the recently widowed Major Rich, a manservant notices a dark stain spreading across the carpet beneath a large carved Spanish chest in the corner of the room. Inside lies the body of Arnold Clayton, husband of the beautiful Margharita Clayton, stabbed to death and concealed where the host's guests had been drinking and talking only hours before. Clayton was supposed to have caught a train to Scotland that night; instead he was found folded into a piece of furniture in the home of a man rumoured to admire his wife. Major Rich is arrested almost at once, the circumstances seeming to allow no other reading. Hercule Poirot, drawn in through a friend who fears for Margharita's safety, declines to accept the obvious. Assisted by his secretary Miss Lemon, he fixes on a single nagging question: why would any guilty man calmly sleep in a room that held a bleeding corpse he could not fail to discover? Working through the small circle of friends who attended the party, Poirot weighs jealousy, motive, and the precise mechanics of a body's concealment. The result is a compact, character-driven puzzle in which the placement of the chest itself becomes the clue that everything turns on.