The Monogram Murders(65)

He shook his head. “How did I know that I would find her here? It is thanks to you, mon ami. Again you help Poirot.”

“How?”

“I invite you to think back to your conversation with Walter Stoakley at the King’s Head Inn, to what he said about a woman who could have had a husband, children, a home of her own and a happy life. Do you recall?”

“What about it?”

“A woman who devoted her life to a substantial man? Who sacrificed everything for him? Then, later, Mr. Stoakley said, “She couldn’t marry some kid, not once she had fallen in love with a man of substance. So she left him behind.’ You remember telling me this, mon ami?”

“Of course I do! I’m not an imbecile.”

“You thought that you had found our older woman and much younger man, n’est-ce pas? Rafal Bobak had referred to them at the Bloxham Hotel—he told us that the three murder victims were talking about them—and you thought Walter Stoakley had in mind the same couple, so you asked Mr. Stoakley how much older this woman was than the man whose love she had spurned because you believed that you heard him say, ‘She couldn’t marry some kid.’ But, my friend, you did not hear him say this!”

“Yes—I did, as a matter of fact.”

“Non. What you heard him say was, ‘She couldn’t marry Sam Kidd,’ Mr. Samuel Kidd.”

“But . . . but . . . Oh, dash it all!”

“You leapt to an incorrect conclusion because Walter Stoakley had already used the word ‘kid’ more than once. The young man with whom he had been drinking he had called a kid. Eh bien, your error was one that many in your position would have made. Do not chastise yourself too severely.”

“And then, having misunderstood, I asked Stoakley about the difference in age between the woman who could have married but didn’t and the ne’er-do-well he had been drinking with before I arrived. He must have wondered why I wanted to know, when Jennie Hobbs had nothing to do with the ne’er-do-well.”

“Oui. This he might have asked you, had he not been stupefied by alcohol. Ah, well.” Poirot shrugged.

“So Jennie Hobbs was engaged to Samuel Kidd,” I said, trying to take it all in. “And . . . she left him behind in Cambridge in order to come to Great Holling with Patrick Ive?”

Poirot nodded his agreement. “Fee Spring, the waitress from Pleasant’s—she told me that Jennie suffered a heartbreak in her past. I wonder what it was.”

“Haven’t we just answered that question?” I said. “It must have been leaving Samuel Kidd behind.”

“I think it is more likely to have been the death of Patrick Ive, the man Jennie truly loved. Incidentally, I am certain that this is why she altered her way of speaking: to sound more like someone of his class, in the hope that he might see her as an equal and not merely as a servant.”

“Are you not afraid that she might disappear on you again?” I asked, looking toward the closed door of the sitting room. “What is she doing that is taking so long? You know, we ought to take her straight to a hospital, if she hasn’t already been.”

“A hospital?” Poirot looked surprised.

“Yes. She lost a fair amount of blood in that hotel room.”

“You assume too much,” said Poirot. He looked as if he had considerably more to say, but at that moment Jennie opened the door.

“PLEASE FORGIVE ME, MONSIEUR Poirot,” she said.

“For what, mademoiselle?”

Silence of an uncomfortable sort filled the room. I wanted to speak and put an end to it, but doubted my ability to contribute anything useful.

“Nancy Ducane,” Poirot said very slowly and deliberately. “Was she the person from whom you fled, when you sought refuge in Pleasant’s Coffee House? Was she the one you feared?”

“I know she killed Harriet, Ida and Richard at the Bloxham Hotel,” Jennie whispered. “I’ve read about it in the papers.”

“Since we find you in the home of Samuel Kidd, your former fiancé, can we assume that Mr. Kidd has told you what he saw on the night of the murders?”

Jennie nodded. “Nancy, running from the Bloxham. She dropped two keys on the pavement, he said.”

“It is a coincidence incroyable, mademoiselle: Nancy Ducane, who has murdered three people already and wishes to murder you also, is seen running from the scene of her crimes by none other than the man you once intended to marry!”

Jennie uttered an almost inaudible “Yes.”

“Poirot, he is suspicious of a coincidence so large. You are lying now, and you were lying when we last met!”

“No! I swear—”

“Why did you take a room at the Bloxham Hotel, knowing it was where Harriet Sippel, Ida Gransbury and Richard Negus had met their deaths? You have no answer for that, I see!”

“Allow me to speak and I shall answer. I was tired of running. It seemed easier to have it over with.”

“Is that so? You calmly accepted the fate that awaited you? You embraced it and moved toward it?”

“Yes.”

“Then why—to Mr. Lazzari, the hotel manager—why did you ask him to provide you with a room ‘quickly, quickly,’ as if you were still in flight from your pursuer? And, since you do not appear to be wounded, whose was the blood in Room 402?”