“This is the limit!” Flyaway Hair slammed Poirot’s meal down on the table and marched back to the kitchen door. Pushing it open she yelled, “That Jennie’s upped and gone without paying!”
“But what is it that she must pay for?” Hercule Poirot muttered to himself.
ONE MINUTE LATER, AFTER a brief unsuccessful attempt to take an interest in his beef chop with vermicelli soufflé, Poirot knocked at the door of Pleasant’s kitchen. Flyaway Hair opened it narrowly, so that nothing was visible beyond her slender form in the doorway.
“Something wrong with your dinner, sir?”
“Allow me to pay for the tea that Mademoiselle Jennie has abandoned,” Poirot offered. “In return, if you would be kind enough to answer one or two questions?”
“D’you know Jennie, then? I’ve not seen you and her together before.”
“Non. I do not know her. That is why I ask you.”
“Why’d you go and sit with her, then?”
“She was afraid, and in great distress. I found it troubling to see. I hoped I might be able to offer some assistance.”
“The likes of Jennie can’t be helped,” Flyaway Hair said. “All right, I’ll answer your questions, but I’ll ask you one first: where was it you were a policeman?”
Poirot did not point out that she had already asked him three questions. This was the fourth.
She peered at him through narrowed eyes. “Somewhere they speak French—but not France, was it?” she said. “I’ve seen what you do with your face when the other girls say ‘the French chap.’ ”
Poirot smiled. Perhaps it would do no harm for her to know his name. “I am Hercule Poirot, mademoiselle. From Belgium. I am delighted to make your acquaintance.” He extended his hand.
She shook it. “Fee Spring. Euphemia really, but everyone calls me Fee. If they used my whole name, they’d never get round to the rest of what they wanted to say to me, would they? Not that I’d be any the worse off for that.”
“Do you know the whole name of Mademoiselle Jennie?”
Fee nodded in the direction of Poirot’s table, where steam still rose from his heaped plate. “Eat your dinner. I’ll be out in two shakes of a lamb’s tail.” She withdrew abruptly, closing the door in his face.
Poirot proceeded back to his seat. Perhaps he would take Fee Spring’s advice and make a further effort with the beef chop. How heartening it was to speak to somebody who observed details. Hercule Poirot did not encounter many such people.
Fee reappeared promptly with a cup in her hand, no saucer. She took a slurp from it as she sat down on the chair that Jennie had vacated. Poirot managed not to wince at the sound.
“I don’t know a lot about Jennie,” she said. “Just what I’ve picked up from odd things she’s said. She works for a lady with a big house. Lives in. That’s why she comes here regular, to collect Her Ladyship’s coffee and cakes, for her fancy dinners and parties and the like. Comes right across town—she said that once. Plenty of our regulars come quite a way. Jennie always stays for a drink. ‘My usual, please,’ she says when she arrives, like she’s a lady herself. That voice is her playing at being grand, I reckon. It’s not the one she was born with. Could be why she doesn’t say much, if she knows she can’t keep it up.”
“Pardon me,” said Poirot, “but how do you know that Mademoiselle Jennie has not always spoken in this way?”
“You ever heard a domestic talk all proper like that? Can’t say as I have.”
“Oui, mais . . . So it is the speculation and nothing more?”
Fee Spring grudgingly admitted that she did not know for certain. For as long as she had known her, Jennie had spoken “like a proper lady.”
“I’ll say this for Jennie: she’s a tea girl, so she’s got some sense in her head at least.”
“A tea girl?”
“That’s right.” Fee sniffed at Poirot’s coffee cup. “All you that drinks coffee when you could be drinking tea want your brains looking at, if you ask me.”
“You do not know the name of the lady for whom Jennie works, or the address of the big house?” Poirot asked.
“No. Don’t know Jennie’s last name neither. I know she had a terrible heartbreak years and years ago. She said so once.”
“Heartbreak? Did she tell you of what kind?”
“S’only one sort,” said Fee decisively. “The sort that does a heart right in.”
“What I mean to say is that there are many causes of the heartbreak: love that is unreturned, the loss of a loved one at a tragically young age—”
“Oh, we never got the story,” said Fee with a trace of bitterness in her voice. “Never will, neither. One word, heartbreak, was all she’d part with. See, the thing about Jennie is, she don’t talk. You wouldn’t be able to help her none if she still sat here in this chair, no more than you can now with her run off. She’s all shut up in herself, that’s Jennie’s trouble. Likes to wallow in it, whatever it is.”
All shut up in herself . . . The words sparked a memory in Poirot—of a Thursday evening at Pleasant’s several weeks ago, and Fee talking about a customer.
He said, “She asks no questions, n’est-ce pas? She is not interested in the social exchanges or the conversation? She does not care to find out what is the latest news in the life of anybody else?”
“Too true!” Fee looked impressed. “There’s not a scrap of curiosity in her. I’ve never known anyone more wrapped up in her own cares. Just doesn’t see the world or the rest of us in it. She never asks you how you’re rubbing along, or what you’ve been doing with yourself.” Fee tilted her head to one side. “You’re quick to catch on, aren’t you?”
“I know what I know only from listening to you speak to the other waitresses, mademoiselle.”
Fee’s face turned red. “I’m surprised you’d go to the bother of listening.”
Poirot had no wish to embarrass her further, so he did not tell her that he greatly looked forward to her descriptions of the individuals he had come to think of, collectively, as “The Coffee-House Characters”—Mr. Not Quite, for instance, who, each time he came in, would order his food and then, immediately afterward, cancel the order because he had decided it was not quite what he wanted.
Now was not the appropriate time to enquire if Fee had a name of the same order as Mr. Not Quite for Hercule Poirot that she used in his absence—perhaps one that made reference to his exquisite mustache.
“So Mademoiselle Jennie does not wish to know the business of other people,” Poirot said thoughtfully, “but unlike many who take no interest in the lives and ideas of those around them, and who talk only about themselves at great length, she does not do this either—is that not so?”
Fee raised her eyebrows. “Powerful memory you’ve got there. Dead right again. No, Jennie’s not one to talk about herself. She’ll answer a question, but she won’t linger on it. Doesn’t want to be kept too long from what’s in her head, whatever it is. Her hidden treasure—except it don’t make her happy, whatever she’s dwelling on. I’ve long since given up trying to fathom her.”
“She dwells on the heartbreak,” Poirot murmured. “And the danger.”
“Did she say she was in danger?”
“Oui, mademoiselle. I regret that I was not quick enough to stop her from leaving. If something should happen to her . . .” Poirot shook his head and wished he could recover the settled feeling with which he had arrived. He slapped the tabletop with the flat of his hand as he made his decision. “I will return here demain matin. You say she is here often, n’est-ce pas? I will find her before the danger does. This time, Hercule Poirot, he will be quicker!”
“Fast or slow, don’t matter,” said Fee. “No one can find Jennie, not even with her right in front of their noses, and no one can help her.” She stood and picked up Poirot’s plate. “There’s no point letting good food go cold over it,” she concluded.
Murder in Three Rooms
THAT WAS HOW IT started, on the evening of Thursda
y, February 7, 1929, with Hercule Poirot, and Jennie, and Fee Spring; amid the crooked, teapot-huddled shelves of Pleasant’s Coffee House.
Or, I should say, that was how it appeared to start. I’m not convinced that stories from real life have beginnings and ends, as a matter of fact. Approach them from any vantage point and you’ll see that they stretch endlessly back into the past and spread inexorably forward into the future. One is never quite able to say “That’s that, then,” and draw a line.
Luckily, true stories do have heroes and heroines. Not being one myself, having no hope of ever being one, I am all too aware that they are real.
I wasn’t present that Thursday evening at the coffee house. My name was mentioned—Edward Catchpool, Poirot’s policeman friend from Scotland Yard, not much older than thirty (thirty-two, to be precise)—but I was not there. I have, nevertheless, decided to try to fill the gaps in my own experience in order make a written record of the Jennie story. Fortunately, I have the testimony of Hercule Poirot to help me, and there is no better witness.
I am writing this for the benefit of nobody but myself. Once my account is complete, I shall read and reread it until I am able to cast my eyes over the words without feeling the shock that I feel now as I write them—until “How can this have happened?” gives way to “Yes, this is what happened.”
At some point I shall have to think of something better to call it than “The Jennie Story.” It’s not much of a title.
I first met Hercule Poirot six weeks before the Thursday evening I have described, when he took a room in a London lodging house that belongs to Mrs. Blanche Unsworth. It is a spacious, impeccably clean building with a rather severe square façade and an interior that could not be more feminine; there are flounces and frills and trims everywhere. I sometimes fear that I will leave for work one day and find that a lavender-colored fringe from some item in the drawing room has somehow attached itself to my elbow or my shoe.
Unlike me, Poirot is not a permanent fixture in the house but a temporary visitor. “I will enjoy one month at least of restful inactivity,” he told me on the first night that he appeared. He said it with great resolve, as if he imagined I might try to stop him. “My mind, it grows too busy,” he explained. “The rushing of the many thoughts . . . Here I believe they will slow down.”
I asked where he lived, expecting the answer “France”; I found out a little later that he is Belgian, not French. In response to my question, he walked over to the window, pulled the lace curtain to one side and pointed at a wide, elegant building that was at most three hundred yards away. “You live there?” I said. I thought it must be a joke.
“Oui. I do not wish to be far from my home,” Poirot explained. “It is most pleasing to me that I am able to see it: the beautiful view!” He gazed at the apartment house with pride, and for a few moments I wondered if he had forgotten I was there. Then he said, “Travel is a wonderful thing. It is stimulating, but not restful. Yet if I do not take myself away somewhere, there will be no vacances for the mind of Poirot! Disturbance will arrive in one form or another. At home one is too easily found. A friend or a stranger will come with a matter of great importance comme toujours—it is always of the greatest importance!—and the little gray cells will once more be busy and unable to conserve their energy. So, Poirot, he is said to have left London for a while, and meanwhile he takes his rest in a place he knows well, protected from the interruption.”
He said all this, and I nodded along as if it made perfect sense, wondering if people grow ever more peculiar as they age.
Mrs. Unsworth never cooks dinner on a Thursday evening—that’s her night for visiting her late husband’s sister—and this was how Poirot came to discover Pleasant’s Coffee House. He told me he could not risk being seen in any of his usual haunts while he was supposed to be out of town, and asked if I could recommend “a place where a person like you might go, mon ami—but where the food is excellent.” I told him about Pleasant’s: cramped, a little eccentric, but most people who tried it once went back again and again.
On this particular Thursday evening—the night of Poirot’s encounter with Jennie—he arrived home at ten past ten, much later than usual. I was in the drawing room, sitting close to the fire but unable to warm myself up. I heard Blanche Unsworth whispering to Poirot seconds after I heard the front door open and shut; she must have been waiting for him in the hall.
I couldn’t hear what she was saying, but I could guess: she was anxious, and I was the cause of her anxiety. She had arrived back from her sister-in-law’s house at half past nine and decided that something was wrong with me. I looked a fright—as if I hadn’t eaten and wouldn’t sleep. She’d said all this to me herself. I don’t know quite how a person manages to look as if he hasn’t eaten, incidentally. Perhaps I was leaner than I had been at breakfast that morning.
She inspected me from a variety of angles and offered me everything she could think of that might set me right, starting with the obvious remedies one offers in such situations—food, drink, a friendly ear. Once I’d rejected all three as graciously as I could, she proceeded to more outlandish suggestions: a pillow stuffed with herbs, something foul smelling but apparently beneficial from a dark blue bottle that I must put in my bath water.
I thanked her and refused. She cast her eyes frantically around the drawing room, looking for any unlikely object she might foist upon me with the promise that it would solve all my problems.
Now, more likely than not, she was whispering to Poirot that he must press me to accept the foul-smelling blue bottle or the herb pillow.
Poirot is normally back from Pleasant’s and reading in the drawing room by nine o’clock on a Thursday evening. I had returned from the Bloxham Hotel at a quarter past nine, determined not to think about what I had encountered there, and very much looking forward to finding Poirot in his favorite chair so that we could talk about amusing trivialities as we so often did.
He wasn’t there. His absence made me feel strangely remote from everything, as if the ground had fallen away beneath my feet. Poirot is a regular sort of person who does not like to vary his routines—“It is the unchanging daily routine, Catchpool, that makes for the restful mind” he had told me more than once—and yet he was a full quarter of an hour late.
When I heard the front door at half past nine, I hoped it was him, but it was Blanche Unsworth. I nearly let out a groan. If you’re worried about yourself, the last thing you want is the company of somebody whose chief pastime is fussing over nothing.
I was afraid I might not be able to persuade myself to return to the Bloxham Hotel the following day, and I knew that I had to. That was what I was trying not to think about.
“And now,” I reflected, “Poirot is here at last, and he will be worried about me as well because Blanche Unsworth has told him he must be.” I decided I would be better off with neither of them around. If there was no possibility of talking about something easy and entertaining, I preferred not to talk at all.
Poirot appeared in the drawing room, still wearing his hat and coat, and closed the door behind him. I expected a barrage of questions from him, but instead he said with an air of distraction, “It is late. I walk and walk around the streets, looking, and I achieve nothing except to make myself late.”
He was worried, all right, but not about me and whether I had eaten or was going to eat. It was a huge relief. “Looking?” I asked.
“Oui. For a woman, Jennie, whom I very much hope is still alive and not murdered.”
“Murdered?” I had that sense of the ground dropping away again. I knew Poirot was a famous detective. He had told me about some of the cases he’d solved. Still, he was supposed to be having a break from all that, and I could have done without his producing that particular word at that moment, in such a portentous fashion.
“What does she look like, this Jennie?” I asked. “Describe her. I might have seen her. Especially if she’s been murdered. I’ve seen two murdered women tonight,
actually, and one man, so you might be in luck. The man didn’t look as if he was likely to be called Jennie, but as for the other two—”
“Attendez, mon ami,” Poirot’s calm voice cut through my desperate ramblings. He took off his hat and began to unbutton his coat. “So Madame Blanche, she is correct—you are troubled? Ah, but how did I not see this straight away? You are pale. My thoughts, they were elsewhere. They arrange to be elsewhere when they see that Madame Blanche approaches! But please tell Poirot immédiatement: what is the matter?”
“THREE MURDERS ARE THE matter,” I said. “And all three of them like nothing I’ve seen before. Two women and one man. Each one in a different room.”
Of course, I had encountered violent death before many times—I had been with Scotland Yard for nearly two years, and a policeman for five—but most murders had about them an obvious appearance of lost control: somebody had lashed out in a fit of temper, or had one tipple too many and blown his top. This business at the Bloxham was very different. Whoever had killed three times at the hotel had planned ahead—for months, I guessed. Each of his crime scenes was a work of macabre art with a hidden meaning that I could not decipher. It terrified me to think that this time I was not up against a chaotic ruffian of the sort I was used to, but perhaps a cold, meticulous mind that would not allow itself to be defeated.
I was no doubt being overly gloomy about it, but I couldn’t shake my feelings of foreboding. Three matching corpses: the very idea made me shudder. I told myself I must not develop a phobia; I had rather to treat this case as I would any other, no matter how different it seemed on the surface.
“Each of the three murders in a different room in the same house?” Poirot asked.
“No, at the Bloxham Hotel. Up Piccadilly Circus way. I don’t suppose you know it?”
“Non.”
“I had never been inside it before tonight. It’s not the sort of place a chap like me would think to go. It’s palatial.”
Poirot was sitting with his back very straight. “Three murders, in the same hotel and each in a different room?” he said.
The Monogram Murders Page 2
