Read The Monogram Murders Online
Authors: Sophie Hannah
once I had reassured you on this point, did you
confide in me.
But I had already told you that I had
a friend at Scotland Yard.
You spoke to me not
because you believed me to be powerless to arrest a
murderer,
but because you knew perfectly well that I
had influence with the police
—because you wished
to see Nancy Ducane framed and hanged for murder!”
“I wish
no such thing
!” Jennie turned her tear-
streaked face to me. “Please, stop him!”
“I will stop when I am ready,” said Poirot. “You
were a regular visitor to Pleasant’s Coffee House,
mademoiselle. The waitresses have said so. They talk
about their customers a great deal in their absence. I
expect you heard them speak about me: the fussy
European gentleman with the mustache who used to
be a policeman on the Continent—and my friend
Catchpool here, from Scotland Yard. You heard them
say that I dine at Pleasant’s every Thursday evening at
half past seven precisely. Oh, yes, mademoiselle, you
knew where to find me, and you knew that Hercule
Poirot would be perfect for your devious purposes!
You arrived at the coffee house in an apparent state of
terror, but it was all a lie, an act! You stared out of the
window for a long time, as if fearful of someone in
pursuit, but
you cannot have seen anything out of
that window except the reflection of the room that
you were in
. And one of the waitresses, she saw your
eyes reflected and saw that you were watching her,
not the street. You were calculating, were you not?
‘Will anyone suspect that I am feigning my state of
distress? Will that sharp-eyed waitress guess the truth
and prevent my plan from being successful?’ ”
I rose to my feet. “Poirot, I don’t doubt that you’re
right, but you can’t simply go on at the poor woman
without allowing her to say a word in her defense.”
“Be quiet, Catchpool. Have I not just explained to
you that Miss Hobbs is excellent at creating an
appearance of great unhappiness while, underneath,
her true self is composed and calculating?”
“You are a cold-hearted man!” Jennie wailed.
“
Au contraire, mademoiselle.
In due course you
will have your turn to speak, you may rest assured,
but first I have another question for you. You said to
me, ‘Oh, please let no one open their mouths!’ How
did you know that Nancy Ducane, after killing her
three victims, had placed cufflinks in their mouths? It
seems to me odd that you should know this. Did Mrs.
Ducane threaten that it would happen? I can imagine a
murderer threatening violence in order to scare—‘If I
catch you, I will cut your throat,’ or something of that
nature—but I cannot imagine a killer saying, ‘After I
have murdered you, I intend to place a monogrammed
cufflink in your mouth.’ I cannot imagine any person
saying that, and I am a man of considerable
imagination!
“And—pardon
me!—one
final
observation,
mademoiselle. Whatever guilt was yours for the tragic
fate of Patrick and Frances Ive, three people were as
guilty as you if not more so: Harriet Sippel, Ida
Gransbury and Richard Negus. They were the people
who believed your lie and turned the whole village
against the Reverend Ive and his wife. Now, at
Pleasant’s you said to me, ‘Once I am dead, justice
will have been done, finally,’ and you placed the
stress upon the ‘I’: ‘once
I
am dead.’ This indicates to
me that you knew that Harriet Sippel, Ida Gransbury
and Richard Negus were already dead. But if I look at
all the evidence as it has been presented to me,
the
three murders at the Bloxham Hotel might not yet
have been committed.
”
“Stop, please,
stop!
” Jennie cried, weeping.
“In a moment, with pleasure. Let me only say that it
was approximately a quarter to eight when you spoke
those words to me—‘Once
I
am dead, justice will
have been done, finally’—and yet we know that the
three Bloxham murders were only discovered by the
hotel’s staff after ten minutes past eight. Yet somehow
you, Jennie Hobbs, had advance knowledge of these
murders. How?”
“If you will only stop accusing me, I shall tell you
everything! I’ve been so desperate. Having to keep it
all secret and lie constantly—it was a torment. I can’t
bear it any longer!”
“
Bon,
” said Poirot quietly. He sounded suddenly
kinder. “You have had a severe shock today, have you
not? Perhaps you will now see that you cannot
deceive Poirot?”
“I do see. Let me tell you the story, from the
beginning. It will be such a relief to be able to tell the
truth at last.”
Jennie spoke at length then, and neither I nor Poirot
interrupted her until she indicated that she had
finished. What follows is in her words, and is, I hope,
a faithful and complete account of what she said.
I DESTROYED THE LIFE of the only man I have ever
loved, and I destroyed my own life along with it.
I didn’t mean for things to take the turn they took. I
would never have imagined that a few silly, cruel
words spoken by me could lead to such disaster. I
ought to have considered and kept my mouth shut, but
I was feeling wounded and, in a moment of weakness,
I allowed spite to get the better of me.
I loved Patrick Ive with every bone and muscle in
my body. I tried not to. I was engaged to be married to
Sam Kidd when I first started working for Patrick—
as his bedder, at Saviour College in Cambridge,
where he studied. I liked Sam well enough, but my
heart belonged to Patrick within a few weeks of first
meeting him, and I knew that no amount of trying to
feel differently would change that. Patrick was
everything good that a person could be. He was fond
of me, but to him I was only a servant. Even after I
learned to speak like the daughter of a master of a
Cambridge college—like Frances Ive—I remained, in
Patrick’s eyes, a loyal servant and nothing more.
Of course I knew about him and Nancy Ducane. I
overheard some of his conversations with her that I
wasn’t supposed to. I knew how much he loved her,
and I couldn’t bear it. I had long ago accepted that he
belonged to Frances and not to me, but it was
intolerable to discover that he had fallen in love with
a woman who was not his wife and that that woman
was not me.
For a few fleeting seconds—no longer—I wanted
to punish him. To cause him grievous hurt of the kind
that he had caused me. So I made up a wicked lie
about him and, God forgive me, I told that lie to
Harriet Sippel. It comforted me for as long as I was
telling it: the idea that Patrick’s whispered words of
love for Nancy—words I had overheard more than
once—were not his but the late William Ducane’s,
conveyed from beyond the grave. Oh, I knew it was
nonsense, but when I told Harriet Sippel, for a few
seconds it felt true.
Then Harriet set to work, saying dreadful,
unforgivable things about Patrick all over the village
—and Ida and Richard helped her, which I never
understood. They must have known what a venomous
creature she had become; everyone in the village
knew. How could they turn on Patrick and ally
themselves with her? Oh, I know the answer: it was
my fault. Richard and Ida knew that the rumor did not
come from Harriet in the first place but from a servant
girl who had always been loyal to Patrick and who
was seen as having no reason to lie.
I saw at once that my jealousy had led me to do a
terrible, heinous thing. I witnessed Patrick’s suffering
and desperately wanted to help him, and Frances—
but I didn’t see how I could! Harriet had
seen
Nancy
enter and leave the vicarage at night. So had Richard
Negus. If I had admitted to lying, I would have had to
offer another explanation for Nancy’s nocturnal visits
to Patrick. And it would not have taken Harriet long
to arrive at the correct explanation by her own
deductions.
The shameful truth is that I am a dreadful coward.
People like Richard Negus and Ida Gransbury—they
don’t mind what other people think of them if they
believe that right is on their side, but I
do
mind. I have
always cared about making a good impression. If I
had confessed to my lie, I would have been hated by
everybody in the village, and rightly so. I’m not a
strong person, Monsieur Poirot. I did nothing, said
nothing, because I was scared. Then Nancy, horrified
by the lie and by people’s believing it, came forward
and told the truth: that she and Patrick were in love
and had been meeting in secret, though nothing of a
carnal nature had taken place between them.
Nancy’s efforts on Patrick’s behalf only made
things worse for him. “Not only a charlatan who
defrauds parishioners and makes a mockery of his
Church, but also an adulterer”—that was what they
started to say. It became too much for Frances, who
took her own life. When Patrick found her, he knew he
would not be able to live with the guilt—after all, it
was his love for Nancy that had started the trouble.
He had failed in his duty to Frances. He, too, took his
own life.
The village doctor said that the two deaths were
accidents, but that was not true. They were both
suicide—another sin in the eyes of those as saintly as
Ida Gransbury, and those with an appetite for
punishing, like Harriet Sippel. Patrick and Frances
both left notes, you see. I found them and passed them
on to the doctor, Ambrose Flowerday. I think he must
have burned them. He said that he would not give
anybody further cause to condemn Patrick and
Frances. Dr. Flowerday was sickened by the way the
whole village had turned on them.
Patrick’s death broke my heart, and it has remained
broken since that day, Monsieur Poirot. I wanted to
die, but with Patrick gone, I felt that I needed to stay
alive, loving him and thinking well of him—as if my
doing so could ever make up for everybody else in
Great Holling believing him to be some sort of devil!
My only consolation was that I was not alone in
my misery. Richard Negus felt ashamed of the part he
had played. He alone among Patrick’s denigrators
changed his mind; when Nancy told her story, he saw
at once that the outlandish lie I had told was unlikely
to be true.
Before he moved to his brother’s home in Devon,
Richard sought me out and asked me directly. I
wanted to tell him that there was not a grain of truth in
the rumor I had started, but I didn’t dare, so I said
nothing. I sat mutely, as if my tongue had been cut out,
and Richard took my silence as an admission of guilt.
I left Great Holling shortly after he did. I went to
Sammy for help at first, but I couldn’t stay in
Cambridge—there were too many memories of
Patrick there—so I came to London. It was Sammy’s
idea. He found work here and, thanks to some people
he introduced me to, so did I. Sammy is devoted to me