LITMIR.BIZ

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I’ve got to know Annabel rather well over the years. I’m afraid, M. Poirot, that therein lies a tale, as they say. I proposed to Annabel some years ago. Marriage, you know. Quite head over heels, I was. Oh—I wasn’t married to my wife at the time,’ Dockerill clarified.

      ‘I am glad to hear, monsieur, that you did not make a bigamous proposal.’

      ‘What? Golly, no. I was a bachelor then. It was peculiar, actually. To this day I can’t make sense of it. Annabel seemed thrilled when I asked her, and then, almost immediately, she burst into tears and refused me. Women are nothing if not changeable, as every man knows—apart from Jane. She’s tremendously reliable. But still … saying no seemed to upset Annabel dreadfully—so much so, I suggested to her that changing her “no” to a “yes” might make her feel more chipper.’

      ‘What was her reaction?’

      ‘A firm “no”, I’m afraid. Ah, well, these things have a way of working out for the best, don’t they? Jane’s so wonderful with our boys. Annabel assured me when she rejected me that she would have been hopeless with them. I don’t know why she thought that, devoted to Timothy and Ivy as she is. And she truly is—like a second mother to them. I’ve wondered more than once if she was secretly afraid of having her own children—in case it weakened her motherly bond with her niece and nephew. Or maybe it was the sheer number of boys in my house that discouraged her. They are rather like a herd of beasts sometimes, and Annabel’s a quiet creature. But then, as I say, she dotes on young Timothy, who’s hardly the easiest of boys. He’s given us a spot of trouble over the years.’

      ‘What kind of trouble?’ asked Poirot.

      ‘Oh, nothing serious. I’m sure he’ll shake out all right. Like a lot of Turville boys, he can be rather self-congratulatory when no such congratulations are in order. Sometimes carries on as if school rules don’t apply to him. As if he’s above them. Jane blames it on …’ Hugo Dockerill broke off. ‘Whoops!’ he laughed. ‘Mustn’t be indiscreet.’

      ‘Nothing you tell me will go any further,’ Poirot assured him.

      ‘I was only going to say that as far as his mother is concerned, nothing is ever Timothy’s fault. Once when I felt I absolutely had to punish him for insubordination—Jane insisted—I got punished myself by Lenore Lavington. She didn’t speak to me for nearly six months. Not one word!’

      ‘Do you know a John McCrodden?’ Poirot asked.

      ‘No, I’m afraid not. Should I?’

      ‘What about Sylvia Rule?’

      ‘Yes, I know Sylvia.’ Hugo beamed, happy to be able to answer in the affirmative.

      Poirot was surprised. He had been wrong again. There was nothing he found more disconcerting. He had assumed that there were two pairs of two, he mused, like the two yellow squares and two pink squares in a slice of Church Window Cake: Sylvia Rule and John McCrodden, who did not know Barnabas Pandy and had never heard his name; and the other pair, the pair who had known Pandy or at least known of him, Annabel Treadway and Hugo Dockerill.

      Incorrectly, Poirot had assumed these pairs would remain neatly separate, as distinct as the yellow squares and the pink squares of the cake. Now, however, things were messy: Hugo Dockerill knew Sylvia Rule.

      ‘How do you know her?’

      ‘Her son Freddie is a pupil at Turville. He’s in the same year as Timothy Lavington.’

      ‘How old are these two boys?’

      ‘Twelve, I think. Both in the Second Form, at any rate, and both in my house. Very different boys. Goodness me, they couldn’t be more different! Timothy’s a popular, gregarious young fellow, always surrounded by a crowd of admirers. Poor Freddie is a loner. He doesn’t seem to have any friends. Spends a lot of time helping Jane, in fact. She’s tremendous. “No boy here will be lonely if I’ve got anything to do with it,” she often says. Means it, too!’

      Had Sylvia Rule lied about not knowing Pandy? Poirot wondered. Would a person necessarily know the name of their son’s school acquaintance’s great-grandfather, particularly when the surnames were different? Timothy’s last name was Lavington, not Pandy.

      ‘So Madame Rule has a son who is in the same house at school as the great-grandson of Barnabas Pandy,’ Poirot muttered, more to himself than to Hugo Dockerill.

      ‘Golly. Does she?’

      ‘That is what we have established, monsieur.’ Perhaps it was only family relationships that Hugo Dockerill struggled with. That and knowing where things were—things like important letters.

      Dockerill’s smile dimmed as he struggled to make sense of Poirot’s announcement. ‘A son who … the great-grandson of … Of course! Yes, she does. She does indeed!’

      This meant, thought Poirot, that it was not so simple as two pink squares and two yellow; it was not a case of pairs. Three recipients of the letter could be linked to Barnabas Pandy most definitively, and one could not—at least, not yet.

      Two questions interested Poirot: had Barnabas Pandy been murdered? And was John McCrodden the odd one out? Or was he also connected to the deceased Pandy in a manner that was not yet clear?

       CHAPTER 5

       A Letter with a Hole in it

      I am producing this account of what Poirot later decided to call ‘The Mystery of Three Quarters’ on a typewriter that has a faulty letter ‘e’. I don’t know if anyone will publish it, but if you are reading a printed version, all of the ‘e’s will be flawless. It is nevertheless significant that in the original typescript there is (or should I say for the benefit of future readers, was?) a small white gap in the middle of the horizontal bar of each letter ‘e’—an extraordinarily tiny hole in the black ink.

      Why is this important? To answer that question immediately would be to rush ahead of my own narrative. Let me explain.

      My name is Edward Catchpool and I’m an inspector with Scotland Yard. I’m also the person telling this story—not only now, but from the beginning, though I have been helped by several people to fill in those parts of the drama for which I was absent. I am especially grateful to the sharp eyes and the loquaciousness of Hercule Poirot, who, when it comes to detail, misses nothing. Thanks to him, I do not feel that I, in any meaningful sense, missed the events I have so far recounted, all of which occurred before I returned from Great Yarmouth.

      The less said about my infuriatingly tedious stay at the seaside, the better. The only relevant point is that I was compelled to return to London sooner than planned (you can imagine my relief) by the arrival of two telegrams. One was from Hercule Poirot, who said he urgently needed my help, and could I come back at once? The other, impossible to ignore, was from my superintendent at Scotland Yard, Nathaniel Bewes. This second telegram, though not from Poirot, was about him. Apparently he was ‘making life difficult’, and Bewes wanted me to stop him.

      I was touched by the Super’s quite unjustifiable confidence in my ability to alter the behaviour of my Belgian friend, and so, once back in Bewes’s office, I sat quietly and nodded sympathetically as he gave vent to his dismay. The essence of what was at stake seemed clear enough. Poirot believed the son of Rowland ‘Rope’ McCrodden to be guilty of murder, and had said so, and claimed to be able to prove it. The Super didn’t like this one bit because Rowland Rope was a chum of his, and he wanted me to persuade Poirot to think otherwise.

      Instead of paying attention to the Super’s loud and varied expressions of disgust, I was busy rehearsing my answer. Should I say, ‘There’s no point in my talking to Poirot about this—if he’s sure he’s right then he won’t listen to me’? No, that would make me sound both truculent

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