How It All Went Wrong
“INDEED,” SAID POIROT. “TELL us. Catchpool and I, we are agog.”
“It was my fault,” said Jennie, whose voice was hoarse by now. “I am a coward. I was afraid to die. Desolate as I was without Patrick, I had grown comfortable in my unhappiness and I didn’t want my life to end. Any sort of life, even one filled with torment, is preferable to a state of nothingness! Please don’t condemn me as unchristian for saying so, but I’m not sure I believe in an afterlife. I grew more and more afraid as the agreed date for the executions came closer—afraid of having to kill. I thought about what would be involved, imagined standing in a locked room and watching Richard drink poison, and I didn’t want to have to do it. But I had agreed! I had promised.”
“The plan that seemed so easy months before started to seem impossible,” said Poirot. “And of course you could not speak of your fears to Richard Negus, who esteemed you so highly. He might think less of you if you admitted to serious doubts. You perhaps were afraid he would take it upon himself to execute you with or without your consent.”
“Yes! I was terrified that he would. You see, from our discussions of the subject, I knew how important it was to him that all four of us should die. He told me on one occasion that if Harriet and Ida had not allowed themselves to be persuaded, he would have ‘done what needed to be done without their consent.’ That was how he put it. Knowing that, how could I go to him and tell him I had changed my mind, that I was prepared neither to die nor to kill?”
“I imagine you chided yourself for your reluctance, mademoiselle. You believed, did you not, that this killing and dying was the right and honorable thing to do?”
“With the rational part of my mind, yes, I did,” said Jennie. “I hoped and prayed that I would discover in myself an extra reserve of courage that would enable me to go through with it.”
“What did you plan to do about Nancy Ducane?” I asked her.
“I did not know. My panic on the night we first met was genuine, Monsieur Poirot. I could not decide what to do about anything! I allowed Sammy to go forward with his story about the keys, and to identify Nancy. I let all that happen, telling myself that at any moment I could go to the authorities with the truth and save her. But . . . I did not do so. Richard thought me a better person than him, but he was wrong—so wrong!
“There is a part of me, still, that envies Nancy because Patrick loved her, the same spiteful part that started all the trouble in Great Holling. And . . . I knew that if I admitted to conspiring in a plot to convict an innocent woman of murder, I would surely go to prison. I was scared.”
“Tell us please, mademoiselle: what did you do? What happened on the day of these . . . executions at the Bloxham Hotel?”
“I was supposed to arrive there at six o’clock. That was when we had agreed to meet.”
“The four conspirators?”
“Yes, and Sammy. I spent the whole day watching the clock tick its way toward the awful moment. When it got close to five o’clock, I simply knew I couldn’t do it. I just couldn’t! I did not go to the hotel at all. Instead, I ran through the streets of London, crying with fear. I had no notion of where to go or what to do, so I ran and ran. I felt as if Richard Negus was bound to be out looking for me, furious that I had let him and the others down. I went to Pleasant’s Coffee House at the agreed time, thinking that I could at least keep that part of my promise, even if I couldn’t kill Richard as I was supposed to.
“When I arrived at the coffee house, I was afraid for my life. That was no act that you saw. I thought Richard, not Nancy, might kill me—and, what is more, I was convinced that if he did, he would be doing the right thing. I did deserve to die! I said nothing to you that wasn’t true, Monsieur Poirot. Please, recall now what I said:
That I was scared of being murdered? I was—by Richard. That I had done something terrible in the past? I had—and if Richard did catch up with me and kill me, as I believed he one day would, I honestly did not want him to be punished for it. I knew that I had let him down. Can you understand that? Richard might have wanted to die, but I wanted him to live. Despite the harm he did to Patrick, he was a good man.”
“Oui, mademoiselle.”
“I longed to tell you the truth that night, Monsieur Poirot, but I lacked the courage.”
“So you believed that Richard Negus would find you and kill you because you did not arrive at the Bloxham Hotel to kill him?”
“Yes. I assumed that he would not be content to die without knowing why I didn’t come to the hotel as planned.”
“Yet he was,” I said, thinking furiously.
Jennie nodded.
I could see now that it all made sense: the identical positioning of the three dead bodies for one thing—in a perfectly straight line, feet pointing toward the door, between a small table and a chair. As Poirot had said, Harriet Sippel, Ida Gransbury and Richard Negus were unlikely all to have fallen naturally into that exact position.
There was a suspicious amount of similarity between the three murder scenes, and at last I thought I understood why: the conspirators needed the police to believe there was only one killer. In fact, any detective worth his salt would have assumed this purely from the cufflinks in the mouths and the fact of all three bodies having turned up at the same hotel on the same night, but the killers were in the grip of paranoia. They knew they were more than one person, and so they feared, as the guilty tend to, that the truth might be apparent to others. So they went to great lengths to create three murder scenes that were more similar to one another than they needed to be.
The laying out of the bodies, perfectly straight and identical, was also consistent with the notion that the killings at the Bloxham Hotel were not murders but executions. There are procedures that one follows after an execution—formalities and rituals. It would have felt important, I thought, to do something with the bodies rather than simply leave them lying exactly as they fell, as a common or garden-variety murderer would.
An image of a much younger Jennie Hobbs came to my mind: at Cambridge University’s Saviour College, moving from one room to another, making beds. She would have made each one identically, following the prescribed pattern . . . I shuddered, then wondered why a vision of a young woman innocently making beds in a college should give me such a chill.
Beds, and deathbeds . . .
Patterns, and the disruption of patterns . . .
“Richard Negus committed suicide,” I heard myself declare. “He must have. He tried to make it look like murder—the same pattern as the other two, so that we would suspect the same killer—but he had to lock his door from the inside. Then he hid the key behind a fireplace tile to make it look as if the murderer had taken it, and opened a window to its full extent. If the hidden key was ever found, we would have wondered, as we did, why the murderer chose to lock the door from the inside, hide the key in the room and escape via the window, but we would still have believed there was a murderer. That was all that mattered to Negus. Whereas if the window was shut and by some chance the key was found, we would draw the only possible conclusion: that Richard Negus had taken his own life. He couldn’t risk our arriving at that conclusion—do you see? If we did, then the framing of Nancy Ducane for all three deaths would fail. We would be more likely to assume that Negus killed Harriet Sippel and Ida Gransbury before killing himself.”
“Yes,” said Jennie. “I think you are right.”
“The different positioning of the cufflink . . .” Poirot murmured before raising his eyebrows at me, indicating that he wished me to continue.
I said, “The cufflink was close to Negus’s throat because his death convulsions from the poison caused his mouth to open. He had carefully positioned himself in a straight line on the floor and placed the cufflink between his lips, but it fell to the back of his mouth. Unlike Harriet Sippel and Ida Gransbury, Richard Negus did not have a killer present when he died, and so the cufflink could not be carefully positioned in the agreed place.”
“Mademoiselle Jennie, you believe that Mr. Negus would swallow the poison, lie down and die without first attempting to discover why you had failed to arrive at the hotel?” Poirot asked her.
“I did not think he would, until I read of his death in the newspaper.”
“Ah.” Poirot’s expression was unreadable.
“For so long, Richard had been expecting to die on that Thursday night, looking forward to the end of his guilt and torment after so many years,” said Jennie. “I believe that all he wanted, once he arrived at the Bloxham, was for it to be over for him, and so, when I did not arrive to kill him as planned, he did it himself.”
“Thank you, mademoiselle.” Poirot rose to his feet. He wobbled a little to find his balance after so long in a seated position.
“What will happen to me, Monsieur Poirot?”
“Please stay here in this house until I or Mr. Catchpool return with more information. If you make the mistake of running away a second time, things will go very badly for you.”
“As they will if I stay put,” said Jennie. There was a blank, faraway look in her eyes. “It’s all right, Mr. Catchpool, you needn’t be sorry for me. I am prepared.”
Her words, no doubt intended to reassure me, filled me with dread. She had the manner of one who had looked into the future and seen terrible events contained within it. Whatever they were, I knew that I was not prepared and did not wish to be.