“I did, but you did not. You believed, as did our friend Signor Lazzari, that Mademoiselle Jennie was dead and that it was her blood on the floor. Alors, I wanted you to demand of yourself: a suitcase, a laundry cart on wheels—both of these are objects that could have been brought into room 402, right to the spot where the dead body was. Why, then, would a killer pull the body toward the door? He would not! She would not! The trail of blood going in the direction of the door was a hoax; its aim was to suggest to us that the body had been dragged out of the room, since it was not in the room. It was the small detail of verisimilitude, so important to lend credence to the murder scene.
“But for Hercule Poirot, it was a detail that allowed him to know what he already strongly suspected: that Jennie Hobbs had not been murdered in that room and neither had anybody else. I could imagine no method of removing a corpse that would necessitate the trail of blood smears going toward the door. No killer would take his victim’s body out into the public corridor of a hotel without first hiding it inside some sort of receptacle—a container. Every container I could think of could easily have been taken into the room, traveling toward the body rather than requiring the body to travel toward it. It was such simple logic, Catchpool. I was surprised you did not grasp this point at once.”
“Handy tip for you, Poirot,” I said. “Next time you’d like me to grasp something at once, open your mouth and tell me facts, whatever they are. Be straightforward about it. You’ll find it saves a lot of bother.”
He smiled. “Bien. From my good friend Catchpool, I shall endeavor to learn the comportement straightforward. I start immediately!” He produced an envelope from his pocket. “This arrived for me an hour ago. You might not welcome my interference in your personal affairs, Catchpool—you may think, ‘Poirot, he sticks in his oar where it is not wanted’—but this letter expresses gratitude for that very vice of mine that you find so intolerable.”
“If you’re referring to Fee Spring, she is not my ‘personal affairs’ and never will be,” I said, eyeing the missive in his hand. “Which poor stick’s private business have you meddled in now? And gratitude for what?”
“For bringing together two people who love each other very much.”
“Who is the letter from?”
Poirot smiled. “Dr. and Mrs. Ambrose Flowerday,” he said. And he handed it to me to read.
THE END
About the Author
SOPHIE HANNAH is the internationally bestselling author of nine psychological thrillers, which have been published in more than twenty countries and adapted for television. Sophie is an Honorary Fellow of Lucy Cavendish College, Cambridge.
Visit www.AuthorTracker.com for exclusive information on your favorite HarperCollins authors.
www.agathachristie.com
www.sophiehannah.com
Also by Sophie Hannah
Little Face
The Truth-Teller’s Lie
The Wrong Mother
The Dead Lie Down
The Cradle in the Grave
The Other Woman’s House
Kind of Cruel
Also by Agatha Christie
Mysteries
The Man in the Brown Suit
The Secret of Chimneys
The Seven Dials Mystery
The Mysterious Mr. Quin
The Sittaford Mystery
The Hound of Death
The Listerdale Mystery
Why Didn’t They Ask Evans?
Parker Pyne Investigates
Murder Is Easy
And Then There Were None
Towards Zero
Death Comes as the End
Sparkling Cyanide
Crooked House
They Came to Baghdad
Destination Unknown
Spider’s Web*
The Unexpected Guest*
Ordeal by Innocence
The Pale Horse
Endless Night
Passenger to Frankfurt
Problem at Pollensa Bay
While the Light Lasts
Poirot
The Mysterious Affair at Styles
The Murder on the Links
Poirot Investigates
The Murder of Roger Ackroyd
The Big Four
The Mystery of the Blue Train
Black Coffee*
Peril at End House
Lord Edgware Dies
Murder on the Orient Express
Three Act Tragedy
Death in the Clouds
The ABC Murders
Murder in Mesopotamia
Cards on the Table
Murder in the Mews
Dumb Witness
Death on the Nile
Appointment with Death
Hercule Poirot’s Christmas
Sad Cypress
One, Two, Buckle My Shoe
Evil under the Sun
Five Little Pigs
The Hollow
The Labours of Hercules
Taken at the Flood
Mrs. McGinty’s Dead
After the Funeral
Hickory Dickory Dock
Dead Man’s Folly
Cat Among the Pigeons
The Adventure of the Christmas Pudding
The Clocks
Third Girl
Hallowe’en Party
Elephants Can Remember
Poirot’s Early Cases
Curtain: Poirot’s Last Case
Marple
The Murder at the Vicarage
The Thirteen Problems
The Body in the Library
The Moving Finger
A Murder Is Announced
They Do It with Mirrors
A Pocket Full of Rye
4:50 from Paddington
The Mirror Crack’d from Side to Side
A Caribbean Mystery
At Bertram’s Hotel
Nemesis
Sleeping Murder
Miss Marple’s Final Cases
Tommy & Tuppence
The Secret Adversary
Partners in Crime
N or M?
By the Pricking of My Thumbs
Postern of Fate
Published as Mary Westmacott
Giant’s Bread
Unfinished Portrait
Absent in the Spring
The Rose and the Yew Tree
A Daughter’s a Daughter
The Burden
Memoirs
An Autobiography
Come, Tell Me How You Live
The Grand Tour
Plays and Stories
Akhnaton
The Mousetrap and Other Plays
The Floating Admiral†
Star Over Bethlehem
Hercule Poirot and the Greenshore Folly
* novelized by Charles Osborne
† contributor
Credits
Cover design by Mary Schuck
Author photograph by Philippa Gedge
Copyright
This book is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogue are drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
AGATHA CHRISTIE and POIROT are registered trademarks of Agatha Christie Limited.
THE MONOGRAM MURDERS. Copyright © 2014 by Agatha Christie Ltd. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this ebook on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
FIRST EDITION
EPUB Edition September 2014 ISBN 9780062297235
ISBN 9
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The Monogram Murders Page 30