The Monogram Murders

CHAPTER 3

At the Bloxham Hotel

The following morning at the Bloxham, I could not help but feel unsettled, knowing that Poirot might arrive at any moment to tell us simple police folk how foolishly we were approaching the investigation of our three murders. I was the only one who knew he was coming, which set me rather on edge. His presence would be my responsibility, and I was afraid that he might demoralize the troops. If truth be told, I feared that he might demoralize me. In the optimistic light of an unusually bright February day, and after a surprisingly satisfactory night’s sleep, I couldn’t understand why I hadn’t forbidden him from coming anywhere near the Bloxham.

I didn’t suppose it mattered, however; he would not have listened to me if I had.

I was in the hotel’s opulent lobby when Poirot arrived, talking to a Mr Luca Lazzari, the hotel’s manager. Lazzari was a friendly, helpful and startlingly enthusiastic man with black curly hair, a musical way of speaking, and moustaches that were in no way the equal of Poirot’s. Lazzari seemed determined that I and my fellow policemen should enjoy our time at the Bloxham every bit as much as the paying guests did—those that did not end up getting murdered, that is.

I introduced him to Poirot, who nodded curtly. He seemed out of sorts and I soon learned why. ‘I did not find Jennie,’ he said. ‘Half the morning I waited at the coffee house! But she did not come.’

‘Hardly “half the morning”, Poirot,’ I said, for he was prone to exaggeration.

‘Mademoiselle Fee also was not there. The other waitresses, they were able to tell me nothing.’

‘Bad luck,’ I said, unsurprised by the news. I hadn’t for a moment imagined that Jennie might revisit the coffee house, and I felt guilty. I should perhaps have tried harder to make Poirot see sense: she had run away from him and from Pleasant’s, having declared that confiding in him had been a mistake. Why on earth would she return the following day and allow him to take charge of protecting her?

‘So!’ Poirot looked at me expectantly. ‘What do you have to tell me?’

‘I too am here to provide the information you need,’ said Lazzari, beaming. ‘Luca Lazzari, at your disposal. Have you visited the Bloxham Hotel before, Monsieur Poirot?’

‘Non.’

‘Is it not superb? Like a palace of the belle époque, no? Majestic! I hope you notice and admire the artistic masterpieces that are all around us!’

‘Oui. It is superior to the lodging house of Mrs Blanche Unsworth, though that house has the better view from the window,’ Poirot said briskly. His glum spirits had certainly dug themselves in.

‘Ah, the views from my charming hotel!’ Lazzari clasped his hands together in delight. ‘From the rooms facing the hotel gardens there are sights of great beauty, and on the other side there is splendid London—another exquisite scene! Later I will show you.’

‘I would prefer to be shown the three rooms in which murders have taken place,’ Poirot told him.

That put a momentary crimp in Lazzari’s smile. ‘Monsieur Poirot, you may rest assured that this terrible crime—three murders on one night, it is scarcely credible to me!—that this will never happen again at the world-renowned Bloxham Hotel.’

Poirot and I exchanged a look. The point was not so much preventing it from happening again but dealing with the fact that it had happened on this occasion.

I decided I had better take the reins and not allow Lazzari the chance to say too much more. Poirot’s moustaches were already twitching with suppressed rage.

‘The victims’ names are Mrs Harriet Sippel, Miss Ida Gransbury and Mr Richard Negus,’ I told Poirot. ‘All three were guests in the hotel and each one was the sole occupant of his or her room.’

‘Each one? His or her room, you say?’ Poirot smiled at his little joke. I attributed the rapid improvement in his spirits to the fact that Lazzari had fallen silent. ‘I do not mean to interrupt you, Catchpool. Continue.’

‘All three victims arrived here at the hotel on Wednesday, the day before they were murdered.’

‘Did they arrive together?’

‘No.’

‘Most definitely not,’ said Lazzari. ‘They arrived separately, one by one. They checked in one by one.’

‘And they were murdered one by one,’ said Poirot, which happened to be exactly what I was thinking. ‘You are certain of this?’ he asked Lazzari.

‘I could not be more so. I have the word of my clerk, Mr John Goode, the most dependable man of my entire acquaintance. You will meet him. We have only the most impeccable persons working here at the Bloxham Hotel, Monsieur Poirot, and when my clerk tells me a thing is so, I know that it is so. From across the country and across the world, people come to ask if they can work at the Bloxham Hotel. I say yes only to the best.’

It’s funny but I didn’t realize how well I had come to know Poirot until that moment—until I saw that Lazzari did not know how to manage him at all. If he had written ‘Suspect This Man of Murder’ on a large sign and hung it around Mr John Goode’s neck, he could not have done a better job of inciting Poirot to distrust the fellow. Hercule Poirot will not allow anyone else to dictate to him what his opinion should be; he will, rather, determine to believe the opposite, contrary old cove that he is.

‘So,’ he said now, ‘it is a remarkable coincidence, is it not? Our three murder victims—Mrs Harriet Sippel, Miss Ida Gransbury and Mr Richard Negus—they arrive separately and appear to have nothing to do with one another. And yet all three share not merely the date of their deaths, which was yesterday, but also their date of arrival at the Bloxham Hotel: Wednesday.’

‘What’s remarkable about it?’ I asked. ‘Plenty of other guests must also have arrived on Wednesday, in a hotel of this size. I mean, ones that have not been murdered.’

Poirot’s eyes looked as if they were about to burst forth from his head. I couldn’t see that I had said anything particularly shocking, so I pretended not to notice his consternation, and continued to tell him the facts of the case.

‘Each of the victims was found inside his or her locked bedroom,’ I said, feeling rather self-conscious about the ‘his or her’ part. ‘The killer locked all three doors and made off with the keys—’

‘Attendez,’ Poirot interrupted. ‘You mean that the keys are missing. You cannot know that the murderer took them or has them now.’

I took a deep breath. ‘We suspect that the killer took the keys away with him. We’ve done a thorough search, and they are certainly not inside the rooms, nor anywhere else in the hotel.’

‘My excellent staff have checked and confirmed that this is true,’ said Lazzari.

Poirot said that he would like to perform his own thorough search of the three rooms. Lazzari joyously agreed, as if Poirot had proposed a tea party followed by dancing.

‘Check all you like, but you won’t find the three room keys,’ I said. ‘I’m telling you, the murderer took them. I don’t know what he did with them, but—’

‘Perhaps he put them in his coat pocket, with one, or three, or five monogrammed cufflinks,’ Poirot said coolly.

‘Ah, now I see why they speak of you as the most splendid detective, Monsieur Poirot!’ Lazzari exclaimed, though he can’t have understood Poirot’s remark. ‘You have a superb mind, they say!’

‘Cause of death is looking very much like poisoning,’ I said, disinclined to linger over descriptions of Poirot’s brilliance. ‘We think cyanide, which can work with great speed if the quantities are sufficient. The inquest’ll tell us for sure, but … almost certainly their drinks were poisoned. In the case of Harriet Sippel and Ida Gransbury, that drink was a cup of tea. In the case of Richard Negus it was sherry.’

‘How is this known?’ Poirot asked. ‘The drinks are still there in the rooms?’

‘The cups are, yes, and Negus’s sherry glass. Only the remaining few drops of the drinks themselves, but it’s easy enough to tell tea from coffee. We will find cyanide in those drops, I’ll wager.’

‘And the time of death?’

‘According to the police doctor, all three were murdered between four o’clock in the afternoon and half past eight in the evening. Luckily, we’ve managed to narrow it down further: to between a quarter past seven and ten minutes past eight.’

‘A stroke of luck indeed!’ Lazzari agreed. ‘Each of the … ah … deceased guests was last seen alive at fifteen minutes after seven o’clock, by three unquestionably dependable representatives of this hotel—so we know this must be true! I myself found the deceased persons—so terrible, this tragedy!—at between fifteen and twenty minutes after eight o’clock.’

‘But they must have been dead by ten past eight,’ I told Poirot. ‘That was when the note announcing the murders was found on the front desk.’

‘Wait, please,’ said Poirot. ‘We will get to this note in due course. Monsieur Lazzari, it is surely not possible that each of the murder victims was last seen alive by a member of hotel staff at a quarter past seven precisely?’

‘Yes.’ Lazzari nodded so hard, I feared his head might fall off his neck. ‘It is very, very true. All three ordered dinner to be brought to their rooms at a quarter past the hour, and all three deliveries were exceptionally prompt. That is the way of the Bloxham Hotel.’

Poirot turned to me. ‘This is another coincidence énorme,’ he said. ‘Harriet Sippel, Ida Gransbury and Richard Negus all arrive at the hotel on the same day, the day before they are murdered. Then on the day of the murders they all order dinner to be brought to their rooms at a quarter past seven exactly? It does not seem very likely.’

‘Poirot, there’s no point debating the likelihood of something we know happened.’

‘Non. But there is a point in making sure that it happened in the way that we have heard. Monsieur Lazzari, I have no doubt that your hotel contains at least one very large room. Please assemble in that room everybody who works here, and I will speak to them all at their—and your—earliest convenience. While you do this, Mr Catchpool and I will begin the inspection of the three victims’ rooms.’

‘Yes, and we’d better be quick about it, before they come for the bodies,’ I said. ‘In normal circumstances, they would have been removed by now.’ I did not mention that the delay in this instance had been caused by my own dereliction of duty. In my hurry to put distance between myself and the Bloxham Hotel last night, and to think about something—anything—more pleasant than these three murders, I had neglected to make the necessary arrangements.

I hoped Poirot might warm up a few degrees once Lazzari had left us alone, but there was no change to his stern demeanour, and I realized that he was probably always like this ‘at work’, as it were—which seemed a bit rich since it was my work and not his, and he was doing nothing to lift my spirits.

I had a master key, and we visited the three rooms one by one. As we waited for the lift’s elaborate gold doors to open, Poirot said, ‘We can agree on one thing, I hope: Monsieur Lazzari’s word cannot be relied upon with regard to those working in the hotel. He speaks of them as if they are above suspicion, which they cannot be if they were here yesterday when the murders were committed. The loyalty of Monsieur Lazzari is commendable, but he is a fool if he believes that all the staff of the Bloxham Hotel are des anges.’

Something had been bothering me, so I made a clean breast of it: ‘I hope you don’t also think I’m a fool. What I said before about plenty of other guests also arriving on Wednesday … That was a hare-brained thing to say. Any guests that arrived on Wednesday and didn’t get murdered on Thursday are irrelevant, aren’t they? I mean, it’s only a noteworthy coincidence that three or any number of apparently unconnected guests arrive on the same day if they also get murdered on the same evening.’

‘Oui.’ Poirot smiled at me with genuine warmth as we stepped into the lift. ‘You have restored my faith in your mental acuity, my friend. And you hit the head of the nail when you say “apparently unconnected”. The three murder victims will turn out to be connected. I will swear to it now. They were not selected at random from among the hotel’s guests. The three were killed for one reason—a reason connected with the initials PIJ. It is for the same reason that they all came to the hotel on the same day.’

‘It’s almost as if they received an invitation to present themselves for slaughter,’ I said in a cavalier fashion. ‘Invitation reads: “Please arrive the day before, so that Thursday can be devoted entirely to your getting murdered.”’

It was perhaps undignified to joke about it, but joking is what I do when I feel despondent, I’m afraid. Sometimes I succeed in tricking myself into imagining that I feel all right about things. It didn’t work on this occasion.

‘Devoted entirely …’ Poirot muttered. ‘Yes, that is an idea, mon ami. You were not being serious, I understand. Nevertheless, you make a point that is very interesting.’

I did not think I had. It was an asinine joke and nothing more. Poirot seemed intent on congratulating me for my most absurd notions.

‘One, two, three,’ said Poirot as we went up in the lift. ‘Harriet Sippel, Room 121. Richard Negus, Room 238. Ida Gransbury, Room 317. The hotel has a fourth and a fifth floor also, but our three murder victims are on the consecutive floors 1, 2 and 3. It is very neat.’ Poirot usually approved of things that were neat, but he looked worried about this one.

We examined the three rooms, which were identical in almost every respect. Each contained a bed, cupboards, a basin with an upturned glass sitting on one corner, several armchairs, a table, a desk, a tiled fireplace, a radiator, a larger table over by the window, a suitcase, clothes and personal effects, and a dead person.

Each room’s door closed with a thud, trapping me inside …

‘Hold his hand, Edward.’

I couldn’t bring myself to look too closely at the bodies. All three were lying on their backs, perfectly straight, with their arms flat by their sides and their feet pointing towards the door. Formally laid out.

(Even writing these words, describing the posture of the bodies, produces in me an intolerable sensation. Is it any wonder I could not look closely at the three victims’ faces for more than a few seconds at a time? The blue undertone to the skin; the still, heavy tongues; the shrivelled lips? Though I would have studied their faces in detail rather than look at their lifeless hands, and I would have done anything at all rather than wonder what I could not help wondering: whether Harriet Sippel, Ida Gransbury and Richard Negus would have wanted somebody to hold their hands once they were dead, or whether the idea would have horrified them. Alas, the human mind is a perverse, uncontrollable organ, and the contemplation of this matter pained me greatly.)

Formally laid out …

A thought struck me with great force. That was what was so grotesque about these three murder scenes, I realized: that the bodies had been laid out as a doctor might lay out his deceased patient, after tending him in his illness for many months. The bodies of Harriet Sippel, Ida Gransbury and Richard Negus had been arranged with meticulous care—or so it seemed to me. Their killer had ministered to them after their deaths, which made it all the more chilling that he had murdered them in cold blood.

No sooner had I had this thought than I told myself I was quite wrong. It was not ministration that had taken place here; far from it. I was confusing the present and the past, mixing up this business at the Bloxham with my unhappiest childhood memories. I ordered myself to think only about what was here in front of me, and nothing else. I tried to see it all through Poirot’s eyes, without the distortion of my own experience.

Each of the murder victims lay between a wing-backed armchair and a small table. On the three tables were two teacups with saucers (Harriet Sippel’s and Ida Gransbury’s) and one sherry glass (Richard Negus’s). In Ida Gransbury’s room, 317, there was a tray on the larger table by the window, loaded with empty plates and one more teacup and saucer. This cup was also empty. There was nothing on the plates but crumbs.

‘Aha,’ said Poirot. ‘So in this room we have two teacups, and many plates. Miss Ida Gransbury had company for her evening meal, most certainly. Perhaps she had the murderer’s company. But why is the tray still here, when the trays have been removed from the rooms of Harriet Sippel and Richard Negus?’

‘They might not have ordered food,’ I said. ‘Maybe they only wanted drinks—the tea and the sherry—and no trays were left in their rooms in the first place. Ida Gransbury also brought twice as many clothes with her as the other two.’ I gestured towards the cupboard, which contained an impressive array of dresses. ‘Have a look in there—there isn’t room to squeeze in even one petticoat, the number of garments she brought with her. She wanted to be certain of looking her best, that’s for sure.’

‘You are right,’ said Poirot. ‘Lazzari said that they all ordered dinner, but we will check exactly what was ordered to each room. Poirot, he would not make the mistake of the assumption if it were not for Jennie weighing on his mind—Jennie, whose whereabouts he does not know! Jennie who is more or less the same age as the three we have here—between forty and forty-five, I think.’

I turned away while Poirot did whatever he did with the mouths and the cufflinks. While he conducted his forays and emitted various exclamations, I stared into fireplaces and out of windows, avoided thinking about hands that would never again be held, and pondered my crossword puzzle and where I might be going wrong. For some weeks I had been trying to compose one that was good enough to be sent to a newspaper to be considered for publication, but I wasn’t having much success.

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 will be left stranded as soon as it reaches 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 further 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 towards 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.’