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 room in a London lodging house that belongs to Mrs. Blanche Unsworth. It is a spacious, impeccably clean building with a rather severe square fa?ade 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 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.”