The Monogram Murders (3 page)

your dinner. I’ll be out in two shakes of a lamb’s tail.”

She withdrew abruptly, closing the door in his face.

Poirot proceeded back to his seat. Perhaps he

would take Fee Spring’s advice and make a further

effort with the beef chop. How heartening it was to

speak to somebody who observed details. Hercule

Poirot did not encounter many such people.

Fee reappeared promptly with a cup in her hand,

no saucer. She took a slurp from it as she sat down on

the chair that Jennie had vacated. Poirot managed not

to wince at the sound.

“I don’t know a lot about Jennie,” she said. “Just

what I’ve picked up from odd things she’s said. She

works for a lady with a big house. Lives in. That’s

why she comes here regular, to collect Her

Ladyship’s coffee and cakes, for her fancy dinners

and parties and the like. Comes right across town—

she said that once. Plenty of our regulars come quite a

way. Jennie always stays for a drink. ‘My usual,

please,’ she says when she arrives, like she’s a lady

herself. That voice is her playing at being grand, I

reckon. It’s not the one she was born with. Could be

why she doesn’t say much, if she knows she can’t

keep it up.”

“Pardon me,” said Poirot, “but how do you know

that Mademoiselle Jennie has not always spoken in

this way?”

“You ever heard a domestic talk all proper like

that? Can’t say as I have.”

“
Oui, mais
. . . So it is the speculation and nothing

more?”

Fee Spring grudgingly admitted that she did not

know for certain. For as long as she had known her,

Jennie had spoken “like a proper lady.”

“I’ll say this for Jennie: she’s a tea girl, so she’s

got some sense in her head at least.”

“A tea girl?”

“That’s right.” Fee sniffed at Poirot’s coffee cup.

“All you that drinks coffee when you could be

drinking tea want your brains looking at, if you ask

me.”

“You do not know the name of the lady for whom

Jennie works, or the address of the big house?” Poirot

asked.

“No. Don’t know Jennie’s last name neither. I

know she had a terrible heartbreak years and years

ago. She said so once.”

“Heartbreak? Did she tell you of what kind?”

“S’only one sort,” said Fee decisively. “The sort

that does a heart right in.”

“What I mean to say is that there are many
causes

of the heartbreak: love that is unreturned, the loss of a

loved one at a tragically young age—”

“Oh, we never got the story,” said Fee with a trace

of bitterness in her voice. “Never will, neither. One

word, heartbreak, was all she’d part with. See, the

thing about Jennie is, she don’t talk. You wouldn’t be

able to help her none if she still sat here in this chair,

no more than you can now with her run off. She’s all

shut up in herself, that’s Jennie’s trouble. Likes to

wallow in it, whatever it is.”

All shut up in herself
. . .
The words sparked a

memory in Poirot—of a Thursday evening at

Pleasant’s several weeks ago, and Fee talking about a

customer.

He said, “She asks no questions,
n’est-ce pas
? She

is not interested in the social exchanges or the

conversation? She does not care to find out what is

the latest news in the life of anybody else?”

“Too true!” Fee looked impressed. “There’s not a

scrap of curiosity in her. I’ve never known anyone

more wrapped up in her own cares. Just doesn’t see

the world or the rest of us in it. She never asks you

how you’re rubbing along, or what you’ve been doing

with yourself.” Fee tilted her head to one side.

“You’re quick to catch on, aren’t you?”

“I know what I know only from listening to you

speak to the other waitresses, mademoiselle.”

Fee’s face turned red. “I’m surprised you’d go to

the bother of listening.”

Poirot had no wish to embarrass her further, so he

did not tell her that he greatly looked forward to her

descriptions of the individuals he had come to think

of, collectively, as “The Coffee-House Characters”—

Mr. Not Quite, for instance, who, each time he came

in, would order his food and then, immediately

afterward, cancel the order because he had decided it

was not quite what he wanted.

Now was not the appropriate time to enquire if

Fee had a name of the same order as Mr. Not Quite

for Hercule Poirot that she used in his absence—

perhaps one that made reference to his exquisite

mustache.

“So Mademoiselle Jennie does not wish to know

the business of other people,” Poirot said thoughtfully,

“but unlike many who take no interest in the lives and

ideas of those around them, and who talk only about

themselves at great length, she does not do this either

—is that not so?”

Fee raised her eyebrows. “Powerful memory

you’ve got there. Dead right again. No, Jennie’s not

one to talk about herself. She’ll answer a question,

but she won’t linger on it. Doesn’t want to be kept too

long from what’s in her head, whatever it is. Her

hidden treasure—except it don’t make her happy,

whatever she’s dwelling on. I’ve long since given up

trying to fathom her.”

“She dwells on the heartbreak,” Poirot murmured.

“And the danger.”

“Did she say she was in danger?”

“
Oui, mademoiselle.
I regret that I was not quick

enough to stop her from leaving. If something should

happen to her . . .” Poirot shook his head and wished

he could recover the settled feeling with which he had

arrived. He slapped the tabletop with the flat of his

hand as he made his decision. “I will return here

demain matin
. You say she is here often,
n’est-ce

pas
? I will find her before the danger does. This time,

Hercule Poirot, he will be quicker!”

“Fast or slow, don’t matter,” said Fee. “No one

can find Jennie, not even with her right in front of

their noses, and no one can help her.” She stood and

picked up Poirot’s plate. “There’s no point letting

good food go cold over it,” she concluded.

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 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