and Ida were concerned it would go like this: Ida
would kill Harriet, Richard would kill Ida, I would
kill Richard. Then I would fake my own murder, at the
Bloxham, using the blood that Sammy would get hold
of. I would live only as long as it took to see Nancy
Ducane hanged, and then I would take my own life. If
by some chance Nancy did not hang, I was to kill her
and then take my own life. I had to be the last to die,
because of the acting involved. I am a good actress
when I want to be. When I contrived to meet you at
the coffee house, Monsieur Poirot . . . Harriet Sippel
could not have produced such a performance. Neither
could Ida, or Richard. So you see, I had to be the one
to stay alive.
The plan that Harriet and Ida were party to was not
Richard’s true plan. When he came to see me alone,
two weeks after our first meeting in London with
Harriet and Ida, he told me that the question of
whether Nancy ought to die had been concerning him
greatly. Like me, he did not believe Nancy had
admitted to Harriet that she had spoken up at the
King’s Head for any reason apart from to defend
Patrick against lies.
On the other hand, Richard could see Harriet’s
point. Patrick and Frances Ive’s deaths had been
caused by the ill-judged behavior of several people,
and it was hard not to count Nancy Ducane among
those responsible.
I could not have been more surprised, or
frightened, when Richard confessed that he had been
unable to reach a decision in the matter of Nancy, and
that therefore he had decided to leave it up to me.
After he, Harriet and Ida were dead, he said, I was
free to choose: either to do my best to ensure that
Nancy hanged, or to take my own life and leave a
different note for the hotel staff to find—not “MAY
THEY NEVER REST IN PEACE,” but a note
containing the truth about our deaths.
I begged Richard not to force me to decide alone.
Why me? I demanded to know.
“Because, Jennie,” he said—and I shall never
forget this—“because you are the best of us. You
were never inflated with a sense of your own virtue.
Yes, you told a lie, but you realized your error as
soon as the words had left your mouth. I believed
your falsehood for an inexcusably long time when I
had no proof, and I helped to gather support for a
campaign against a good, innocent man. A flawed
man, yes—not a saint. But who among us is perfect?”
“All right,” I told Richard. “I will make the choice
that you have entrusted to me.” I was flattered to be so
praised, I suppose.
And so our plans were made. Now, would you like
me to tell you how it all went wrong?
How It All Went Wrong
“INDEED,” SAID POIROT. “TELL us. Catchpool and I, we
are agog.”
“It was my fault,” said Jennie, whose voice was
hoarse by now. “I am a coward. I was afraid to die.
Desolate as I was without Patrick, I had grown
comfortable in my unhappiness and I didn’t want my
life to end. Any sort of life, even one filled with
torment, is preferable to a state of nothingness! Please
don’t condemn me as unchristian for saying so, but
I’m not sure I believe in an afterlife. I grew more and
more afraid as the agreed date for the executions
came closer—afraid of having to kill. I thought about
what would be involved, imagined standing in a
locked room and watching Richard drink poison, and
I didn’t want to have to do it. But I had agreed! I had
promised.”
“The plan that seemed so easy months before
started to seem impossible,” said Poirot. “And of
course you could not speak of your fears to Richard
Negus, who esteemed you so highly. He might think
less of you if you admitted to serious doubts. You
perhaps were afraid he would take it upon himself to
execute you with or without your consent.”
“Yes! I was terrified that he would. You see, from
our discussions of the subject, I knew how important
it was to him that all four of us should die. He told me
on one occasion that if Harriet and Ida had not
allowed themselves to be persuaded, he would have
‘done what needed to be done without their consent.’
That was how he put it. Knowing that, how could I go
to him and tell him I had changed my mind, that I was
prepared neither to die nor to kill?”
“I imagine you chided yourself for your reluctance,
mademoiselle. You believed, did you not, that this
killing and dying was the right and honorable thing to
do?”
“With the rational part of my mind, yes, I did,”
said Jennie. “I hoped and prayed that I would
discover in myself an extra reserve of courage that
would enable me to go through with it.”
“What did you plan to do about Nancy Ducane?” I
asked her.
“I did not know. My panic on the night we first met
was genuine, Monsieur Poirot. I could not decide
what to do about anything! I allowed Sammy to go
forward with his story about the keys, and to identify
Nancy. I let all that happen, telling myself that at any
moment I could go to the authorities with the truth and
save her. But . . . I did not do so. Richard thought me a
better person than him, but he was wrong—so wrong!
“There is a part of me, still, that envies Nancy
because Patrick loved her, the same spiteful part that
started all the trouble in Great Holling. And . . . I
knew that if I admitted to conspiring in a plot to
convict an innocent woman of murder, I would surely
go to prison. I was scared.”
“Tell us please, mademoiselle: what did you do?
What happened on the day of these . . . executions at
the Bloxham Hotel?”
“I was supposed to arrive there at six o’clock.
That was when we had agreed to meet.”
“The four conspirators?”
“Yes, and Sammy. I spent the whole day watching
the clock tick its way toward the awful moment. When
it got close to five o’clock, I simply knew I couldn’t
do it. I just couldn’t! I did not go to the hotel at all.
Instead, I ran through the streets of London, crying
with fear. I had no notion of where to go or what to
do, so I ran and ran. I felt as if Richard Negus was
bound to be out looking for me, furious that I had let
him and the others down. I went to Pleasant’s Coffee
House at the agreed time, thinking that I could at least
keep that part of my promise, even if I couldn’t kill
Richard as I was supposed to.
“When I arrived at the coffee house, I was afraid
for my life. That was no act that you saw. I thought
Richard, not Nancy, might kill me—and, what is
more, I was convinced that if he did, he would be
doing the right thing. I did deserve to die! I said
nothing to you that wasn’t true, Monsieur Poirot.
Please, recall now what I said:
That I was scared of being murdered? I was—by
Richard. That I had done something terrible in the
past? I had—and if Richard did catch up with me and
kill me, as I believed he one day would, I honestly
did not want him to be punished for it. I knew that I
had let him down. Can you understand that? Richard
might have wanted to die, but I wanted him to live.
Despite the harm he did to Patrick, he was a good
man.”
“Oui, mademoiselle. ”
“I longed to tell you the truth that night, Monsieur
Poirot, but I lacked the courage.”
“So you believed that Richard Negus would find
you and kill you because you did not arrive at the
Bloxham Hotel to kill him?”
“Yes. I assumed that he would not be content to die
without knowing why I didn’t come to the hotel as
planned.”
“Yet he was,” I said, thinking furiously.
Jennie nodded.
I could see now that it all made sense: the identical
positioning of the three dead bodies for one thing—in
a perfectly straight line, feet pointing toward the door,
between a small table and a chair. As Poirot had said,
Harriet Sippel, Ida Gransbury and Richard Negus
were unlikely all to have fallen naturally into that
exact position.
There was a suspicious amount of similarity
between the three murder scenes, and at last I thought
I understood why: the conspirators needed the police
to believe there was only one killer. In fact, any
detective worth his salt would have assumed this
purely from the cufflinks in the mouths and the fact of
all three bodies having turned up at the same hotel on
the same night, but the killers were in the grip of
paranoia. They knew they were more than one person,
and so they feared, as the guilty tend to, that the truth
might be apparent to others. So they went to great
lengths to create three murder scenes that were more
similar to one another than they needed to be.
The laying out of the bodies, perfectly straight and
identical, was also consistent with the notion that the
killings at the Bloxham Hotel were not murders but
executions. There are procedures that one follows
after an execution—formalities and rituals. It would
have felt important, I thought, to do something with
the bodies rather than simply leave them lying exactly
as they fell, as a common or garden-variety murderer
would.
An image of a much younger Jennie Hobbs came to
my mind: at Cambridge University’s Saviour College,
moving from one room to another, making beds. She
would have made each one identically, following the
prescribed pattern . . . I shuddered, then wondered
why a vision of a young woman innocently making
beds in a college should give me such a chill.
Beds, and deathbeds . . .
Patterns, and the disruption of patterns . . .
“Richard Negus committed suicide,” I heard
myself declare. “He must have. He tried to make it
look like murder—the same pattern as the other two,
so that we would suspect the same killer—but he had
to lock his door from the inside. Then he hid the key
behind a fireplace tile to make it look as if the
murderer had taken it, and opened a window to its full
extent. If the hidden key was ever found, we would
have wondered, as we did, why the murderer chose to
lock the door from the inside, hide the key in the room
and escape via the window, but we would still have
believed there was a murderer. That was all that
mattered to Negus. Whereas if the window was shut
and by some chance the key was found, we would
draw the only possible conclusion: that Richard
Negus had taken his own life. He couldn’t risk our
arriving at that conclusion—do you see? If we did,
then the framing of Nancy Ducane for all three deaths
would fail. We would be more likely to assume that
Negus killed Harriet Sippel and Ida Gransbury before
killing himself.”
“Yes,” said Jennie. “I think you are right.”
“The different positioning of the cufflink . . .”
Poirot murmured before raising his eyebrows at me,
indicating that he wished me to continue.
I said, “The cufflink was close to Negus’s throat
because his death convulsions from the poison caused
his mouth to open. He had carefully positioned
himself in a straight line on the floor and placed the
cufflink between his lips, but it fell to the back of his
mouth. Unlike Harriet Sippel and Ida Gransbury,
Richard Negus did not have a killer present when he
died, and so the cufflink could not be carefully
positioned in the agreed place.”
“Mademoiselle Jennie, you believe that Mr. Negus
would swallow the poison, lie down and die without
first attempting to discover why you had failed to
arrive at the hotel?” Poirot asked her.
“I did not think he would, until I read of his death
in the newspaper.”
“Ah.” Poirot’s expression was unreadable.
“For so long, Richard had been expecting to die on
that Thursday night, looking forward to the end of his
guilt and torment after so many years,” said Jennie. “I
believe that all he wanted, once he arrived at the
Bloxham, was for it to be over for him, and so, when I
did not arrive to kill him as planned, he did it
himself.”
“Thank you, mademoiselle.” Poirot rose to his
feet. He wobbled a little to find his balance after so
long in a seated position.
“What will happen to me, Monsieur Poirot?”
“Please stay here in this house until I or Mr.
Catchpool return with more information. If you make
the mistake of running away a second time, things will
go very badly for you.”
“As they will if I stay put,” said Jennie. There was
a blank, faraway look in her eyes. “It’s all right, Mr.
Catchpool, you needn’t be sorry for me. I am
prepared.”
Her words, no doubt intended to reassure me,
filled me with dread. She had the manner of one who
had looked into the future and seen terrible events
contained within it. Whatever they were, I knew that I
was not prepared and did not wish to be.
All the Devils Are Here
APART FROM TELLING ME twice that we must go to
Great Holling without delay, Poirot remained silent
all the way home. He looked preoccupied, and it was
clear that he did not want to talk.
We arrived at the lodging house to find young
Stanley Beer waiting for us. “What is the matter?”
Poirot asked him. “Are you here about the work of art
I created?”
“Pardon, sir? Oh, your crest? No, that was
perfectly all right, sir. As a matter of fact . . .” Beer
reached into his pocket and handed over an envelope.
“You’ll find your answer in there.”
“Thank you, Constable. But then it must be that
something else is wrong? You are anxious, non? ”
“Yes, sir. We’ve had word at Scotland Yard from
an Ambrose Flowerday, the Great Holling village
doctor. He’s asked for Mr. Catchpool to go there
immediately. He says he’s needed.”
Poirot looked at me, then turned back to Stanley
Beer. “It was our intention to go there immediately.
Do you know what has provoked Dr. Flowerday to
request Catchpool’s presence?”
“I’m afraid I do. It’s not a happy business, sir. A
woman by the name of Margaret Ernst has been
attacked. She is likely to die—”
“Oh, no,” I murmured.
“—and she says she needs to see Mr. Catchpool
before she does. After speaking to Dr. Flowerday, I
would advise you to hurry, sir. There’s a car waiting
outside to take you to the station.”
Thinking of Poirot’s methodical nature and his
dislike of any hectic activity, I said, “Might we take
