‘Oh!’ Annabel Treadway gasped.
‘What is the matter?’ Poirot asked her. ‘Tell me. Do not be afraid.’
She looked terrified. ‘It’s not true,’ she whispered.
‘What is not true?’
‘He does exist.’
‘Monsieur Pandy? Barnabas Pandy?’
‘Yes. Well, he did exist. He’s dead, you see. Not murdered, though. He fell asleep and … I thought … it was not my intention to deceive you, M. Poirot. I should have made it clear straight away … I simply thought …’ Her eyes moved quickly from one part of the room to another. There was, Poirot sensed, great chaos in her mind at that moment.
‘You have not deceived me,’ he assured her. ‘Madame Rule and Monsieur McCrodden were adamant that they knew no one by the name of Barnabas Pandy, and neither do I. I made the assumption that the same must be true of you. Now, please tell me all that you know about Monsieur Pandy. He is dead, you say?’
‘Yes. He died in December of last year. Three months ago.’
‘And you say it was not murder—which means you know how he died?’
‘Of course I do. I was there. We lived together in the same house.’
‘You … you lived together?’ This Poirot had not been expecting.
‘Yes, since I was seven years old,’ she said. ‘Barnabas Pandy was my grandfather.’
‘He was more like a parent to me than a grandparent,’ Annabel Treadway told Poirot, once he had succeeded in convincing her that he was not angry with her for misleading him. ‘My mother and father died when I was seven, and Grandy—that’s what I called him—took us in, Lenore and me. Lenore has also been like a parent to me, in a way. I don’t know what I’d do without her. Grandy was terribly old. It’s sad when they leave us, of course, but old people do die, don’t they? Naturally, when it’s their time.’
The contrast between her matter-of-fact tone and the air of sadness that seemed to cling to her led Poirot to conclude that, whatever was making her unhappy, it was not her grandfather’s death.
Then her manner changed. There was a flash of something in her eyes as she said fiercely, ‘People mind so much less when old people die, which is dreadfully unfair! “He had a good innings,” they say, as if that makes it tolerable, whereas when a child dies everyone knows it’s the worst kind of tragedy. I believe every death is a tragedy! Don’t you think it’s unfair, M. Poirot?’
The word ‘tragedy’ seemed to echo in the air. If Poirot had been ordered to pick one word to describe the essence of the woman before him, he would have chosen that one. It was almost a relief to hear it spoken aloud.
When he didn’t immediately answer her question, Annabel Treadway blushed and said, ‘When I spoke of old people dying and nobody caring as much as … well, I didn’t mean … I was talking about really very old people. Grandy was ninety-four, which I’m sure is much older than … I hope I have caused no offence.’
Thus, reflected Poirot, did some reassurances cause greater alarm than the original remark upon which they sought to improve. Somewhat dishonestly, he told Annabel Treadway that he was not offended. ‘How did you destroy the letter?’ he asked her.
She looked down at her knees.
‘You would prefer not to tell me?’
‘Being accused of murder—not by you, but definitely by somebody—makes one a little nervous of revealing anything.’
‘I understand. All the same, I should like to know how you disposed of it.’
She frowned. ‘Alors!’ thought Poirot to himself as the crease between her eyebrows deepened. That was one mystery solved at least. Frowning was a habit of hers and had been for many years. The groove in her forehead was the proof.
‘You’ll think me silly and superstitious if I tell you,’ she said, raising her handkerchief to just below her nose. She was not crying, but perhaps expected to be soon. ‘I took a pen and scored thick black lines through every word, so that nothing of what was written remained visible. I did it to your name too, M. Poirot. Every single word! Then I tore it up and burned the pieces.’
‘Three distinct methods of obliteration.’ Poirot smiled. ‘I am impressed. Madame Rule and Monsieur McCrodden, they were less thorough than you, mademoiselle. There is something else I should like to ask you. I sense you are unhappy, and perhaps afraid?’
‘I have nothing to be afraid of,’ she said quickly. ‘I’ve told you, I’m innocent. Oh, if only it were Lenore or Ivy accusing me, I would know how to convince them. I would simply say, “I swear on Hoppy’s life,” and they would know I was telling the truth. They already know, of course, that I did not kill Grandy.’
‘Who is Hoppy?’ asked Poirot.
‘Hopscotch. My dog. He’s the most darling creature. I would never swear on his life and then lie. You would love him, M. Poirot. It’s impossible not to love him.’ For the first time since arriving, Annabel Treadway smiled, and the thick layer of sadness in the room’s atmosphere lifted a little. ‘I must get back to him. You’ll think me foolish, but I miss him dreadfully. And I’m not afraid—truly. If the person who sent the letter wasn’t willing to put his name to it, then it’s not a serious accusation, is it? It’s a silly trick, that’s all it is, and I’m very glad to be able to see you and straighten it out. Now, I must go.’
‘Please, mademoiselle, do not leave yet. I would like to ask you more questions.’
‘But I must get back to Hoppy,’ Annabel Treadway insisted, rising to her feet. ‘He needs … and none of them can … When I’m not there, he … I’m so sorry. I hope whoever sent those letters causes you no further trouble. Thank you for seeing me. Good day, M. Poirot.’
‘Good day, mademoiselle,’ Poirot said to a room that was suddenly empty apart from himself and a lingering feeling of desolation.
CHAPTER 4
The Odd One Out?
The next morning felt peculiar to Hercule Poirot. By ten o’clock, no stranger had telephoned. Nobody had appeared at Whitehaven Mansions to accuse him of accusing them of the murder of Barnabas Pandy. He waited in until forty minutes after eleven (one never knew when a faulty alarm clock might cause an accusee to oversleep), then set off across town to Pleasant’s Coffee House.
Unofficially in charge at Pleasant’s was a young waitress by the name of Euphemia Spring. Everyone called her Fee for short. Poirot liked her enormously. She said the most unexpected things. Her flyaway hair defied gravity by refusing to lie flat against her head, though there was nothing floaty or flighty about her mind, which was always sharply in focus. She made the finest coffee in London, then did all she could to discourage customers from drinking it. Tea, she was fond of proclaiming, was a far superior beverage and beneficial to health, whereas coffee apparently led to sleepless nights and ruination of every sort.
Poirot continued to drink Fee’s excellent coffee in spite of her warnings and entreaties, and had noticed that on many subjects (other than the aforementioned) she had much wisdom to impart. One of her areas of expertise was Poirot’s friend and occasional helper Inspector Edward Catchpool—which was why he was here.
The coffee house was starting to fill with people. Moisture dripped down the insides of the windows. Fee was serving a gentleman on the other side of the room when Poirot walked in, but she waved at him with her left hand: an eloquent gesture that told him precisely where to sit and wait for her.
Poirot sat. He straightened the cutlery on the table in front of him as he always did, and tried not to look at the teapot collection that filled the high shelves on the walls. He found the sight of them unbearable: all angled differently and apparently at random. There was no logic to it. To be someone who cared about teapots, enough to collect so many, and yet not to see the need to point all the spouts in the same direction … Poirot had long suspected Fee of creating a deliberately haphazard arrangement solely to cause him distress. He had once, when the teapots were lined up in a more conventional fashion, remarked that one was positioned incorrectly. Each time he had come t
o Pleasant’s since that day, there had been no pattern at all. Fee Spring did not respond well to criticism.
She appeared by his side and slammed a plate down between his knife and fork. There was a slice of cake on it, one Poirot had not ordered. ‘I’ll be needing your help,’ she said, before he could ask her about Catchpool, ‘but you’ll have to eat up first.’
It was her famous Church Window Cake, so called because each slice comprised two yellow and two pink squares that were supposed to resemble the stained glass of a church window. Poirot found the name bothersome. Church windows were coloured, yes, but they were also transparent and made of glass. One might as well call it ‘Chess Board Cake’—that was what it brought to Poirot’s mind when he saw it: a chess board, albeit too small and in the wrong colours.
‘I telephoned to Scotland Yard this morning,’ he told Fee. ‘They say that Catchpool is at the seaside on holiday, with his mother. This did not sound to me likely.’
‘Eat,’ said Fee.
‘Oui, mais—’
‘But you want to know where Edward is. Why? Has something happened?’ She had started, in recent months, to refer to Catchpool as ‘Edward’, though never when he was present, Poirot noticed.
‘Do you know where he is?’ Poirot asked her.
‘Might do.’ Fee grinned. ‘I’ll gladly tell all’s I know, once you’ve said you’ll help me. Now, eat.’
Poirot sighed. ‘How will it help you if I eat a slice of your cake?’
Fee sat down beside him and rested both her elbows on the table. ‘It’s not my cake,’ she whispered, as if talking about something shameful. ‘Looks the same, tastes the same, but it isn’t mine. That’s the problem.’
‘I do not understand.’
‘Were you ever served by a girl here, name of Philippa—all bones, teeth like a horse?’
‘Non. She does not sound familiar.’
‘She wasn’t here long. I caught her pilfering food and had to have words. Not that she didn’t need feeding up, but I wasn’t having her taking food from plates of those who’d paid fair and square. I told her she was welcome to leftovers, but that weren’t good enough for her. Didn’t like being spoken to like a thief—thieves never do—and so she never came back after. Well, now she’s at the new coffee house, Kemble’s, near the wine merchants’ place on Oxford Street. They can keep her and good luck to ’em—but then customers start telling me she’s making my cake. I didn’t believe ’em at first. How could she know the recipe? Passed down from my great-granny, it were, to my granny, then my ma, then to me. I’d cut out my own tongue before I’d tell it to anyone outside the family, and I haven’t, to no one—certainly not to her. I’ve not written it down. Only way she could know’s if she’s secretly watched me making it … and when I thought carefully, I thought, yes, she might’ve. She’d have only needed to do it once if she’d paid attention, and I can’t swear she didn’t. All that time, the two of us together in a tiny kitchen …’
Fee pointed an accusatory finger, as if the kitchen of Pleasant’s were to blame. ‘Easy enough to look like she’s busy with somethin’ else. And she was a proper little sneak-about. Anyhow, I had to go and try it, didn’t I? And I think they’re right, those who’ve told me she’s making my cake. I think they’re dead right!’ Her eyes blazed with indignation.
‘What would you like me to do, mademoiselle?’
‘Haven’t I said? Haven’t I been saying? Eat that and tell me if I’m right or wrong. That’s hers, not mine. I shoved it in a coat pocket when she wasn’t looking. She never even knew I was in her coffee house, that’s how careful I was. I went in disguise—wore a proper costume!’
Poirot did not wish to eat a slice of cake that had been in anybody’s pocket. ‘I have not sampled your Church Window Cake for many months,’ he told Fee. ‘My memory of it is not strong enough to judge. Besides, one does not remember taste accurately—it is impossible.’
‘D’you think I don’t know that?’ said Fee impatiently. ‘I’ll give you a slice of mine next, won’t I? I’ll get it right now.’ She stood up. ‘Have a little bite of one, then the other. Then do it again, a little bite from each. Tell me if they couldn’t all come from the same slice.’
‘If I do this, you will tell me where is Catchpool?’
‘No.’
‘No?’
‘I said I’d tell you where Edward is if you’ll help me.’
‘And I have agreed to taste—’
‘The tasting’s not the helping,’ Fee said firmly. ‘That’ll come after.’
Hercule Poirot rarely allowed himself to be bent to the will of others, but to resist Fee Spring was a fool’s enterprise. He waited until she returned with another slice of Church Window Cake that looked identical to the first and then, obediently, sampled both. To be certain, he tasted three pieces from each one.
Fee watched him closely. Finally she could control herself no longer and demanded, ‘Well? Is it the same or not?’
‘I can taste no difference,’ Poirot told her. ‘None at all. But, mademoiselle, I am afraid that there is no statute that prevents one person from making the same cake as another, if she has observed with her own eyes—’
‘Oh, I’m not after using the law against her. All’s I want to know is if she thinks she’s stolen from me or not.’
‘I see,’ said Poirot. ‘You are interested not in the legal offence but in the moral one.’
‘I want you to go to her coffee house, order her cake, and then ask her about it. Ask where she got the recipe.’
‘What if she says, “It is the one used by Fee Spring of Pleasant’s”?’
‘Then I’ll go see her myself, and tell her what she doesn’t know: that the Spring family recipe’s not to be used by anyone else. If it’s an honest mistake, that’s how I’ll treat it.’
‘And what will you do if she answers more evasively?’ Poirot asked. ‘Or if she says boldly that she got the recipe for her cake from somewhere else, and you do not believe her?’
Fee smiled and narrowed her eyes. ‘Oh, I’ll soon have her regretting it,’ she said, then quickly added, ‘Not in a way as’d make you wish you hadn’t helped me, mind.’
‘I am glad to hear that, mademoiselle. If you will allow Poirot to offer you a piece of wise advice: the pursuit of revenge is rarely a good idea.’
‘Neither’s sitting around twiddling your thumbs when folks have made off with what’s rightfully yours,’ said Fee decisively. ‘What I want from you’s the help I’ve asked for, not advice I didn’t asked for.’
‘Je comprends,’ said Poirot.
‘Good.’
‘Please. Where is Catchpool?’
Fee grinned. ‘At the seaside with his ma, just like Scotland Yard said.’
Poirot’s face assumed a stern look. ‘I see that I have been tricked,’ he said.
‘Hardly! You didn’t believe it when they told you. Now I’m telling you it’s true, so’s you know. That’s where he is. Great Yarmouth, out east.’
‘As I said before … this does not sound likely.’
‘He didn’t want to go but he had to, to get the old girl to leave him be. She’d found another perfect wife for him.’
‘Ah!’ Poirot was familiar with Catchpool’s mother’s ambition to see her son settled with a nice young lady.
‘And this one had so much going in her favour—a right looker, Edward said she was, and from a respectable family. Kind, too, and cultivated. He found it harder than usual to say no.’
‘To his mother? Or did the jolie femme make to him the proposal of marriage?’
Fee laughed. ‘No—it was his ma’s notion and that was all. It knocked the stuffing out of the old girl when he said he wasn’t interested. She must’ve thought, “If he won’t be persuaded, even for this one …” Edward decided he had to do something to lift her spirits, and she loves Great Yarmouth, so that’s where they are.’
‘It is February,’ said Poirot crossly. ‘To go to an English seas
ide resort in February is to invite misery, is it not?’ What a dismal time Catchpool must be having, he thought. He ought to return to London at once so that Poirot could discuss with him the matter of Barnabas Pandy.
‘Excuse me, M. Poirot? M. Hercule Poirot?’ A tentative voice interrupted his thoughts. He turned to find a smartly attired man beaming at him as if suffused with the greatest joy.
‘Hercule Poirot, c’est moi,’ he confirmed.
The man extended his hand. ‘How delightful to meet you,’ he said. ‘Your reputation is formidable. It’s hard to judge what one ought to say to such a great man. I’m Dockerill—Hugo Dockerill.’
Fee eyed the new arrival suspiciously. ‘I’ll leave you to it, then,’ she said. ‘Don’t forget you’ve promised to help me,’ she warned Poirot before leaving the table. He assured her that he would not forget, then invited the smiling man to sit.
Hugo Dockerill was almost completely bald, though not yet fifty, Poirot guessed.
‘I’m terribly sorry to accost you in this manner,’ Dockerill said, sounding jolly and not at all regretful. ‘Your valet told me I might find you here. He encouraged me to make an appointment for later this afternoon, but I’m awfully anxious to clear up the misunderstanding. So I told him I’d rather seek you out sooner, and when I explained to him what it was all about, he seemed to think that you might want to see me rather urgently—so here I am!’ He guffawed loudly, as if he’d told a hilarious anecdote.
‘Misunderstanding?’ Poirot said. He was starting to wonder if perhaps a fourth letter … but no, how could that be? Would any person, even the most enthusiastic and optimistic, beam with delight in such circumstances?
‘Yes. I received your letter two days ago, and … well, I’m sure the fault is entirely mine and I’d hate you to think I’m levelling any sort of criticism at you—I’m absolutely not,’ Hugo Dockerill chattered on. ‘In fact, I’m a keen admirer of your work, from what I’ve heard of it, but … well, I must have unwittingly done something that’s given you the wrong idea. For that, I apologize. I do sometimes get into a bit of a muddle. You’d only need to ask my wife Jane—she’d tell you. I planned to track you down at once, after I got your letter, but I misplaced it almost immediately—’
The Mystery of Three Quarters Page 3