The Monogram Murders(75)

“Catchpool, I am talking not about morally wrong but about factually impossible. Is this how you force me to explain before I am ready, by exasperating me? Bien, I will draw one detail to your attention in the hope that it will lead you to others. According to Jennie Hobbs, how did the keys to rooms 121 and 317 of the Bloxham Hotel end up in Nancy Ducane’s blue coat?”

“Samuel Kidd planted them there. To frame Nancy.”

“He slipped them into her pocket on the street?”

“It’s easy enough to do, I imagine.”

“Yes, but how did Mr. Kidd get hold of the two keys? Jennie was supposed to find both, along with Richard Negus’s key, in Room 238 when she went there to kill Richard Negus. She was supposed to pass all three keys to Samuel Kidd after she had left and locked Room 238. Yet according to her, she did not go to Richard Negus’s room or to the Bloxham Hotel at all on the night of the murders. Mr. Negus locked his door from the inside and killed himself, having hidden his key behind a loose tile in the fireplace. So how did Samuel Kidd get his hands on the other two keys?”

I waited a few moments in case the answer came to me. It didn’t. “I don’t know.”

“Perhaps when Jennie Hobbs did not arrive, Samuel Kidd and Richard Negus improvised: the former killed the latter, then took Harriet Sippel’s and Ida Gransbury’s keys from Mr. Negus’s hotel room. In which case, why not also take Mr. Negus’s key? Why hide it behind the loose tile in the fireplace? The only reasonable explanation is that Richard Negus wanted his suicide to look like murder. Mon ami, this could have been achieved just as easily by having Samuel Kidd remove the key from the room. There would have been then no need for the open window to give the impression of the murderer escaping from the room in that way.”

I saw the strength of his argument. “Since Richard Negus locked his door from the inside, how did Samuel Kidd get into room 238 in order to remove the keys to rooms 121 and 317?”

“Précisément.”

“What if he climbed in through the open window, having first climbed a tree?”

“Catchpool—think. Jennie Hobbs says she did not go to the Bloxham Hotel that night. So, either Samuel Kidd cooperated with Richard Negus to make the plan work without her, or else the two men did not cooperate. If they did not, then why would Mr. Kidd enter Mr. Negus’s hotel room uninvited, by an open window, and remove two keys from it? What reason would he have for doing so? And if the two men did cooperate, surely Samuel Kidd would have ended up with three keys to place in Nancy Ducane’s pocket rather than two. Additionally . . . if Richard Negus committed suicide, as you now believe, causing the cufflink to fall far back in his mouth, then who arranged his body in the perfectly straight line? Do you believe that a man could swallow poison and then contrive to die in that exceptionally neat position? Non! Ce n’est pas possible.”

“I shall need to think about this another time,” I said. “You’ve made my head spin. It’s full of a jumble of questions that weren’t there before.”

“For example?”

“Why did our three murder victims order sandwiches, cakes and scones and then not eat any of them? And if they didn’t eat the food, why wasn’t it still on the plates in Ida Gransbury’s room? What happened to it?”

“Ah! Now you think like a proper detective. Hercule Poirot is educating you in how to use the little gray cells.”

“Did you think of that—the food discrepancy?”

“Bien s?r. Why did I not ask Jennie Hobbs to account for it, when I asked her to explain many other inconsistencies? I did not do so because I wanted her to imagine that we believed her story by the time we left her. Therefore, I could not ask her a question for which she would be unable to provide an answer.”

“Poirot! Samuel Kidd’s face!”

“Where, mon ami?”

“No, I don’t mean that I can see his face, I mean . . . Remember the first time you met him at Pleasant’s, he had cut himself shaving? There was a cut on a small shaved area of his cheek, while the rest was covered by a growth of beard?”

Poirot nodded.

“What if that was not a shaving cut that we saw but a cut from a sharp branch of a tree? What if Samuel Kidd cut himself on his way into or out of the open window of Room 238? He knew that he was going to approach us with his lie about having seen Nancy Ducane run from the hotel, and he didn’t want us to connect the mysterious scratch on his face with the tree outside Richard Negus’s open window, so he shaved a small patch of skin.”

“Knowing that we would assume he had started to shave, cut himself badly and stopped,” said Poirot. “And then, when he visited me at the lodging house, his beard had disappeared and his face was covered in cuts: to remind me that he cannot shave without lacerating his face. Eh, bien, if I believe this then I will assume that every cut I see upon his face is caused by shaving.”

“Why don’t you sound more excited?” I asked.

“Because it is so obvious. I arrived at this conclusion more than two hours ago.”

“Oh.” I felt deflated. “Wait a minute—if Samuel Kidd scratched his face on the tree outside Richard Negus’s open window, that means he might have climbed into the room and got his hands on the keys to 121 and 317. Doesn’t it?”