that she knew that whoever killed them was also
intent on killing her?”
Without waiting for my answer, Poirot proceeded
with his imaginings. “And the letters PIJ, the person
who has those initials, he is very important to the
story, n’est-ce pas? Jennie, she knows this. She
knows that if you find these three letters you will be
on your way to finding the murderer, and she wants to
prevent this. Alors, you must catch him before it is too
late for Jennie, or else Hercule Poirot, he shall not
forgive himself!”
I was alarmed to hear this. I felt a pressing sense
of responsibility for catching this killer as it was, and
I did not wish also to be responsible for Poirot’s
never forgiving himself. Did he really look at me and
see a man capable of apprehending a murderer with a
mind of this sort—a mind that would think to place
monogrammed cufflinks in the mouths of the dead? I
have always been a straightforward person and I
work best at straightforward things.
“I think you must go back to the hotel,” said Poirot.
He meant immediately.
I shuddered at the memory of those three rooms.
“First thing tomorrow will be soon enough,” I said,
studiously avoiding his gleaming eyes. “I should tell
you, I’m not going to make a fool of myself by
bringing up this Jennie person. It would only confuse
everybody. You have come up with a possible
meaning for what she said, and I have come up with
another. Yours is the more interesting, but mine is
twenty times more likely to be correct.”
“It is not” came the contradiction.
“We shall have to disagree about it,” I said firmly.
“If we were to ask a hundred people, they would all
agree with me and not with you, I suspect.”
“I too suspect this.” Poirot sighed. “Allow me to
convince you if I can. A few moments ago, you said to
me about the murders at the hotel, ‘Each of the victims
had something in his or her mouth,’ did you not?”
I agreed that I had.
“You did not say, ‘in their mouth,’ you said, ‘his or
her’—because you are an educated man and you
speak in the singular and not the plural: ‘his or her,’ to
go with ‘each’—it is grammatically correct.
Mademoiselle Jennie, she is a housemaid, but she has
the speech of an educated person and the vocabulary
also. She used the word ‘inevitable’ when talking
about her death, her murder. And then she said to me,
‘So you see, there is no help to be had, and even if
there were, I should not deserve it. ’ She is a woman
who uses the English language as it should be used.
Therefore, mon ami . . . ” Poirot was up on his feet
again. “Therefore! If you are correct and Jennie meant
to say, ‘Please let no one open their mouths’ in the
sense of ‘Please let no one give information to the
police,’ why did she not say, ‘Please let no one open
his or her mouth?’ The word ‘no one’ requires the
singular, not the plural!”
I stared up at him with an ache in my neck, too
bewildered and weary to respond. Hadn’t he told me
himself that Jennie was in a frightful panic? In my
experience, people who are stricken with terror tend
not to fuss about grammar.
I had always thought of Poirot as among the most
intelligent of men, but perhaps I had been wrong. If
this was the sort of nonsense he was inclined to spout,
then no wonder he had judged it time to submit his
mind to a rest cure.
“Naturally, you will now tell me that Jennie was
distressed and was therefore not careful about her
speech,” Poirot went on. “However, she spoke with
perfect correctness apart from this one instance—
unless I am right and you are wrong, in which case
Jennie said nothing that was grammatically incorrect
at all!”
He clapped his hands together and seemed so
gratified by his announcement that I was moved to say
rather sharply, “That’s marvelous, Poirot. A man and
two women are murdered, and it’s my job to sort it
out, but I’m jolly pleased that Jennie, whoever she is,
didn’t slip up in her use of the English language.”
“And Poirot also, he is jolly pleased, ” said my
hard-to-discourage friend, “because a little progress
has been made, a little discovery. Non. ” His smile
vanished and his expression became more serious.
“Mademoiselle Jennie did not make the error of
grammar. The meaning she intended was, ‘Please let
no one open the mouths of the three murdered people
— their mouths.’ ”
“If you insist,” I muttered.
“Tomorrow after breakfast you will return to the
Bloxham Hotel,” said Poirot. “I will join you there
later, after I look for Jennie.”
“You?” I said, somewhat perturbed. Words of
protest formed in my head, but I knew they would
never reach Poirot’s ears. Famous detective or not,
his ideas about the case had so far been, frankly,
ridiculous, but if he was offering his company, I
wouldn’t turn it down. He was very sure of himself
and I was not—that was what it boiled down to. I
already felt bolstered by the interest he was taking.
“Oui, ” he said. “Three murders have been
committed that share an extremely unusual feature: the
monogrammed cufflink in the mouth. Most assuredly I
will go to the Bloxham Hotel.”
“Aren’t you supposed to be avoiding stimulation
and resting your brain?” I asked.
“Oui. Précisément.” Poirot glared at me. “It is not
restful for me to sit in this chair all day and think of
you omitting to mention to anybody my meeting with
Mademoiselle Jennie, a detail of the utmost
importance! It is not restful for me to consider that
Jennie runs around London giving her murderer every
opportunity to kill her and put his fourth cufflink in
her mouth.”
Poirot leaned forward in his chair. “Please tell me
that this at least has struck you: that cufflinks come in
pairs ? You have three in the mouths of the dead at the
Bloxham Hotel. Where is the fourth, if not in the
pocket of the killer, waiting to go into the mouth of
Mademoiselle Jennie after her murder?”
I’m afraid I laughed. “Poirot, that’s just plain silly.
Yes, cufflinks normally come in pairs but really, it’s
quite simple: he wanted to kill three people, so he
only used three cufflinks. You can’t use the notion of
some dreamed-up fourth cufflink to prove anything—
certainly not to link the hotel murders to this Jennie
woman.”
Poirot’s face had taken on a stubborn cast. “When
you are a killer who decides to use cufflinks in this
way, mon ami, you invite the thought of the pairs. It is
the killer who has put before us the notion of the
fourth cufflink and the fourth victim, not Hercule
Poirot!”
“But . . . then how do we know he doesn’t have six
victims in mind, or eight? Who is to say that the
pocket of this killer doesn’t contain five more
cufflinks with the monogram PIJ?”
To my amazement, Poirot nodded and said, “You
make a good point.”
“No, Poirot, it’s not a good point,” I said
despondently. “I conjured it up out of nowhere. You
might enjoy my flights of fancy, but I can promise you
my bosses at Scotland Yard won’t.”
“Your bosses, they do not like you to consider
what is possible? No, of course they do not,” Poirot
answered himself. “And they are the people in charge
of catching this murderer. They, and you. Bon. This is
why Hercule Poirot must go tomorrow to the Bloxham
Hotel.”
At the Bloxham Hotel
THE FOLLOWING MORNING AT the Bloxham, I could not
help but feel unsettled, knowing that Poirot might
arrive at any moment to tell us simple police folk how
foolishly we were approaching the investigation of
our three murders. I was the only one who knew he
was coming, which set me rather on edge. His
presence would be my responsibility, and I was
afraid that he might demoralize the troops. If truth be
told, I feared that he might demoralize me. In the
optimistic light of an unusually bright February day,
and after a surprisingly satisfactory night’s sleep, I
couldn’t understand why I hadn’t forbidden him from
coming anywhere near the Bloxham.
I didn’t suppose it mattered, however; he would
not have listened to me if I had.
I was in the hotel’s opulent lobby, talking to a Mr.
Luca Lazzari, the hotel’s manager, when Poirot
arrived. Lazzari was a friendly, helpful and startlingly
enthusiastic man with black curly hair, a musical way
of speaking, and a mustache that was in no way the
equal of Poirot’s. Lazzari seemed determined that I
and my fellow policemen should enjoy our time at the
Bloxham every bit as much as the paying guests did—
those that did not end up getting murdered, that is.
I introduced him to Poirot, who nodded curtly. He
seemed out of sorts and I soon learned why. “I did not
find Jennie,” he said. “Half the morning I waited at
the coffee house! But she did not come.”
“Hardly ‘half the morning,’ Poirot,” I said, for he
was prone to exaggeration.
“Mademoiselle Fee also was not there. The other
waitresses, they were able to tell me nothing.”
“Bad luck,” I said, unsurprised by the news. I
hadn’t for a moment imagined that Jennie might revisit
the coffee house, and I felt guilty. I should perhaps
have tried harder to make Poirot see sense: she had
run away from him and from Pleasant’s, having
declared that confiding in him had been a mistake.
Why on earth would she return the following day and
allow him to take charge of protecting her?
“So!” Poirot looked at me expectantly. “What do
you have to tell me?”
“I too am here to provide the information you
need,” said Lazzari, beaming. “Luca Lazzari, at your
disposal. Have you visited the Bloxham Hotel before,
Monsieur Poirot?”
“Non. ”
“Is it not superb? Like a palace of the belle
époque, no? Majestic! I hope you notice and admire
the artistic masterpieces that are all around us!”
“Oui. It is superior to the lodging house of Mrs.
Blanche Unsworth, though that house has the better
view from the window,” Poirot said briskly. His glum
spirits had certainly dug themselves in.
“Ah, the views from my charming hotel!” Lazzari
clasped his hands together in delight. “From the
rooms facing the hotel gardens there are sights of
great beauty, and on the other side there is splendid
London—another exquisite scene! Later I will show
you.”
“I would prefer to be shown the three rooms in
which murders have taken place,” Poirot told him.
That put a momentary crimp in Lazzari’s smile.
“Monsieur Poirot, you may rest assured that this
terrible crime—three murders on one night, it is
scarcely credible to me!—that this will never happen
again at the world-renowned Bloxham Hotel.”
Poirot and I exchanged a look. The point was not
so much preventing it from happening again but
dealing with the fact that it had happened on this
occasion.
I decided I had better take the reins and not allow
Lazzari the chance to say too much more. Poirot’s
mustache was already twitching with suppressed
rage.
“The victims’ names are Mrs. Harriet Sippel, Miss
Ida Gransbury and Mr. Richard Negus,” I told Poirot.
“All three were guests in the hotel and each one was
the sole occupant of his or her room.”
“Each one? His or her room, you say?” Poirot
smiled at his little joke. I attributed the rapid
improvement in his spirits to the fact that Lazzari had
fallen silent. “I do not mean to interrupt you,
Catchpool. Continue.”
“All three victims arrived here at the hotel on
Wednesday, the day before they were murdered.”
“Did they arrive together?”
“No.”
“Most definitely not,” said Lazzari. “They arrived
separately, one by one. They checked in one by one.”
“And they were murdered one by one,” said
Poirot, which happened to be exactly what I was
thinking. “You are certain of this?” he asked Lazzari.
“I could not be more so. I have the word of my
clerk, Mr. John Goode, the most dependable man of
my entire acquaintance. You will meet him. We have
only the most impeccable persons working here at the
Bloxham Hotel, Monsieur Poirot, and when my clerk
tells me a thing is so, I know that it is so. From across
the country and across the world, people come to ask
if they can work at the Bloxham Hotel. I say yes only
to the best.”
It’s funny but I didn’t realize how well I had come
to know Poirot until that moment—until I saw that
Lazzari did not know how to manage him at all. If he
had written “Suspect This Man of Murder” on a large
sign and hung it around Mr. John Goode’s neck, he
could not have done a better job of inciting Poirot to
distrust the fellow. Hercule Poirot will not allow
anyone else to dictate to him what his opinion should
be; he will, rather, determine to believe the opposite,
contrary old cove that he is.
“So,” he said now, “it is a remarkable
coincidence, is it not? Our three murder victims—
Mrs. Harriet Sippel, Miss Ida Gransbury and Mr.
Richard Negus—they arrive separately and appear to
have nothing to do with one another. And yet all three
share not merely the date of their deaths, which was
yesterday, but also their date of arrival at the Bloxham
Hotel: Wednesday.”
“What’s remarkable about it?” I asked. “Plenty of
other guests must also have arrived on Wednesday in
a hotel of this size. I mean, ones that have not been
murdered.”
Poirot’s eyes looked as if they were about to burst
forth from his head. I couldn’t see that I had said
anything particularly shocking, so I pretended not to
notice his consternation, and continued to tell him the
facts of the case.
“Each of the victims was found inside his or her
locked bedroom,” I said, feeling rather self-conscious
about the “his or her” part. “The killer locked all
three doors and made off with the keys—”
“Attendez, ” Poirot interrupted. “You mean that the
keys are missing. You cannot know that the murderer
took them or has them now.”
I took a deep breath. “We suspect that the killer
took the keys away with him. We’ve done a thorough
search, and they are certainly not inside the rooms,
nor anywhere else in the hotel.”
“My excellent staff have checked and confirmed
