The Monogram Murders (38 page)

necessary if I am to explain to you, who do not

understand a thing. Your every word shows me that

you comprehend nothing. You talk about having all the

answers, but the story we heard from Jennie Hobbs

this morning was an elaborate embroidery of lies! Do

you not see this?”

“Well . . . I mean . . . um . . .”

“Richard Negus agrees with Harriet Sippel that

perhaps Nancy Ducane should hang for three murders

she did not commit? He is willing to leave Nancy’s

fate to be decided by Jennie Hobbs? Richard Negus

the leader, the respected authority figure—the same

Richard Negus who, for sixteen years, has felt so

terribly guilty for unjustly condemning Patrick Ive?

The Richard Negus who realized
too late
that it is

wrong to condemn and persecute a man for

understandable human weaknesses? Who ended his

engagement

to

Ida

Gransbury

because

she

dogmatically insisted that every transgression must be

punished with the utmost harshness—
this
Richard

Negus would entertain the idea of allowing Nancy

Ducane, whose only crime was to love a man who

could never belong to her, to be condemned by law

and face the gallows for three murders of which she is

innocent? Pah! It is nonsense! There is no consistency.

It is a fantasy dreamed up by Jennie Hobbs to mislead

us yet again.”

I listened to most of this with my mouth open. “Are

you sure, Poirot? I believed her, I have to say.”

“Of course I am sure. Did not Henry Negus tell us

that his brother Richard spent sixteen years in his

home as a recluse, seeing and speaking to nobody?

Yet according to Jennie Hobbs, he spent these same

years persuading Harriet Sippel and Ida Gransbury

that they were responsible for Patrick and Frances

Ive’s deaths and must pay the price. How was

Richard Negus able to do this persuading without his

brother Henry noticing his regular communications

with two women from Great Holling?”

“You might have a point there. I didn’t think of

that.”

“It is a minor point. Surely you noticed all that was

more substantially wrong with Jennie’s story?”

“To frame an innocent person for murder is

unquestionably wrong,” I said.

“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 sûr.
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?”

“There is no time to discuss the meaning now,”

said Poirot in a stern voice. “We arrive at the station.

It is clear from your question that you have not

listened carefully.”

DR. AMBROSE FLOWERDAY TURNED OUT to be a tall,

thick-set man of around fifty with wiry dark hair that

was graying at the temples. His shirt was crumpled

and missing a button. He had passed on instructions

for us to go to the vicarage, so that was where we

were, standing in a chilly hall with a high ceiling and

a splintering wooden floor.

The whole place seemed to have been given over

to Dr. Flowerday for him to use as a temporary

hospital for one patient. The door had been opened by

a nurse in uniform. Under different circumstances I

might have been curious about this arrangement, but

all I could think of was poor Margaret Ernst.

“How is she?” I asked, once the introductions

were over.

The doctor’s face twisted in anguish. Then he

composed himself. “I am allowed to say only that she

is doing well in the circumstances.”

“Allowed by whom?” asked Poirot.

“Margaret. She will not tolerate defeatist talk.”

“And is it true, what she asks you to tell us?”

After a short pause, Dr. Flowerday gave a small

nod. “Most people would not survive for this long

after such an assault. Margaret has a strong

constitution and a strong mind. It was a serious attack,

but, damn it, I shall keep her alive if it kills me.”

“What happened to her?”

“Two thoroughly bad pennies from the top end of

the village came to the churchyard in the middle of the

night and . . . well, they did things to the Ives’ grave

that do not bear repeating. Margaret heard them. Even

in her sleep she is vigilant. She heard metal smashing

against stone. When she ran out to try to stop them,

they attacked her with a spade they had brought with

them. They didn’t care if they beat her to death! That

much was obvious to the village constable, when he

arrested them some hours later.”

Poirot said, “Pardon me, Doctor. You
know
who

did this to Mrs. Ernst? The two bad pennies that you

refer to . . . they confessed?”

“Proudly,” said Dr. Flowerday through gritted

teeth.

“So they are arrested?”

“Oh, yes, the police have got them.”

“Who are they?” I asked.

“Frederick and Tobias Clutton, father and son.

Drunken good-for-nothings, the pair of them.”

I wondered if the son was the ne’er-do-well I had

seen drinking with Walter Stoakley in the King’s

Head. (I later discovered that I was right: he was.)

“Margaret got in their way, they said. As for the

Ives’ grave . . .” Dr. Flowerday turned to me. “Please

understand that I am not blaming you for this, but your

visit stirred things up. You were seen going to

Margaret’s cottage. All the villagers know where she

stands with regard to the Ives. They knew that the

story you were hearing inside that house was one that

painted Patrick Ive not as a promiscuous charlatan but

as the victim of a sustained campaign of cruelty and

slander—theirs. It made them want to punish Patrick

all over again. He is dead and beyond their reach, so

they desecrated his grave instead. Margaret has

always said it would happen one day. She sits by her

window day in and day out, hoping to catch them and

stop them. Do you know she never met Patrick or

Frances Ive? Did she tell you that? They were
my

friends. Their tragedy was my sorrow, the injustice of

it my obsession. Yet, from the first, they mattered to

Margaret. It horrified her to think that such a thing

could happen in her husband’s new parish. She made

sure that it mattered to him, too. It was the most

incredible good fortune, that Margaret and Charles

came to Great Holling. One couldn’t wish for a better

ally. Allies,” Dr. Flowerday corrected himself.

“May we speak to Margaret?” I asked. If she was

about to die—and I had the sense that she was, in

spite of the doctor’s determination that she should not