The Monogram Murders(13)

After we had looked at all three rooms, Poirot insisted that we return to the one on the second floor—Richard Negus’s, number 238. Would I find it any easier to enter these rooms, I wondered, the more I did it? So far the answer was no. Walking once again into Negus’s hotel room felt like forcing my heart to climb the most perilous mountain, in the certain knowledge that it would be left stranded as soon as it reached the top.

Poirot—unaware of my distress, which I concealed effectively, I hope—stood in the middle of the room and said, “Bon. This is the one that is most different from the others, n’est-ce pas? Ida Gransbury has the tray and the additional teacup in her room, it is true, but here there is the sherry glass instead of the teacup, and here we have one window open to its full capacity, while in the other two rooms all the windows are closed. Mr. Negus’s room is intolerably cold.”

“This is how it was when Monsieur Lazzari walked in and found Negus dead,” I said. “Nothing’s been altered in any way.”

Poirot walked over to the open window. “Here is Monsieur Lazzari’s wonderful view that he offered to show me—of the hotel’s gardens. Both Harriet Sippel and Ida Gransbury had rooms on the other side of the hotel, with views of the ‘splendid London.’ Do you see these trees, Catchpool?”

I told him that I did, wondering if he had me down as a colossal idiot. How could I fail to see trees that were directly outside the window?

“Another difference here is the position of the cufflink,” said Poirot. “Did you notice that? In Harriet Sippel’s and Ida Gransbury’s mouths, the cufflink is slightly protruding between the lips. Whereas Richard Negus has the cufflink much farther back, almost at the entrance to the throat.”

I opened my mouth to object, then changed my mind, but it was too late. Poirot had seen the argument in my eyes. “What is it?” he asked.

“I think you’re being a touch pedantic,” I said. “All three victims have monogrammed cufflinks in their mouths—the same initials on each one, PIJ. That’s something they have in common. It isn’t a difference. No matter which of their teeth the cufflink happens to be next to.”

“But it is a very big difference! The lips, the entrance to the throat—these are not the same place, not at all.” Poirot walked over so that he was standing right in front of me. “Catchpool, please remember what I am about to tell you. When three murders are almost identical, the smallest divergent details are of the utmost importance.”

Was I supposed to remember these wise words even if I disagreed with them? Poirot needn’t have worried. I remember nearly every word he has spoken in my presence, and the ones that infuriated me most are the ones I remember best of all.

“All three cufflinks were in the mouths of the victims,” I repeated with determined obstinacy. “That’s good enough for me.”

“This I see,” said Poirot with an air of dejection. “Good enough for you, and good enough also for your hundred people that you might ask, and also, I have no doubt, for your bosses at Scotland Yard. But not good enough for Hercule Poirot!”

I had to remind myself that he was talking about definitions of similarity and difference, and not about me personally.

“What about the open window, when all the windows in the other two rooms are closed?” he asked. “Is that a difference worth noting?”

“It’s unlikely to be relevant,” I said. “Richard Negus might have opened the window himself. There would be no reason for the murderer to close it. You’ve said it often yourself, Poirot—we Englishmen open windows in the dead of winter because we believe it’s good for our character.”

“Mon ami,” said Poirot patiently. “Consider: these three people did not drink poison, fall out of their armchairs and quite naturally land flat on their backs with their arms at their sides and their feet pointing toward the door. It is impossible. Why would one not stagger across the room? Why would one not fall out of the chair on the other side? The killer, he arranged the bodies so that each one was in the same position, at an equal distance from the chair and from the little table. Eh bien, if he cares so much to arrange his three murder scenes to look exactly the same, why does he not wish to close the window that, yes, perhaps Mr. Richard Negus has opened—but why does the murderer not close it in order to make it conform with the appearance of the windows in the other two rooms?”

I had to think about this. Poirot was right: the bodies had been laid out in this way deliberately. The killer must have wanted them all to look the same.

Laying out the dead . . .

“I suppose it depends where you choose to draw your frame around the scene of the crime,” I said hurriedly, as my mind tried to drag me back to my childhood’s darkest room. “Depends whether you want to extend it as far as the window.”

“Frame?”

“Yes. Not a real frame, a theoretical one. Perhaps our murderer’s frame for his creations was no larger than a square like this.” I walked around Richard Negus’s body, turning corners when necessary. “You see? I’ve just walked a small frame around Negus, and the window is outside the frame.”

Poirot was smiling and trying to hide it beneath his mustache. “A theoretical frame around the murder. Yes, I see. Where does the scene of a crime begin and where does it end? This is the question. Can it be smaller than the room that contains it? This is a fascinating matter for the philosophers.”