Two Keys
POIROT ARRIVED AT THE coffee house to find it very busy and smelling of a mixture of smoke and something sweet like pancake syrup. “I need a table, but they are all taken,” he complained to Fee Spring, who had only just arrived herself and was standing by the wooden coat stand with her coat draped over her arm. When she pulled off her hat, her flyaway hair crackled and hung in the air for a few seconds before succumbing to gravity. The effect was rather comical, thought Poirot.
“Your need’s in trouble, then, isn’t it?” she said cheerfully. “I can’t shoo paying patrons out onto the street, not even for a famous detective.” She lowered her voice to a whisper. “Mr. and Mrs. Ossessil will be on their way before too long. You can sit where they’re sitting.”
“Mr. and Mrs. Ossessil? That is an unusual name.”
Fee laughed at him, then whispered again. “ ‘Oh, Cecil’—that’s what she says all day long, the wife. The husband, poor soul, he can’t get as much as two words out of his mouth without her setting him straight. He says he’d like scrambled eggs and toast? Right away she pipes up, ‘Oh, Cecil, not eggs and toast!’ And don’t think he has to speak to set her off! He sits down at the first table he comes to and she says, ‘Oh, Cecil, not this table!’ ’Course, he ought to say he wants what he don’t want, and don’t want what he wants. That’s what I’d do. I keep waiting for him to tumble to it but he’s a useless old lump, truth be told. Brain like a moldy cabbage. I expect that’s what started her Oh-Cecil-ing.”
“If he does not leave soon, I shall say ‘Oh, Cecil’ to him myself,” said Poirot, whose legs were already aching from a combination of standing and the thwarted desire to be seated.
“They’ll be gone before your coffee’s ready,” Fee said. “She’s finished her meal, see. She’ll Oh-Cecil him out of here in no time. What you doing here at lunchtime anyway? Wait, I know what you’re up to! Looking for Jennie, aren’t you? I heard you were in first thing this morning too.”
“How did you hear it?” Poirot asked. “You have only just arrived, n’est-ce pas?”
“I’m never far away,” said Fee enigmatically. “No one’s seen hide nor hair of Jennie, but d’you know, Mr. Poirot, I’ve got her stuck in my mind same as she’s stuck in yours.”
“You too are worried?”
“Oh, not about her being in danger. It’s not up to me to save her.”
“Non.”
“Nor’s it up to you.”
“Ah, but Hercule Poirot, he has saved lives. He has saved innocent men from the gallows.”
“A good half of them’s probably guilty,” said Fee cheerfully, as if the idea amused her.
“Non, mademoiselle. Vous êtes misanthrope.”
“If you say so. All’s I know is, if I worried about everyone as comes in here needing to be worried about, I’d not have a moment’s peace. It’s one sorry predicament after another and most of it’s coming from their own heads, not real problems.”
“If something is in a person’s head, then it is real,” Poirot said.
“Not if it’s daft nonsense dreamed up out of nowhere, which it often is,” said Fee. “No, what I meant about Jennie is, I noticed something last night . . . except I can’t think what it might be. I remember thinking, ‘It’s funny Jennie doing that, or saying that . . .’ Only trouble is, I can’t remember what set me off thinking it—what she did, or what she said. I’ve tried and tried till it’s made my head spin! Ah, look, they’re going, Mr. and Mrs. Oh-Cecil. You go and sit yourself down. Coffee?”
“Yes, please. Mademoiselle, will you please continue in your efforts to remember what Jennie did or said? It matters more than I can express.”
“More than straight shelves?” Fee asked with sudden sharpness. “More than cutlery laid out square on the table?”
“Ah. You think these things are the dreamed-up nonsense?” Poirot asked.
Fee’s face reddened. “Sorry if I spoke out of turn,” she said. “It’s only . . . well, you’d be a good deal happier, wouldn’t you, if you stopped fussing about how a fork sits on a tablecloth?”
Poirot gave her the benefit of his best polite smile. “I would be very much happier if you were to remember what it was about Mademoiselle Jennie that has stuck in your mind.” With that, he made a dignified exit from the conversation and sat down at his table.
He waited for an hour and a half, during which time he ate a good lunch but saw no sign of Jennie.
It was nearly two o’clock when I arrived at Pleasant’s with a man in tow whom Poirot at first took to be Henry Negus, Richard’s brother. There was some confusion as I explained that I had left Constable Stanley Beer to wait for Negus and bring him along when he arrived, and that I had done so because the only person I could think about at the moment was the man standing beside me.
I introduced him—Mr. Samuel Kidd, a boilermaker—and watched with amusement as Poirot recoiled from the dirt-marked shirt with the missing button, and the partly unshaven face. Mr. Kidd had nothing as ordinary as a beard or a mustache, but he plainly had trouble using a razor. The evidence suggested that he had started to shave, cut himself badly, and abandoned the enterprise. As a consequence, one side of his face was smooth and hairless but wounded, while the other was injury free and covered with dark bristles. Which side looked worse was not an easy question to settle. “Mr. Kidd has a very interesting story to tell us,” I said. “I was standing outside the Bloxham waiting for Henry Negus, when—”
“Ah!” Poirot interrupted me. “You and Mr. Kidd have come now from the Bloxham Hotel?”
“Yes.” Where did he think I had come from? Timbuktu?
“How did you travel?”
“Lazzari let me have one of the hotel’s cars.”
“How long did the journey take?”
“Thirty minutes on the nose.”
“How were the roads? Were there many cars?”
“No. Hardly anyone about, as a matter of fact.”
“Do you think that in different conditions you could have made the journey in less time?” Poirot asked.
“Not unless I grew wings. Thirty minutes is jolly good going, I’d say.”
“Bon. Mr. Kidd, please sit down and tell Poirot your very interesting story.”
To my astonishment, instead of sitting, Samuel Kidd laughed and repeated the very words Poirot had spoken in an exaggerated French accent, or Belgian accent, or however it is that Poirot speaks: “Meester Keedd, please sit down and tell Poirr-oh your very interesting storrie.”
Poirot looked affronted to have his voice mocked. I felt a pang of sympathy for him, until he said, “Mr. Kidd pronounces my name better than you do, Catchpool.”
“Meester Keedd,” the disheveled man said with a guffaw. “Oh, don’t mind me, sir. I’m only entertaining meself. Meester Keedd!”
“We are not here to entertain ourselves,” I told him, tired of his antics already. “Please repeat what you told me outside the hotel.”
Kidd took ten minutes to tell a story that could have been distilled into three, but it was worth it. Walking past the Bloxham shortly after eight o’clock the previous evening, he had seen a woman run out of the hotel, down the steps and onto the street. She was panting and looked frightful. He had started to make his way toward her to ask if she needed help, but she was too fast for him and ran away before he could get to her. As she ran, she dropped something on the ground: two gold-colored keys. Realizing she had dropped them, she turned around and hurried back to retrieve them. Then, clutching them in her gloved hand, she had disappeared into the night.
“I said to meself, that’s strange, that is, her taking off like that,” Samuel Kidd mused. “And then this morning I seen police everywhere and I asked one of ’em what was the big to-do. When I heard about these murders, I thought to meself, ‘That could have been a murderer that you saw, Sammy.’ She looked frightful, did the lady—frightful!”
Poirot was staring at one of the many stains on the man’s shirt. “Frightful,” he murmured. “Your story is most intriguing, Mr. Kidd. Two keys, you say?”
“That’s right, sir. Two gold keys.”
“You were close enough to see, yes?”
“Oh, yes, sir—the street’s nicely lit up outside the Bloxham. It was no trouble seeing.”
“Can you tell me anything else about these keys apart from their gold color?”
“Yes. They had numbers on ’em.”
“Numbers?” I said. This was a detail that Samuel Kidd had not revealed to me in his first telling of the story outside the hotel, nor in his second, on the way here in the car. And . . . dash it all, I should have thought to ask him. I had seen Richard Negus’s key, the one that Poirot had found behind the loose fireplace tile. It had the number 238 on it.
“Yes, sir, numbers. Like, you know, one hundred, two hundred . . .”
“I know what numbers are,” I said brusquely.
“Were those, in fact, the numbers you saw on the keys, Mr. Kidd?” Poirot asked. “One hundred and two hundred?”
“No, sir. One of them was a hundred and summat, if I’m not mistaking. The other . . .” Kidd scratched his head vigorously. Poirot averted his eyes. “It was three hundred and summat, I think, sir. Though I couldn’t swear to it, you understand. But that’s what I’m seeing now in my mind’s eye: one hundred and summat, three hundred and summat.”
Room 121, Harriet Sippel’s room. And Ida Gransbury’s, Room 317.
I felt a hollow space open up in my stomach. I recognized the sensation: it was how I had felt when I first saw the three dead bodies and was told by the police doctor that a gold monogrammed cufflink had been found in each of their mouths.
It now seemed likely that Samuel Kidd had been within inches of the murderer last night. A frightful-looking lady. I shivered.
“This woman that you saw,” said Poirot, “did she have fair hair and a brown hat and coat?”
He was, of course, thinking of Jennie. I still believed there was no link, but I could see Poirot’s reasoning: Jennie had been running around London last night in a state of great agitation and so had this other lady. It was just about possible they were one and the same person.
“No, sir. She had a hat on but it were pale blue, and her hair were dark. Curled and dark.”
“How old was she?”
“Wouldn’t like to guess a lady’s age, sir. Between young and old, I’d say.”
“Apart from the blue hat, what was she wearing?”
“Can’t say I took that in, sir. I was too busy looking at her face when I could.”
“Was she pretty?” I asked.
“Yes, but I wasn’t looking for that reason, sir. I was looking because I know her, see. I took one look and I thought to meself, ‘Sammy, you know that lady.’ ”
Poirot shifted in his chair. He looked at me, then back at Kidd. “If you know her, Mr. Kidd, please tell us who she is.”
“I can’t, sir. That’s what I was trying to get straight in my head when she ran away. I don’t know how I know her, or her name, or nothing like that. It’s not from making boilers I know her, I can say that much. She looked refined. A proper lady. I don’t know anybody like that, but I do know her. That face—it’s not a face I saw last night for the first time. No, sir.” Samuel Kidd shook his head. “It’s a puzzle all right. I might have asked her, if she’d not run away.”
I wondered, out of all the people who ever ran away, how many did so for that very reason: because they would rather not be asked, whatever the question might be.
SHORTLY AFTER I HAD sent Samuel Kidd packing with orders to search his memory for the name of this mysterious woman and details of where and when he might have made her acquaintance, Constable Stanley Beer delivered Henry Negus to Pleasant’s.
Mr. Negus was considerably more pleasing to the eye than Samuel Kidd: a handsome man of around fifty with iron-gray hair and a wise face. He was smartly dressed and soft spoken. I liked him instantly. His grief at the loss of his brother was palpable, though he was a model of self-control throughout our conversation.
“Please accept my condolences, Mr. Negus,” said Poirot. “I am so sorry. It is a terrible thing to lose one so close as a brother.”
Negus nodded his gratitude. “Anything I can do to help—anything at all—I will gladly do. Mr. Catchpool says that you have questions for me?”
“Yes, monsieur. The names Harriet Sippel and Ida Gransbury—they are familiar to you?”
“Were they the other two who were. . . ?” Henry Negus stopped talking as Fee Spring approached with the cup of tea he had asked for on arrival.
Once she had retreated, Poirot said, “Yes. Harriet Sippel and Ida Gransbury were also murdered at the Bloxham Hotel yesterday evening.”
“The name Harriet Sippel means nothing to me. Ida Gransbury and my brother were engaged to be married years ago.”
“So you knew Mademoiselle Gransbury?” I heard the flare of excitement in Poirot’s voice.
“No, I never met her,” said Henry Negus. “I knew her name, of course, from Richard’s letters. He and I rarely saw one another while he lived in Great Holling. We wrote instead.”
I felt another piece of the puzzle slide into position with a satisfying click. “Richard lived in Great Holling?” I asked, struggling to keep my voice even. If Poirot shared my surprise at this discovery, he did not show it.
One village, linking all three murder victims. I repeated its name several times in my mind: Great Holling, Great Holling, Great Holling. Everything seemed to point in its direction.
“Yes, Richard lived there until 1913,” said Negus. “He had a law practice in the Culver Valley. It’s where he and I grew up—in Silsford. Then in 1913 he came to live in Devon with me, where he’s lived ever since. I mean . . . where he lived,” he corrected himself. His face looked suddenly haggard, as if the knowledge of his brother’s death had landed violently upon him once again, crushing him.
“Did Richard ever mention to you anyone from the Culver Valley by the name of Jennie?” asked Poirot. “Or anyone at all with that name, perhaps from Great Holling or perhaps not?”
There was a pause that stretched forward. Then Henry Negus said, “No.”
“What about a person with the initials PIJ?”
“No. The only one from the village that he ever mentioned was Ida, his fiancée.”
“If I may ask a delicate question, monsieur: why did your brother’s engagement not result in a marriage?”
“I’m afraid I don’t know. Richard and I were close but we tended to discuss ideas more than anything else. Philosophy, politics, theology . . . We did not generally inquire into one another’s private business. All he told me about Ida was that he was engaged to be married to her, and then, in 1913, that they were no longer engaged.”
“Attendez. In 1913, his engagement to Ida Gransbury ends, and also he leaves Great Holling to move to Devon and live with you?”
“And my wife and children, yes.”
“Did he leave Great Holling in order to put more distance between himself and Miss Gransbury?”
Henry Negus considered the question. “I think that was part of it, but it wasn’t the whole story. Richard hated Great Holling by the time he left it, and that can’t have been only Ida Gransbury’s doing. He loathed every inch of the place, he said. He didn’t tell me why, and I didn’t ask. Richard had a way of letting you know when he had said all he wanted to say. His verdict on the village was delivered very much in the spirit of ‘That’s all there is to it,’ as I recall. Perhaps if I had tried to find out more—” Negus broke off, an anguished expression on his face.
“You must not blame yourself, Mr. Negus,” said Poirot. “You did not cause your brother’s death.”
“I couldn’t help thinking that . . . well, that something dreadful must have happened to him in that village. And one doesn’t like to speak or think about things of that nature if one can help it.” Henry Negus sighed. “Richard certainly didn’t want to talk about it, whatever it was, so I took the view that it was better not talked about. He was the one with the authority, you see—the older brother. Everybody deferred to him. He had a brilliant mind, you know.”
“Indeed?” Poirot smiled kindly.
“Oh, no one paid attention to detail like Richard, before his decline. Meticulous, he was, in everything he did. You would entrust anything to him—anybody would. That was why he was so successful as a lawyer, before things went badly wrong. I always believed that he would right himself one day. When he seemed to perk up a few months ago, I thought, ‘Finally, he has regained his appetite for life.’ I hoped he might have been thinking about working again, before every last penny of his money ran out—”
“Mr. Negus, if you would please slow down a little,” said Poirot, polite but insistent. “Your brother did not at first work when he moved into your home?”
“No. As well as Great Holling and Ida Gransbury, Richard left behind his profession when he came to Devon. Instead of practicing the law, he shut himself away in his room and practiced drinking heavily.”
“Ah. The decline you mentioned?”
“Yes,” said Negus. “It was a very different Richard that arrived at my house from the one I had last encountered. He was so withdrawn and dour. It was as if he had built a wall around himself. He never left the house—saw no one, wrote to no one, received no letters. All he did was read books and stare into space. He refused to accompany us to church and would not relent even to please my wife. One day, after he had been with us for about a year, I found a Bible outside his door, on the landing floor. It had been in a drawer in the bedroom we had given him. I tried to put it back there, but Richard made it clear that he wished to banish it from the room. I must confess that after that incident, I asked my wife whether . . . well, whether we ought to ask him to find a home elsewhere. It was rather disconcerting to have him around. But Clara—that’s my wife—she wouldn’t hear of it. ‘Family’s family,’ she said. ‘We’re all Richard has. You don’t turn family out onto the street.’ She was quite right, of course.”
“You referred to your brother spending money excessively?” I said.
“Yes. He and I were both left very comfortably off.” Henry Negus shook his head. “The idea that my responsible older brother Richard would tear through his fortune with no care for the future . . . and yet that’s what he did. He seemed intent on converting what our father had left him into liquor and pouring it down his throat. He was heading for penury and serious illness, I feared. Some nights I lay awake worrying about the terrible end that might lie in store for him. Not murder, though. I never thought for a moment that Richard would be murdered, though perhaps I should have wondered.”
Poirot looked up, instantly alert. “Why would you wonder such a thing, monsieur? Most of us assume that our relations will not be murdered. It is a reasonable assumption in almost all cases.”
Henry Negus thought for a while before answering. Finally he said, “It would be fanciful to say that Richard seemed to know that he would be murdered, for who can know? But from the day that he moved into my home, he had the morose, doom-laden comportment of a man whose life had already ended. That is the only way I can describe it.”
“You say, however, that he, ah, perked up in the months preceding his death?”
“Yes. My wife noticed it too. She wanted me to ask him about it—women always do, don’t they?—but I knew Richard well enough to know he would not welcome the intrusion.”
“He seemed happier?” Poirot asked.
“I wish I could say yes to that, Monsieur Poirot. If I could believe that Richard was happier than he had been for years on the day that he died, that would be a significant consolation to me. But no, it wasn’t happiness. It was more as if he was planning something. He seemed to have a purpose again, after years without one. That was my impression, though, as I say, I know nothing of what that purpose might have been.”
“Yet you are certain you did not imagine this change?”
“Yes, I am. It manifested itself in several ways. Richard got up and came down to breakfast more often. He had more vim and energy about him. His personal hygiene improved. Most noticeable of all was that he stopped drinking. I cannot tell you how grateful I was for that alone. My wife and I prayed that he would succeed, whatever his venture—that finally the curse of Great Holling would release its grip on him and let him enjoy a fruitful life.”
“The curse, monsieur? You believe the village to be cursed?”
Henry Negus’s face reddened. “Not really, no. Of course, there’s no such thing, is there? It’s my wife’s phrase. Deprived of a good yarn to get her teeth into, she dreamed up the notion of a curse, based on Richard’s fleeing the place, and his broken engagement, and the only other fact she knows about Great Holling.”
“What other fact?” I asked.
“Oh.” Henry Negus looked surprised. Then he said, “No, I don’t suppose you would know about it. Why should you? The terrible tragedy of the young vicar of the parish and his wife. Richard wrote and told us about it a few months before he left the village,” said Henry. “They died within hours of one another.”
“Did they indeed? What was the cause of their deaths?” asked Poirot.
“I don’t know. Richard didn’t include that detail in his letter, assuming he knew it. He wrote only that it was a terrible tragedy. As a matter of fact, I asked him about it later, but I’m afraid he rather growled at me, which left me none the wiser. I think he was too caught up in his own misfortunes to care to discuss anybody else’s.”