The Monogram Murders Read Online Free

witness.
    I am writing this for the benefit of nobody but
    myself. Once my account is complete, I shall read and
    reread it until I am able to cast my eyes over the
    words without feeling the shock that I feel now as I
    write them—until “How can this have happened?”
    gives way to “Yes, this is what happened.”
    At some point I shall have to think of something
    better to call it than “The Jennie Story.” It’s not much
    of a title.
    I first met Hercule Poirot six weeks before the
    Thursday evening I have described, when he took a
    room in a London lodging house that belongs to Mrs.
    Blanche Unsworth. It is a spacious, impeccably clean
    building with a rather severe square façade and an
    interior that could not be more feminine; there are
    flounces and frills and trims everywhere. I sometimes
    fear that I will leave for work one day and find that a
    lavender-colored fringe from some item in the
    drawing room has somehow attached itself to my
    elbow or my shoe.
    Unlike me, Poirot is not a permanent fixture in the
    house but a temporary visitor. “I will enjoy one month
    at least of restful inactivity,” he told me on the first
    night that he appeared. He said it with great resolve,
    as if he imagined I might try to stop him. “My mind, it
    grows too busy,” he explained. “The rushing of the
    many thoughts . . . Here I believe they will slow
    down.”
    I asked where he lived, expecting the answer
    “France”; I found out a little later that he is Belgian,
    not French. In response to my question, he walked
    over to the window, pulled the lace curtain to one
    side and pointed at a wide, elegant building that was
    at most three hundred yards away. “You live there ?” I
    said. I thought it must be a joke.
    “ Oui. I do not wish to be far from my home,”
    Poirot explained. “It is most pleasing to me that I am
    able to see it: the beautiful view!” He gazed at the
    apartment house with pride, and for a few moments I
    wondered if he had forgotten I was there. Then he
    said, “Travel is a wonderful thing. It is stimulating,
    but not restful. Yet if I do not take myself away
    somewhere, there will be no vacances for the mind of
    Poirot! Disturbance will arrive in one form or
    another. At home one is too easily found. A friend or a
    stranger will come with a matter of great importance
    comme toujours —it is always of the greatest
    importance!—and the little gray cells will once more
    be busy and unable to conserve their energy. So,
    Poirot, he is said to have left London for a while, and
    meanwhile he takes his rest in a place he knows well,
    protected from the interruption.”
    He said all this, and I nodded along as if it made
    perfect sense, wondering if people grow ever more
    peculiar as they age.
    Mrs. Unsworth never cooks dinner on a Thursday
    evening—that’s her night for visiting her late
    husband’s sister—and this was how Poirot came to
    discover Pleasant’s Coffee House. He told me he
    could not risk being seen in any of his usual haunts
    while he was supposed to be out of town, and asked if
    I could recommend “a place where a person like you
    might go, mon ami— but where the food is excellent.”
    I told him about Pleasant’s: cramped, a little
    eccentric, but most people who tried it once went
    back again and again.
    On this particular Thursday evening—the night of
    Poirot’s encounter with Jennie—he arrived home at
    ten past ten, much later than usual. I was in the
    drawing room, sitting close to the fire but unable to
    warm myself up. I heard Blanche Unsworth
    whispering to Poirot seconds after I heard the front
    door open and shut; she must have been waiting for
    him in the hall.
    I couldn’t hear what she was saying, but I could
    guess: she was anxious, and I was the cause of her
    anxiety. She had arrived back from her sister-in-law’s
    house at half past nine and decided that something
    was wrong with me. I looked a fright—as if I hadn’t
    eaten and wouldn’t sleep.