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.
“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
