‘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.
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 to 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