customers at Pleasant’s. Apart from when he dined
here with his friend Edward Catchpool—the Scotland
Yard detective with whom he temporarily shared a
lodging house—he confined himself to his own
company, in the spirit of l’hibernation.
The gossiping of the coffee house waitresses did
not concern Poirot; he was grateful for their
convenient absence. He hoped it would make Jennie
more likely to speak frankly to him. “I would be
happy to offer you my counsel, mademoiselle,” he
said.
“You’re very kind, but no one can help me.” Jennie
wiped her eyes. “I’d like to be helped—I’d like it
more than anything! But it’s too late. I am already
dead, you see, or I shall be soon. I can’t hide
forever.”
Already dead . . . Her words had brought a new
chill into the room.
“So, you see, there is no help to be had,” she went
on, “and even if there were, I should not deserve it.
But . . . I do feel a little better with you sitting at my
table.” She had wrapped her arms around herself,
either for comfort or in a vain attempt to stop her
body from shaking. She hadn’t drunk a drop of her tea.
“Please stay. Nothing will happen while I’m talking to
you. That’s some consolation, at least.”
“Mademoiselle, this is most concerning. You are
alive now, and we must do what is necessary to keep
you alive. Please tell me—”
“No!” Her eyes widened, and she shrank back in
her chair. “No, you mustn’t! Nothing must be done to
stop this. It can’t be stopped, it’s impossible.
Inevitable. Once I am dead, justice will be done,
finally.” She looked over her shoulder toward the
door again.
Poirot frowned. Perhaps Jennie felt a little better
since he’d sat down at her table, but he felt decidedly
worse. “Do I understand you correctly? Are you
suggesting that somebody is pursuing you who wishes
to murder you?”
Jennie fixed her tearful blue eyes on him. “Does it
count as murder if I give in and let it happen? I’m so
tired of running, of hiding, of being so dreadfully
afraid. I want it to be over with if it’s going to
happen, and it is, because it must. It’s the only way to
make things right. It’s what I deserve.”
“This cannot be so,” said Poirot. “Without
knowing the particulars of your predicament, I
disagree with you. Murder can never be right. My
friend, the policeman—you must allow him to help
you.”
“No! You mustn’t speak a word about this to him,
or to anybody. Promise me that you won’t!”
Hercule Poirot was not in the habit of making
promises he could not keep.
“What could you possibly have done that calls for
the punishment of murder? Have you murdered
somebody yourself?”
“There would be no difference if I had! Murder
isn’t the only thing that’s unforgivable, you know. I
don’t expect you’ve ever done anything truly
unforgivable, have you?”
“Whereas you have? And you believe you must
pay with your own life? Non. This is not right. If I
could persuade you to accompany me to my lodging
house—it is very near. My friend from Scotland Yard,
Mr. Catchpool—”
“No!” Jennie leaped up out of her chair.
“Please sit, mademoiselle.”
“No. Oh, I’ve said too much! How stupid I am! I
only told you because you look so kind, and I thought
you couldn’t do anything. If you hadn’t said you were
retired and from another country, I’d never have said
a word! Promise me this: if I’m found dead, you’ll
tell your friend the policeman not to look for my
killer.” She pressed her eyes shut and clasped her
hands together. “Oh, please let no one open their
mouths! This crime must never be solved. Promise me
you’ll tell your policeman friend that, and make him
agree? If you care about justice, please do as I ask.”
She made a dash for the door. Poirot stood up to
follow, then, noticing the distance she’d covered in
the time it took him to extract himself from his chair,
sat down again with a heavy sigh. It was futile. Jennie
was gone, out into the night. He would never catch
her.
The door to the kitchen opened and Flyaway Hair
appeared with Poirot’s dinner. The smell offended his
stomach; he had lost every last scrap of his appetite.
“Where’s Jennie?” Flyaway Hair asked him, as if
he were somehow responsible for her having
vanished. He did, in fact, feel responsible. If he had
moved faster, if he had chosen his words more
carefully . . .
“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 Thursday,
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
