The Monogram Murders

by Sophie Hannah

  “Yes, and all committed earlier in the evening within a short space of time.”

  “This evening? And yet you are here. Why are you not at the hotel? The killer, he is apprehended already?”

  “No such luck, I’m afraid. No, I . . .” I stopped and cleared my throat. Reporting the facts of the case was straightforward enough, but I had no wish to explain to Poirot how my mood had been affected by what I had seen, or to tell him that I had been at the Bloxham for no more than five minutes before I succumbed to the powerful urge to leave.

  The way all three had been laid out on their backs so formally: arms by their sides, palms of their hands touching the floor, legs together . . .

  Laying out the dead. The phrase forced its way into my mind, accompanied by a vision of a dark room from many years ago—a room I had been compelled to enter as a young child, and had been refusing to enter in my imagination ever since. I fully intended to carry on refusing for the rest of my life.

  Lifeless hands, palms facing downward.

  “Hold his hand, Edward.”

  “Don’t worry, there are plenty of police crawling about the place,” I said quickly and loudly, to banish the unwelcome vision. “Tomorrow morning is soon enough for me to go back.” Seeing that he was waiting for a fuller answer, I added, “I had to clear my head. Frankly, I’ve never seen anything as peculiar as these three murders in all my life.”

  “In what way peculiar?”

  “Each of the victims had something in his or her mouth—the same thing.”

  “Non.” Poirot wagged his finger at me. “This is not possible, mon ami. The same thing cannot be inside three different mouths at the same time.”

  “Three separate things, all identical,” I clarified. “Three cufflinks, solid gold from the look of them. Monogrammed. Same initials on all three: PIJ. Poirot? Are you all right? You look—”

  “Mon Dieu!” He had risen to his feet and begun to pace around the room. “You do not see what this means, mon ami. No, you do not see it at all, because you have not heard the story of my encounter with Mademoiselle Jennie. Quickly I must tell you what happened so that you understand.”

  Poirot’s idea of telling a story quickly is rather different from most people’s. Every detail matters to him equally, whether it’s a fire in which three hundred people perish or a small dimple on a child’s chin. He can never be induced to rush to the nub of a matter, so I settled into my chair and let him tell it in his own way. By the time he had finished, I felt as if I had experienced the events first-hand—more comprehensively, indeed, than I experience many scenes from my life in which I personally participate.

  “What an extraordinary thing to happen,” I said. “On the same night as the three murders at the Bloxham, too. Quite a coincidence.”

  Poirot sighed. “I do not think it is a coincidence, my friend. One accepts that the coincidences happen from time to time, but here there is a clear connection.”

  “You mean murder on the one hand, and the fear of being murdered on the other?”

  “Non. That is one connection, yes, but I am talking about something different.” Poirot stopped promenading around the drawing room and turned to face me. “You say that in your three murder victims” mouths are found three gold cufflinks bearing the monogram ‘PIJ?’ ”

  “That’s right.”

  “Mademoiselle Jennie, she said to me quite clearly: ‘Promise me this: if I’m found dead, you’ll tell your friend the policeman not to look for my killer. Oh, please let no one open their mouths! This crime must never be solved.’ What do you think she meant by ‘Oh, please let no one open their mouths?’ ”

  Was he joking? Apparently not. “Well,” I said, “it’s clear, isn’t it? She feared she would be murdered, didn’t want her killer punished and was hoping no one would say anything to point the finger at him. She believes she is the one who deserves to be punished.”

  “You choose the meaning that at first seems obvious,” said Poirot. He sounded disappointed in me. “Ask yourself if there is another possible meaning of those words: ‘Oh, please let no one open their mouths.’ Reflect upon your three gold cufflinks.”

  “They are not mine,” I said emphatically, wishing at that moment that I could push the whole case very far away from me. “All right, I see what you’re driving at, but—”

  “What do you see? Je conduis ma voiture à quoi?”

  “Well . . . ‘Please let no one open their mouths’ could, at a stretch, mean ‘Please let no one open the mouths of the three murder victims at the Bloxham Hotel.’ ” I felt an utter fool giving voice to this preposterous theory.

  “Exactement! ‘Please let no one open their mouths and find the gold cufflinks with the initials PIJ.’ Is it not possible that this is what Jennie meant? That she knew about the three murder victims at the hotel, and that she knew that whoever killed them was also intent on killing her?”

  Without waiting for my answer, Poirot proceeded with his imaginings. “And the letters PIJ, the person who has those initials, he is very important to the story, n’est-ce pas? Jennie, she knows this. She knows that if you find these three letters you will be on your way to finding the murderer, and she wants to prevent this. Alors, you must catch him before it is too late for Jennie, or else Hercule Poirot, he shall not forgive himself!”

  I was alarmed to hear this. I felt a pressing sense of responsibility for catching this killer as it was, and I did not wish also to be responsible for Poirot’s never forgiving himself. Did he really look at me and see a man capable of apprehending a murderer with a mind of this sort—a mind that would think to place monogrammed cufflinks in the mouths of the dead? I have always been a straightforward person and I work best at straightforward things.

  “I think you must go back to the hotel,” said Poirot. He meant immediately.

  I shuddered at the memory of those three rooms. “First thing tomorrow will be soon enough,” I said, studiously avoiding his gleaming eyes. “I should tell you, I’m not going to make a fool of myself by bringing up this Jennie person. It would only confuse everybody. You have come up with a possible meaning for what she said, and I have come up with another. Yours is the more interesting, but mine is twenty times more likely to be correct.”

  “It is not” came the contradiction.

  “We shall have to disagree about it,” I said firmly. “If we were to ask a hundred people, they would all agree with me and not with you, I suspect.”

  “I too suspect this.” Poirot sighed. “Allow me to convince you if I can. A few moments ago, you said to me about the murders at the hotel, ‘Each of the victims had something in his or her mouth,’ did you not?”

  I agreed that I had.

  “You did not say, ‘in their mouth,’ you said, ‘his or her’—because you are an educated man and you speak in the singular and not the plural: ‘his or her,’ to go with ‘each’—it is grammatically correct. Mademoiselle Jennie, she is a housemaid, but she has the speech of an educated person and the vocabulary also. She used the word ‘inevitable’ when talking about her death, her murder. And then she said to me, ‘So you see, there is no help to be had, and even if there were, I should not deserve it.’ She is a woman who uses the English language as it should be used. Therefore, mon ami . . .” Poirot was up on his feet again. “Therefore! If you are correct and Jennie meant to say, ‘Please let no one open their mouths’ in the sense of ‘Please let no one give information to the police,’ why did she not say, ‘Please let no one open his or her mouth?’ The word ‘no one’ requires the singular, not the plural!”

  I stared up at him with an ache in my neck, too bewildered and weary to respond. Hadn’t he told me himself that Jennie was in a frightful panic? In my experience, people who are stricken with terror tend not to fuss about grammar.

  I had always thought of Poirot as among the most intelligent of men, but perhaps I had been wrong. If this was the sort of nonsense he was inclined to spout, then no wonder he had judged it t
ime to submit his mind to a rest cure.

  “Naturally, you will now tell me that Jennie was distressed and was therefore not careful about her speech,” Poirot went on. “However, she spoke with perfect correctness apart from this one instance—unless I am right and you are wrong, in which case Jennie said nothing that was grammatically incorrect at all!”

  He clapped his hands together and seemed so gratified by his announcement that I was moved to say rather sharply, “That’s marvelous, Poirot. A man and two women are murdered, and it’s my job to sort it out, but I’m jolly pleased that Jennie, whoever she is, didn’t slip up in her use of the English language.”

  “And Poirot also, he is jolly pleased,” said my hard-to-discourage friend, “because a little progress has been made, a little discovery. Non.” His smile vanished and his expression became more serious. “Mademoiselle Jennie did not make the error of grammar. The meaning she intended was, ‘Please let no one open the mouths of the three murdered people—their mouths.’ ”

  “If you insist,” I muttered.

  “Tomorrow after breakfast you will return to the Bloxham Hotel,” said Poirot. “I will join you there later, after I look for Jennie.”

  “You?” I said, somewhat perturbed. Words of protest formed in my head, but I knew they would never reach Poirot’s ears. Famous detective or not, his ideas about the case had so far been, frankly, ridiculous, but if he was offering his company, I wouldn’t turn it down. He was very sure of himself and I was not—that was what it boiled down to. I already felt bolstered by the interest he was taking.

  “Oui,” he said. “Three murders have been committed that share an extremely unusual feature: the monogrammed cufflink in the mouth. Most assuredly I will go to the Bloxham Hotel.”

  “Aren’t you supposed to be avoiding stimulation and resting your brain?” I asked.

  “Oui. Précisément.” Poirot glared at me. “It is not restful for me to sit in this chair all day and think of you omitting to mention to anybody my meeting with Mademoiselle Jennie, a detail of the utmost importance! It is not restful for me to consider that Jennie runs around London giving her murderer every opportunity to kill her and put his fourth cufflink in her mouth.”

  Poirot leaned forward in his chair. “Please tell me that this at least has struck you: that cufflinks come in pairs? You have three in the mouths of the dead at the Bloxham Hotel. Where is the fourth, if not in the pocket of the killer, waiting to go into the mouth of Mademoiselle Jennie after her murder?”

  I’m afraid I laughed. “Poirot, that’s just plain silly. Yes, cufflinks normally come in pairs but really, it’s quite simple: he wanted to kill three people, so he only used three cufflinks. You can’t use the notion of some dreamed-up fourth cufflink to prove anything—certainly not to link the hotel murders to this Jennie woman.”

  Poirot’s face had taken on a stubborn cast. “When you are a killer who decides to use cufflinks in this way, mon ami, you invite the thought of the pairs. It is the killer who has put before us the notion of the fourth cufflink and the fourth victim, not Hercule Poirot!”

  “But . . . then how do we know he doesn’t have six victims in mind, or eight? Who is to say that the pocket of this killer doesn’t contain five more cufflinks with the monogram PIJ?”

  To my amazement, Poirot nodded and said, “You make a good point.”

  “No, Poirot, it’s not a good point,” I said despondently. “I conjured it up out of nowhere. You might enjoy my flights of fancy, but I can promise you my bosses at Scotland Yard won’t.”

  “Your bosses, they do not like you to consider what is possible? No, of course they do not,” Poirot answered himself. “And they are the people in charge of catching this murderer. They, and you. Bon. This is why Hercule Poirot must go tomorrow to the Bloxham Hotel.”

  At the Bloxham Hotel

  THE FOLLOWING MORNING AT the Bloxham, I could not help but feel unsettled, knowing that Poirot might arrive at any moment to tell us simple police folk how foolishly we were approaching the investigation of our three murders. I was the only one who knew he was coming, which set me rather on edge. His presence would be my responsibility, and I was afraid that he might demoralize the troops. If truth be told, I feared that he might demoralize me. In the optimistic light of an unusually bright February day, and after a surprisingly satisfactory night’s sleep, I couldn’t understand why I hadn’t forbidden him from coming anywhere near the Bloxham.

  I didn’t suppose it mattered, however; he would not have listened to me if I had.

  I was in the hotel’s opulent lobby, talking to a Mr. Luca Lazzari, the hotel’s manager, when Poirot arrived. Lazzari was a friendly, helpful and startlingly enthusiastic man with black curly hair, a musical way of speaking, and a mustache that was in no way the equal of Poirot’s. Lazzari seemed determined that I and my fellow policemen should enjoy our time at the Bloxham every bit as much as the paying guests did—those that did not end up getting murdered, that is.

  I introduced him to Poirot, who nodded curtly. He seemed out of sorts and I soon learned why. “I did not find Jennie,” he said. “Half the morning I waited at the coffee house! But she did not come.”

  “Hardly ‘half the morning,’ Poirot,” I said, for he was prone to exaggeration.

  “Mademoiselle Fee also was not there. The other waitresses, they were able to tell me nothing.”

  “Bad luck,” I said, unsurprised by the news. I hadn’t for a moment imagined that Jennie might revisit the coffee house, and I felt guilty. I should perhaps have tried harder to make Poirot see sense: she had run away from him and from Pleasant’s, having declared that confiding in him had been a mistake. Why on earth would she return the following day and allow him to take charge of protecting her?

  “So!” Poirot looked at me expectantly. “What do you have to tell me?”

  “I too am here to provide the information you need,” said Lazzari, beaming. “Luca Lazzari, at your disposal. Have you visited the Bloxham Hotel before, Monsieur Poirot?”

  “Non.”

  “Is it not superb? Like a palace of the belle époque, no? Majestic! I hope you notice and admire the artistic masterpieces that are all around us!”

  “Oui. It is superior to the lodging house of Mrs. Blanche Unsworth, though that house has the better view from the window,” Poirot said briskly. His glum spirits had certainly dug themselves in.

  “Ah, the views from my charming hotel!” Lazzari clasped his hands together in delight. “From the rooms facing the hotel gardens there are sights of great beauty, and on the other side there is splendid London—another exquisite scene! Later I will show you.”

  “I would prefer to be shown the three rooms in which murders have taken place,” Poirot told him.

  That put a momentary crimp in Lazzari’s smile. “Monsieur Poirot, you may rest assured that this terrible crime—three murders on one night, it is scarcely credible to me!—that this will never happen again at the world-renowned Bloxham Hotel.”

  Poirot and I exchanged a look. The point was not so much preventing it from happening again but dealing with the fact that it had happened on this occasion.

  I decided I had better take the reins and not allow Lazzari the chance to say too much more. Poirot’s mustache was already twitching with suppressed rage.

  “The victims’ names are Mrs. Harriet Sippel, Miss Ida Gransbury and Mr. Richard Negus,” I told Poirot. “All three were guests in the hotel and each one was the sole occupant of his or her room.”

  “Each one? His or her room, you say?” Poirot smiled at his little joke. I attributed the rapid improvement in his spirits to the fact that Lazzari had fallen silent. “I do not mean to interrupt you, Catchpool. Continue.”

  “All three victims arrived here at the hotel on Wednesday, the day before they were murdered.”

  “Did they arrive together?”

  “No.”

  “Most definitely not,” said Lazzari. “They arrived separately, one by one.
They checked in one by one.”

  “And they were murdered one by one,” said Poirot, which happened to be exactly what I was thinking. “You are certain of this?” he asked Lazzari.

  “I could not be more so. I have the word of my clerk, Mr. John Goode, the most dependable man of my entire acquaintance. You will meet him. We have only the most impeccable persons working here at the Bloxham Hotel, Monsieur Poirot, and when my clerk tells me a thing is so, I know that it is so. From across the country and across the world, people come to ask if they can work at the Bloxham Hotel. I say yes only to the best.”

  It’s funny but I didn’t realize how well I had come to know Poirot until that moment—until I saw that Lazzari did not know how to manage him at all. If he had written “Suspect This Man of Murder” on a large sign and hung it around Mr. John Goode’s neck, he could not have done a better job of inciting Poirot to distrust the fellow. Hercule Poirot will not allow anyone else to dictate to him what his opinion should be; he will, rather, determine to believe the opposite, contrary old cove that he is.

  “So,” he said now, “it is a remarkable coincidence, is it not? Our three murder victims—Mrs. Harriet Sippel, Miss Ida Gransbury and Mr. Richard Negus—they arrive separately and appear to have nothing to do with one another. And yet all three share not merely the date of their deaths, which was yesterday, but also their date of arrival at the Bloxham Hotel: Wednesday.”

  “What’s remarkable about it?” I asked. “Plenty of other guests must also have arrived on Wednesday in a hotel of this size. I mean, ones that have not been murdered.”

  Poirot’s eyes looked as if they were about to burst forth from his head. I couldn’t see that I had said anything particularly shocking, so I pretended not to notice his consternation, and continued to tell him the facts of the case.

  “Each of the victims was found inside his or her locked bedroom,” I said, feeling rather self-conscious about the “his or her” part. “The killer locked all three doors and made off with the keys—”