The Monogram Murders(24)

“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.