The Fourth Cufflink
IN THE LOBBY OF the Bloxham, we nearly walked straight into Henry Negus, Richard Negus’s brother. He was carrying a small briefcase in one hand. In the other, he carried a very large suitcase, which he dropped in order to speak to us. “I wish I were a younger, stronger man,” he said, out of breath. “How is the case progressing, if I might enquire?”
From his expression and tone of voice, I deduced that he was unaware that there had been a fourth murder. I said nothing, interested to see what Poirot would do.
“We are confident of success,” said Poirot with deliberate vagueness. “You have spent the night here, monsieur?”
“Night? Oh, the suitcase. No, I stayed at the Langham. Couldn’t face this place, though Mr. Lazzari was good enough to offer. I am here only to collect Richard’s belongings.” Henry Negus inclined his head toward the suitcase but kept his eyes averted, as if he didn’t want to see it himself. I looked at the stiff card label attached to its handle: Mr. R. Negus.
“Well, I had better make haste,” said Negus. “Please keep me informed.”
“We will,” I said. “Goodbye, Mr. Negus. I am so very sorry about your brother.”
“Thank you, Mr. Catchpool. Monsieur Poirot.” Negus looked embarrassed, perhaps even angry. I thought I understood why: in the face of tragedy, he had decided to be efficient and did not wish to be reminded of his own sadness while he was trying to focus on the practicalities.
As he walked out onto the street, I saw Luca Lazzari rushing toward us, clutching at his hair. A sheen of sweat covered his face. “Ah, Monsieur Poirot, Mr. Catchpool! At last! You have heard the disastrous news? Unhappy days at the Bloxham Hotel! Oh, unhappy days!”
Was it my imagination, or had he styled his mustache to resemble Poirot’s? It was a pale imitation, if imitation it was. I found it fascinating that a fourth murder in his hotel had produced in him such a mournful disposition. When only three guests had been murdered at the Bloxham, he had remained chipper. A thought occurred to me: maybe this time the victim was an employee of the hotel and not a guest. I asked who had been killed.
“I do not know who she is or where she is now,” said Lazzari. “Come, follow me. You will see for yourselves.”
“You do not know where she is?” Poirot demanded as we followed the hotel manager to the lift. “What do you mean? Is she not here, in the hotel?”
“Ah, but where in the hotel? She could be anywhere!” Lazzari wailed.
Rafal Bobak inclined his head in greeting as he came toward us, pushing a large cart on wheels full of what looked like sheets in need of laundering. “Monsieur Poirot,” he said, stopping when he saw us. “I have been going over and over it in my mind, to see if I can remember any more of what was said in Room 317 on the night of the murders.”
“Oui?” Poirot sounded hopeful.
“I haven’t remembered anything else, sir. I’m sorry.”
“Never mind. Thank you for trying, Mr. Bobak.”
“Look,” said Lazzari. “Here comes the lift, and I am afraid to step into it! In my own hotel! I do not know, any more, what I will find, or not find. I am afraid to turn one more corner, to open one more door . . . I fear the shadows in the corridors, the creaks of the floorboards . . .”
As we went up in the lift, Poirot tried to get some sense out of the distraught hotel manager, but to no avail. Lazzari seemed unable to manage more than six linked words at a time: “Miss Jennie Hobbs reserved the room . . . What? Yes, fair hair . . . But then where did she go? . . . Yes, brown hat . . . We have lost her! . . . She was without cases . . . I saw her myself, yes . . . I was too late to the room! . . . What? Yes, a coat. Pale brown . . .”
On the fourth floor, we followed Lazzari as he hurried ahead of us along the corridor. “Harriet Sippel was on the first floor, remember?” I said to Poirot. “Richard Negus was on the second and Ida Gransbury on the third. I wonder if it means anything.”
By the time we caught up with Lazzari, he had unlocked the door to Room 402. “Gentlemen, you are about to see a most anomalous scene of ugliness in the beautiful Bloxham Hotel. Please prepare yourselves.” Having issued this warning, he flung open the door so that it banged against the wall inside the room.
“But . . . Where is the body?” I asked. It was not inside the room, laid out like the others. Immense relief suffused me.
“Nobody knows, Catchpool.” Poirot’s voice was quiet but there was anger in it. Or it might have been fear.
Between a chair and a small occasional table—positioned exactly where the bodies had been in rooms 121, 238 and 317—there was a pool of blood on the floor, with a long smear mark at one side, as if something had been dragged through part of it. Jennie Hobbs’s body? An arm perhaps, from the shape of the smear. There were small lines breaking up the red that might have been fingermarks . . .
I turned away, sickened by the sight.
“Poirot, look.” In one corner of the room there was a dark brown hat, upturned. There was something inside it, a small metal object. Could it be . . . ?
“Jennie’s hat,” said Poirot, a tremor in his voice. “My worst fear, it has come to pass, Catchpool. And inside the hat . . .” He walked over, very slowly. “Yes, it is as I thought: a cufflink. The fourth cufflink, also with the monogram PIJ.”
His mustache began to move with some energy, and I could only imagine the grimaces it concealed. “Poirot, he has been a fool—a contemptible fool—to allow this to happen!”
“Poirot, no one could possibly accuse you of—” I began.
“Non! Do not try to console me! Always you want to turn away from pain and suffering, but I am not like you, Catchpool! I cannot countenance such . . . cowardice. I want to regret what I regret, without you trying to stop me. It is necessary!”
I stood as still as a statue. He had wanted to silence me, and he had succeeded.
“Catchpool,” he said my name abruptly, as if he thought my attention might have wandered far from the matter at hand. “Observe the marks made by the blood here. The body was pulled through it to leave this . . . trail. Does that make sense to you?” he demanded.
“Well . . . yes, I’d say so.”
“Look at the direction of movement: not toward the window, but away from it.”
“Which means what?” I asked.
“Since Jennie’s body is not here, it must have been removed from the room. The trail of blood is going not toward the window but toward the corridor, so . . .” Poirot stared at me expectantly.
“So?” I said tentatively. Then, as clarity dawned, “Oh, I see what you mean: the marks, the smears, were made when the killer pulled Jennie Hobbs’s body from the pool of blood toward the door?”
“Non. Look at the width of the doorway, Catchpool. Look at it: it is wide. What does this tell you?”
“Not an awful lot,” I said, thinking it best to be candid. “A murderer wishing to remove his victim’s body from a hotel room would hardly care whether the doorway of that room was wide or narrow.”
Poirot shook his head disconsolately, muttering under his breath.
He turned to Lazzari. “Signor, please tell me everything you know, from the beginning.”
“Of course. Certainly.” Lazzari cleared his throat in preparation. “A room was taken by a woman named Jennie Hobbs. Monsieur Poirot, she ran into the hotel as if a calamity had befallen her and threw money down on the desk. She requested a room as if escaping from a pursuing demon! I showed her to the room myself, then went away to commence the consideration: what ought I to do? Should I inform the police that a woman with the name Jennie has arrived at the hotel? You had asked me about that name in particular, Monsieur Poirot, but there must be many women in London with the name Jennie, and more than one of those Jennies must have cause for great unhappiness that is nothing to do with a murder case. How am I to know if—”
“Please, signor, arrive at the point,” said Poirot, interrupting his flow. “What did you do?”
“I waited about thirty minutes, then came up here to the fourth floor and knocked at the door. No answer! So I went back downstairs to get a key.”
As Lazzari spoke, I walked over to the window and looked out. Anything was preferable to the sight of the blood and the hat and the wretched monogrammed cufflink. Room 402, like Richard Negus’s room, 238, was on the garden side of the hotel. I stared at the pleached limes, but soon had to look away, as even they looked sinister to me: a row of inanimate objects fused together, as if they had held hands for too long.
I was about to turn back to Poirot and Lazzari when I spotted two people in the garden beneath the window. They stood beside a brown wheelbarrow. I could see only the tops of their heads. One was a man and the other a woman, and they were locked together in an embrace. The woman seemed to stumble or slump, her head tilting to one side. Her companion grasped her more tightly. I took a step back, but I was not fast enough: the man had looked up and seen me. It was Thomas Brignell, the assistant clerk. His face instantly turned beet red. I took another step back so that I could no longer see the gardens at all. Poor Brignell, I thought; given his reluctance to stand up and speak in public, I could well imagine how painfully embarrassed he must be to be caught canoodling.
Lazzari continued with his account: “When I returned with a master key, I knocked again, to make sure I was not about to intrude upon the young lady’s privacy, and still she did not open the door! So I unlocked it myself . . . and this is what I found!”
“Did Jennie Hobbs specifically request a room on the fourth floor?” I asked.
“No, she did not. I assisted her myself, since my dear trusty clerk John Goode was otherwise occupied. Miss Hobbs said, “Put me in any room, but quickly! Quickly, I beg of you.”
“Was any sort of note left at the front desk to announce the fourth murder?” asked Poirot.
“No. This time, there was not the note,” said Lazzari.
“Were any food or beverages served to the room, or requested?”
“No. None.”
“You have checked with everybody who works in the hotel?”
“Every single person, yes. Monsieur Poirot, we have looked everywhere . . .”
“Signor, a few moments ago you described Jennie Hobbs as a young lady. How old was she, would you say?”
“Oh . . . I must beg your pardon. No, she was not young. But she was not old.”
“Was she, perhaps, thirty?” Poirot asked.
“I believe she might have been forty, but a woman’s age is a difficult thing to estimate.”
Poirot nodded. “A brown hat and a pale brown coat. Fair hair. Panic and distress, and an age that might be forty. The Jennie Hobbs you describe sounds like the Jennie Hobbs I encountered at Pleasant’s Coffee House last Thursday evening. But can we say for certain that it was she? Two sightings by two different people . . .” Suddenly, he fell silent though his mouth continued to move.
“Poirot?” I said.
He had eyes—intensely green eyes, at that precise moment—only for Lazzari. “Signor, I must speak to that most observant waiter again, Mr. Rafal Bobak. And Thomas Brignell, and John Goode. In fact, I must speak to every single member of your staff as soon as possible and ask how many times they each saw Harriet Sippel, Richard Negus and Ida Gransbury—dead or alive.”
He had evidently realized something important. As I reached this conclusion, I heard myself gasp as I too made a mental leap. “Poirot,” I murmured.
“What is it, my friend? You have put some pieces of our puzzle together? Poirot, he understands now something that did not strike him before, but there are still questions, still pieces that cannot be made to fit.”
“I have . . .” I cleared my throat. Speaking, for some reason, was proving rather difficult. “I have just seen a woman in the hotel gardens.” I could not, at that moment, bring myself to say that she had been in the arms of Thomas Brignell, or to describe the strange way in which she had seemed to crumple, her head falling to one side. It was simply too . . . peculiar. The suspicion running through my mind was one I would have felt embarrassed to utter aloud.
Thankfully, however, I did feel able to divulge one important detail. “She was wearing a pale brown coat,” I told Poirot.