half an hour to ready ourselves?”
Beer looked at his watch. “Five, ten minutes at a
stretch, but no longer, sir—not if you want to catch the
next train.”
I must admit with some shame that, in the event,
Poirot was downstairs with his suitcase before I was.
“Hurry, mon ami, ” he urged.
In the car, I decided that I needed to speak, even if
Poirot was not feeling talkative. “If I had only stayed
away from that infernal village, Margaret Ernst would
not have been attacked,” I said grimly. “Someone
must have seen me go to her cottage and noticed how
long I stayed.”
“You stayed long enough for her to tell you
everything, or nearly everything. What is achieved by
trying to kill her when she has already shared her
knowledge with the police?”
“Revenge. Punishment. Though, frankly, it makes
no sense. If Nancy Ducane is innocent, and Jennie
Hobbs and Samuel Kidd are behind everything—I
mean, if they’re the only ones still alive who were
behind everything—well, why should Jennie and
Kidd want to kill Margaret Ernst? She said nothing to
me to incriminate either of them, and she never
harmed Patrick or Frances Ive.”
“I agree. Jennie Hobbs and Samuel Kidd would
not wish to murder Margaret Ernst as far as I can
see.”
Rain lashed at the windows of our car. It made it
harder both to hear and to concentrate. “Then who
did?” I asked. “There we were, thinking we had all
the answers—”
“You surely did not think any such thing,
Catchpool?”
“Yes, I did. I expect you’re about to tell me I’m
wrong, but it all seemed to add up, didn’t it? All
pretty straightforward, until we heard about Margaret
Ernst being attacked.”
“He tells me it is straightforward!” Poirot smirked
at the rain-spattered car window.
“Well, it looked simple enough to me. All the
killers were dead. Ida killed Harriet, with Harriet’s
consent, and was then killed by Richard Negus—
again, with her full consent. Then Negus, when Jennie
didn’t arrive to kill him as planned, took his own life.
Jennie Hobbs and Samuel Kidd have killed nobody.
Of course, they conspired to bring about three deaths,
but those deaths were not really murders, as I see it.
They were—”
“Executions by consent?”
“Exactly.”
“It was a very neat plan they made, was it not?
Harriet Sippel, Ida Gransbury, Richard Negus and
Jennie Hobbs. Let us call them A, B, C and D for the
moment, and we will see the neatness of their plan
more clearly.”
“Why should we not call them by their names?” I
asked.
Poirot ignored me. “A, B, C and D—all plagued
by guilt and seeking the redemption of the soul. They
agree that they must pay for a past sin with their own
lives, and so they plan to kill one another: B kills A,
then C kills B, then D kills C.”
“Except that D didn’t kill C, did she? D is Jennie
Hobbs, and she didn’t kill Richard Negus.”
“Perhaps not, but she was supposed to. That was
the plan. Also that D would stay alive to see E—
Nancy Ducane—hang for the murders of A, B, and C.
Only then could D . . .” Poirot stopped. “D,” he
repeated. “Demise. That is the correct word.”
“What?”
“For your crossword puzzle. A word that means
death and has six letters. Do you recall? I suggested
‘murder’ and you said that would only work if murder
began . . .” He fell silent, shaking his head.
“If murder began with a D. Yes, I remember.
Poirot, are you all right?” His eyes had that strange
green glow about them that they sometimes acquire.
“Comment? Mais bien évidemment! If murder
began with a D! Of course! That is it! Mon ami, you
do not know how you have helped me. Now I think
. . . yes, that is it. That must be it. The younger man
and the older woman—ah, but it is so clear to me
now!”
“Please explain.”
“Yes, yes. When I am ready.”
“Why are you not ready now? What are you
waiting for?”
“You must allow me more than twenty seconds to
compose and arrange my ideas, Catchpool. That is
necessary if I am to explain to you, who do not
understand a thing. Your every word shows me that
you comprehend nothing. You talk about having all the
answers, but the story we heard from Jennie Hobbs
this morning was an elaborate embroidery of lies! Do
you not see this?”
“Well . . . I mean . . . um . . .”
“Richard Negus agrees with Harriet Sippel that
perhaps Nancy Ducane should hang for three murders
she did not commit? He is willing to leave Nancy’s
fate to be decided by Jennie Hobbs? Richard Negus
the leader, the respected authority figure—the same
Richard Negus who, for sixteen years, has felt so
terribly guilty for unjustly condemning Patrick Ive?
The Richard Negus who realized too late that it is
wrong to condemn and persecute a man for
understandable human weaknesses? Who ended his
engagement
to
Ida
Gransbury
because
she
dogmatically insisted that every transgression must be
punished with the utmost harshness— this Richard
Negus would entertain the idea of allowing Nancy
Ducane, whose only crime was to love a man who
could never belong to her, to be condemned by law
and face the gallows for three murders of which she is
innocent? Pah! It is nonsense! There is no consistency.
It is a fantasy dreamed up by Jennie Hobbs to mislead
us yet again.”
I listened to most of this with my mouth open. “Are
you sure, Poirot? I believed her, I have to say.”
“Of course I am sure. Did not Henry Negus tell us
that his brother Richard spent sixteen years in his
home as a recluse, seeing and speaking to nobody?
Yet according to Jennie Hobbs, he spent these same
years persuading Harriet Sippel and Ida Gransbury
that they were responsible for Patrick and Frances
Ive’s deaths and must pay the price. How was
Richard Negus able to do this persuading without his
brother Henry noticing his regular communications
with two women from Great Holling?”
“You might have a point there. I didn’t think of
that.”
“It is a minor point. Surely you noticed all that was
more substantially wrong with Jennie’s story?”
“To frame an innocent person for murder is
unquestionably wrong,” I said.
“Catchpool, I am talking not about morally wrong
but about factually impossible. Is this how you force
me to explain before I am ready, by exasperating me?
Bien, I will draw one detail to your attention in the
hope that it will lead you to others. According to
Jennie Hobbs, how did the keys to rooms 121 and 317
of the Bloxham Hotel end up in Nancy Ducane’s blue
coat?”
“Samuel Kidd planted them there. To frame
Nancy.”
“He slipped them into her pocket on the street?”
“It’s easy enough to do, I imagine.”
“Yes, but how did Mr. Kidd get hold of the two
keys? Jennie was supposed to find both, along with
Richard Negus’s key, in Room 238 when she went
there to kill Richard Negus. She was supposed to
pass all three keys to Samuel Kidd after she had left
and locked Room 238. Yet according to her, she did
not go to Richard Negus’s room or to the Bloxham
Hotel at all on the night of the murders. Mr. Negus
locked his door from the inside and killed himself,
having hidden his key behind a loose tile in the
fireplace. So how did Samuel Kidd get his hands on
the other two keys?”
I waited a few moments in case the answer came
to me. It didn’t. “I don’t know.”
“Perhaps when Jennie Hobbs did not arrive,
Samuel Kidd and Richard Negus improvised: the
former killed the latter, then took Harriet Sippel’s and
Ida Gransbury’s keys from Mr. Negus’s hotel room. In
which case, why not also take Mr. Negus’s key? Why
hide it behind the loose tile in the fireplace? The only
reasonable explanation is that Richard Negus wanted
his suicide to look like murder. Mon ami, this could
have been achieved just as easily by having Samuel
Kidd remove the key from the room. There would
have been then no need for the open window to give
the impression of the murderer escaping from the
room in that way.”
I saw the strength of his argument. “Since Richard
Negus locked his door from the inside, how did
Samuel Kidd get into room 238 in order to remove the
keys to rooms 121 and 317?”
“Précisément. ”
“What if he climbed in through the open window,
having first climbed a tree?”
“Catchpool—think. Jennie Hobbs says she did not
go to the Bloxham Hotel that night. So, either Samuel
Kidd cooperated with Richard Negus to make the
plan work without her, or else the two men did not
cooperate. If they did not, then why would Mr. Kidd
enter Mr. Negus’s hotel room uninvited, by an open
window, and remove two keys from it? What reason
would he have for doing so? And if the two men did
cooperate, surely Samuel Kidd would have ended up
with three keys to place in Nancy Ducane’s pocket
rather than two. Additionally . . . if Richard Negus
committed suicide, as you now believe, causing the
cufflink to fall far back in his mouth, then who
arranged his body in the perfectly straight line? Do
you believe that a man could swallow poison and then
contrive to die in that exceptionally neat position?
Non! Ce n’est pas possible. ”
“I shall need to think about this another time,” I
said. “You’ve made my head spin. It’s full of a jumble
of questions that weren’t there before.”
“For example?”
“Why did our three murder victims order
sandwiches, cakes and scones and then not eat any of
them? And if they didn’t eat the food, why wasn’t it
still on the plates in Ida Gransbury’s room? What
happened to it?”
“Ah! Now you think like a proper detective.
Hercule Poirot is educating you in how to use the
little gray cells.”
“Did you think of that—the food discrepancy?”
“Bien sûr. Why did I not ask Jennie Hobbs to
account for it, when I asked her to explain many other
inconsistencies? I did not do so because I wanted her
to imagine that we believed her story by the time we
left her. Therefore, I could not ask her a question for
which she would be unable to provide an answer.”
“Poirot! Samuel Kidd’s face!”
“Where, mon ami?”
“No, I don’t mean that I can see his face, I mean
. . . Remember the first time you met him at
Pleasant’s, he had cut himself shaving? There was a
cut on a small shaved area of his cheek, while the rest
was covered by a growth of beard?”
Poirot nodded.
“What if that was not a shaving cut that we saw but
a cut from a sharp branch of a tree? What if Samuel
Kidd cut himself on his way into or out of the open
window of Room 238? He knew that he was going to
approach us with his lie about having seen Nancy
Ducane run from the hotel, and he didn’t want us to
connect the mysterious scratch on his face with the
tree outside Richard Negus’s open window, so he
shaved a small patch of skin.”
“Knowing that we would assume he had started to
shave, cut himself badly and stopped,” said Poirot.
“And then, when he visited me at the lodging house,
his beard had disappeared and his face was covered
in cuts: to remind me that he cannot shave without
lacerating his face. Eh, bien, if I believe this then I
will assume that every cut I see upon his face is
caused by shaving.”
“Why don’t you sound more excited?” I asked.
“Because it is so obvious. I arrived at this
conclusion more than two hours ago.”
“Oh.” I felt deflated. “Wait a minute—if Samuel
Kidd scratched his face on the tree outside Richard
Negus’s open window, that means he might have
climbed into the room and got his hands on the keys to
121 and 317. Doesn’t it?”
“There is no time to discuss the meaning now,”
said Poirot in a stern voice. “We arrive at the station.
It is clear from your question that you have not
listened carefully.”
DR. AMBROSE FLOWERDAY TURNED OUT to be a tall,
thick-set man of around fifty with wiry dark hair that
was graying at the temples. His shirt was crumpled
and missing a button. He had passed on instructions
for us to go to the vicarage, so that was where we
were, standing in a chilly hall with a high ceiling and
a splintering wooden floor.
The whole place seemed to have been given over
to Dr. Flowerday for him to use as a temporary
hospital for one patient. The door had been opened by
a nurse in uniform. Under different circumstances I
might have been curious about this arrangement, but
all I could think of was poor Margaret Ernst.
“How is she?” I asked, once the introductions
were over.
The doctor’s face twisted in anguish. Then he
composed himself. “I am allowed to say only that she
is doing well in the circumstances.”
“Allowed by whom?” asked Poirot.
“Margaret. She will not tolerate defeatist talk.”
“And is it true, what she asks you to tell us?”
After a short pause, Dr. Flowerday gave a small
nod. “Most people would not survive for this long
after such an assault. Margaret has a strong
constitution and a strong mind. It was a serious attack,
but, damn it, I shall keep her alive if it kills me.”
“What happened to her?”
“Two thoroughly bad pennies from the top end of
the village came to the churchyard in the middle of the
night and . . . well, they did things to the Ives’ grave
that do not bear repeating. Margaret heard them. Even
in her sleep she is vigilant. She heard metal smashing
against stone. When she ran out to try to stop them,
they attacked her with a spade they had brought with
them. They didn’t care if they beat her to death! That
much was obvious to the village constable, when he
arrested them some hours later.”
Poirot said, “Pardon me, Doctor. You know who
did this to Mrs. Ernst? The two bad pennies that you
refer to . . . they confessed?”
“Proudly,” said Dr. Flowerday through gritted
teeth.
“So they are arrested?”
“Oh, yes, the police have got them.”
“Who are they?” I asked.
“Frederick and Tobias Clutton, father and son.
Drunken good-for-nothings, the pair of them.”
I wondered if the son was the ne’er-do-well I had
seen drinking with Walter Stoakley in the King’s
