The Monogram Murders

by Sophie Hannah

  Jennie wiped away a tear. “I believe I did her a favor. You heard her express the desire to be reunited with Patrick. I helped her with that, didn’t I?”

  “Catchpool,” said Poirot. “Do you recall that I said to you, after we found the blood in the Room 402 of the Bloxham Hotel, that it was too late for me to save Mademoiselle Jennie?”

  “Yes.”

  “You thought I meant that she was dead, but you misunderstood me. You see, I knew even then that Jennie was beyond help. She had already done things so terrible that her own death was guaranteed, I feared. That was my meaning.”

  “In every way that counts, I have been dead since Patrick died,” Jennie said in that same tone of unending hopelessness.

  I knew there was only one way that I could get through this ordeal, and that was by concentrating all my attention on questions of logic. Had Poirot solved the puzzle? He seemed to think he had, but I was still in the dark. Who, for instance, had killed Harriet Sippel, Ida Gransbury and Richard Negus, and why had they done so? I asked these questions of Poirot.

  “Ah,” he said, smiling fondly, as if I had reminded him of a joke we had once shared. “I see your dilemma, mon ami. You listen to Poirot declaim at great length and then, a few minutes before the conclusion, there is the interruption of another murder, and you do not, after all, hear the answers that you have been waiting for. Dommage.”

  “Please tell me at once, and let the dommage end here,” I said as forcefully as I could.

  “It is quite simple. Jennie Hobbs and Nancy Ducane, with the help of Samuel Kidd, conspired to murder Harriet Sippel, Ida Gransbury and Richard Negus. However, while collaborating with Nancy, Jennie pretended to be part of a quite different conspiracy. She allowed Richard Negus to believe that he was the one with whom she conspired.”

  “That does not sound ‘quite simple’ to me,” I said. “It sounds inordinately complicated.”

  “No, no, my friend. Vraiment, it is not at all. You are having trouble reconciling the different versions of the story that you have heard, but you must forget all that Jennie told us when we visited her at Samuel Kidd’s house—banish it from your mind completely. It was a lie from start to finish, though I do not doubt that it contained some elements of veracity. The best lies always do. In a moment, Jennie will tell us the whole truth, now that she has nothing to lose, but first, my friend, I must pay you the compliment that you deserve. It was you, in the end, who helped me to see clearly with your suggestion in the graveyard of Holy Saints Church.”

  Poirot turned to Jennie. He said, “The lie you told to Harriet Sippel: that Patrick Ive took money from parishioners and, in return, conveyed to them messages from their dead loved ones; that Nancy Ducane had visited him in the vicarage at night for that reason—in the hope of communicating with her deceased husband, William. Ah, how often has Poirot heard about this terrible, wicked lie? Many, many times. You yourself admitted to us the other day, Miss Hobbs, that you told the lie in a moment of weakness, inspired by jealousy. But this was not the truth!

  “Standing by Patrick and Frances Ive’s desecrated grave, Catchpool said to me, ‘What if Jennie Hobbs lied about Patrick Ive not to hurt him but to help him?’ Catchpool had realized the significance of something that I had taken for granted—a fact that had never been in dispute, and so I had failed to examine it: Harriet Sippel’s passionate love for her late husband, George, who died tragically young. Had Poirot not been told how much Harriet had loved George? Or how the death of George had turned Harriet from a happy, warm-hearted woman into a bitter, spiteful monster? One can hardly imagine a loss so terrible, so devastating, that it extinguishes all joy and destroys all that is good in a person. Oui, bien sûr, I knew that Harriet Sippel had suffered such a loss. I knew it so surely that I thought no further about it!

  “I knew, also, that Jennie Hobbs loved Patrick Ive enough to abandon Samuel Kidd, her fiancé, in order to remain in the service of Reverend Ive and his wife. This is a very self-sacrificing love: content to serve, and receive little in return. Yet the story told to us by both Jennie and Nancy offered Jennie’s jealousy as her reason for telling the terrible lie that she told—jealousy of Patrick’s love for Nancy. But this cannot be true! It is not consistent! We must think not only of the physical facts but of the psychological. Jennie did nothing to punish Patrick Ive for his marriage to Frances. She accepted with good grace that he belonged to another woman. She continued as his loyal servant and was a great help to him and his wife at the vicarage, and they, in turn, were devoted to her. Why then all of a sudden, after many years of self-sacrificing love and service, would Patrick Ive’s love for Nancy Ducane inspire Jennie to slander him, and to set in motion a chain of events that would destroy him? The answer is that it would not, and did not.

  “It was not the eruption of envy and longing locked inside for so long that prompted Jennie to tell her lie. It was something altogether different. You were trying—were you not, Miss Hobbs?—to help the man you loved. To save him, even. As soon as I heard the theory of my clever friend Catchpool, I knew it was the truth. It was so obvious, and Poirot, he had been imbécile not to see!”

  Jennie looked at me. “What theory?” she asked.

  I opened my mouth to answer, but Poirot was too quick for me. “When Harriet Sippel told you she had seen Nancy Ducane visiting the vicarage late at night, you were straight away alert to the danger. You knew about these trysts—how could you not, when you lived at the vicarage—and you were anxious to protect Patrick Ive’s good name. How could this be achieved? Harriet Sippel, once she had sniffed out a scandal, would relish the opportunity to bring public shame to a sinner. How could you explain the presence of Nancy Ducane at the vicarage on nights when Frances Ive was not there, except with the truth? What other story would pass the muster? And then, as if by magic, when you had almost given up hope, you thought of something that might work. You decided to use temptation and false hope to eliminate the threat that Harriet represented.”

  Jennie stared blankly ahead. She said nothing.

  “Harriet Sippel and Nancy Ducane had something in common,” Poirot went on. “They had both lost their husbands to early tragic death. You told Harriet that, with the help of Patrick Ive, Nancy had been able to communicate with the deceased William Ducane—that money had changed hands. Of course, it would have to be kept secret from the Church and from everybody in the village, but you suggested to Harriet that, if she so wished, Patrick would be able to do for her what he was doing for Nancy. She and George could be . . . well, if not together again then at least there could be communication of a kind between them. Tell me, how did Harriet respond when you said this to her?”

  A long silence followed. Then Jennie said, “She was foaming at the mouth for it to happen as soon as possible. She would pay any price, she said, to be able to speak to George again. You cannot imagine how much she loved that man, Monsieur Poirot. Watching her face as I spoke . . . it was like seeing a dead woman come back to life. I tried to explain it all to Patrick: that there had been a problem, but I had solved it. I made the offer to Harriet without asking him first, you see. Oh, I think I knew in my heart that Patrick would never consent to it, but I was desperate! I didn’t want to give him the chance to forbid me. Can you understand that?”

  “Oui, mademoiselle.”

  “I hoped I would be able to persuade him to agree. He was a principled man, but I knew he would want to shield Frances from a scandal, and protect Nancy, and this was a certain way to guarantee Harriet’s silence. It was the only way! All Patrick would have had to do was say some comforting words to Harriet once in a while and pretend that those words came from George Sippel. There was no need for him to take her money, even. I said all this to him, but he wouldn’t hear of it. He was horrified.”

  “He was entirely right to be,” said Poirot quietly. “Continue, please.”

  “He said it would be immoral and unfair to do to Harriet what I was proposing; he would sooner face persona
l ruin. I begged him to reconsider. What harm would it do, if it would make Harriet happy? But Patrick was resolute. He asked me to give her the message that what I had proposed would not, after all, be possible. He was very specific. ‘Do not say that you lied, Jennie, or else she will revert to suspecting the truth,’ he said. My instructions were to tell Harriet only that she could not have what she wanted.”

  “So you had no choice but to tell her,” I said.

  “No choice at all.” Jennie started to cry. “And from the moment I told Harriet that Patrick had refused her request, she made herself his enemy, repeating my lie to the whole village. Patrick could have ruined her reputation in return, by making it known that she had been eager to avail herself of his unwholesome services, and only started to call them blasphemous and unchristian once she had been thwarted, but he wouldn’t do it. He said that no matter how maliciously Harriet attacked him, he would not blacken her name. Foolish man! He could have shut her up in an instant, but he was too noble for his own good!”

  “Was that when you went to Nancy Ducane for advice?” Poirot asked.

  “Yes. I didn’t see why Patrick and I should be the only ones to fret. Nancy was part of it too. I asked her if I should publicly admit to my lie, but she advised me not to. She said, ‘I fear that trouble is coming to Patrick now one way or another, and to me. You would be wise to recede into the background and say nothing, Jennie. Do not sacrifice yourself. I am not sure you would be strong enough to withstand Harriet’s vilification.’ She underestimated me. I was upset, you see—I suppose I sort of fell apart a bit, because I was so frightened for Patrick, with Harriet determined to destroy him—but I am not a weak person, Monsieur Poirot.”

  “I see that you are not afraid.”

  “No. I draw strength from the knowledge that Harriet Sippel—that loathsome hypocrite—is dead. Her killer did the world a great service.”

  “Which leads us to the question of that killer’s identity, mademoiselle. Who killed Harriet Sippel? You told us that it was Ida Gransbury, but that was a lie.”

  “I hardly need tell you the truth, Monsieur Poirot, when you know it as well as I do.”

  “Then I must ask you to take pity on poor Mr. Catchpool here. He does not yet know the whole story.”

  “You’d better tell him, then, hadn’t you?” Jennie smiled an absent sort of smile, and I suddenly felt as if there was less of her in the room than there had been only moments ago; she had taken herself away.

  “Très bien,” said Poirot. “I will start with Harriet Sippel and Ida Gransbury: two inflexible women so convinced of their own rectitude that they were willing to hound a good man into an early grave. Did they express sorrow after his death? No, instead they objected to his burial in consecrated ground. Did these two women, after much persuasion by Richard Negus, come to regret their treatment of Patrick Ive? No, of course they did not. It is not plausible that they would. That, Mademoiselle Jennie, was when I knew that you were lying: at that point in your story.”

  Jennie shrugged. “Anything is possible,” she said.

  “Non. Only the truth is possible. I knew that Harriet Sippel and Ida Gransbury would never have agreed to the plan of voluntary execution that you described to me. Therefore, they were murdered. How convenient, to pass off their murders as a kind of delegated suicide! You hoped Poirot might disengage his little gray cells once he heard that all the dead had been so willing to die. It was their great opportunity for redemption! What an imaginative and unusual story—the sort that one hears and assumes must be the truth, for who would think to invent such a fabrication?”

  “It was my safeguard, to be used if needed,” said Jennie. “I hoped you would never find me, but I feared you might.”

  “And if I did, you expected that your alibi for between quarter past seven and ten past eight would work, and Nancy Ducane’s also. You and Samuel Kidd would be charged with attempting to frame an innocent woman, but not with murder or conspiracy to commit murder. It is clever: you confess to wrongdoing in order to avoid punishment for far more serious crimes. Your enemies are murdered, and no one hangs because we believe your story: Ida Gransbury killed Harriet Sippel, and Richard Negus killed Ida Gransbury and then himself. Your plan was ingenious, mademoiselle—but not as ingenious as Hercule Poirot!”

  “Richard wanted to die,” said Jennie angrily. “He was not murdered. He was determined to die.”

  “Yes,” said Poirot. “This was the truth in the lie.”

  “It’s his fault, this whole horrible mess. I would never have killed anybody if it were not for Richard.”

  “But you did kill—several times. It was Catchpool who, once again, set me on the right track, by uttering a few innocent words.”

  “What words?” Jennie asked.

  “He said, ‘If murder began with a D . . .’ ”

  IT WAS UNSETTLING TO listen to Poirot’s appreciation of my helpfulness. I didn’t understand how a few careless words of mine could have been so momentous.

  Poirot was in full flow. “After we had heard your story, mademoiselle, we left Samuel Kidd’s house and, naturally, we discussed what you had told us: your supposed plan that you made together with Richard Negus . . . If I may say so, it was a compelling idea. There was a neatness about it—like the falling dominoes, except, when I thought carefully, it was not like that at all because the order of knocking over is altered. Not D falls down, then C, then B, then A; instead, B knocks A down, then C knocks B . . . But that is beside the point.”

  What on earth was he talking about? Jennie looked as if she was wondering the same thing.

  “Ah, I must be more lucid in my explanation,” said Poirot. “To enable myself to imagine the order of events more easily, mademoiselle, I substituted letters for names. Your plan, as you told it to us at Samuel Kidd’s house, was as follows: B kills A, C then kills B, D then kills C. Afterwards, D waits for E to be blamed and hanged for the murders of A, B and C, and then D kills herself. Do you see, Miss Hobbs, that you are D in this arrangement, according to the story you told us?”

  Jennie nodded.

  “Bon. Now, by chance, Catchpool here is a devotee of the crossword puzzle, and it was in connection with this hobby that he asked me to think of a word that had six letters and meant ‘death.’ I suggested ‘murder.’ No, said Catchpool, my suggestion would only work ‘if murder began with a D.’ I recalled his words some time later and made the idle speculation in my mind: what if murder did begin with a D? What if the first to kill was not Ida Gransbury but you, Miss Hobbs?

  “Over time, this speculation hardened into certainty. I understood why it must have been you who killed Harriet Sippel. She and Ida Gransbury shared neither a train nor a car from Great Holling to the Bloxham Hotel. Therefore each was unaware of the presence of the other, and there was no plan agreed by all for one to kill the other. That had to be a lie.”

  “What was the truth?” I asked rather desperately.

  “Harriet Sippel believed, and so did Ida Gransbury, that she alone was going to London, for a very private reason. Harriet had been contacted by Jennie, who said she needed to meet with her urgently. The highest level of secrecy was required. Jennie told Harriet that a room at the Bloxham Hotel was booked and paid for, and that she, Jennie, would come to the hotel on Thursday afternoon, perhaps at half past three or four o’clock, so that they could conduct their important business. Harriet accepted Jennie’s invitation because Jennie had written in her letter of invitation something that Harriet could not resist.

  “You offered her what Patrick Ive had refused her all those years ago, n’est-ce pas, mademoiselle? Communication with her late beloved husband. You told her that George Sippel had sought to speak to her through you—you, who had tried to help him reach her sixteen years earlier, and failed. And now, again, George was trying to send a message to his dearest wife, using you as his channel. He had spoken to you from the afterlife! Oh, I have no doubt that you made it extremely convincing! Harriet was unabl
e to resist. She believed because she so ardently wished it to be true. The lie you had told her so long ago, about the souls of dead loved ones making contact with the living—she believed it then, and she had never stopped believing it.”

  “Clever old you, Monsieur Poirot,” said Jennie. “Top marks.”

  “Catchpool, tell me: do you understand now about the old woman enamored of a man possibly young enough to be her son? These people with whom you became so obsessed, who featured in the gossip between Nancy Ducane and Samuel Kidd in Room 317?”

  “I’d hardly say obsessed. And, no, I don’t understand.”

  “Let us recall précisément what Rafal Bobak told us. He heard Nancy Ducane, posing as Harriet Sippel, say, ‘She’s no longer the one he confides in. He’d hardly be interested in her now—she’s let herself go, and she’s old enough to be his mother.’ Think about those words: ‘he’d hardly be interested in her now’—that fact is asserted first, before the two reasons for his lack of interest are given. One of these is that she is old enough to be his mother. Now, she is old enough to be his mother. Do you not see, Catchpool? If she is old enough to be his mother now, then she must always have been old enough to be his mother. Nothing else is possible!”

  “Isn’t that stretching it a bit?” I said. “I mean, without the ‘now’ it makes perfect sense: he’d hardly be interested in her—she’s let herself go and she’s old enough to be his mother.”

  “But, mon ami, what you say, it is ridiculous,” Poirot spluttered. “It is not logical. The ‘now’ was there, in the sentence. We cannot pretend to be without it when we are with it. We cannot ignore a ‘now’ that is right in front of our ears!”