The Monogram Murders Read Online Free Page A

She’d said all this to me
    herself. I don’t know quite how a person manages to
    look as if he hasn’t eaten, incidentally. Perhaps I was
    leaner than I had been at breakfast that morning.
    She inspected me from a variety of angles and
    offered me everything she could think of that might set
    me right, starting with the obvious remedies one
    offers in such situations—food, drink, a friendly ear.
    Once I’d rejected all three as graciously as I could,
    she proceeded to more outlandish suggestions: a
    pillow stuffed with herbs, something foul smelling but
    apparently beneficial from a dark blue bottle that I
    must put in my bath water.
    I thanked her and refused. She cast her eyes
    frantically around the drawing room, looking for any
    unlikely object she might foist upon me with the
    promise that it would solve all my problems.
    Now, more likely than not, she was whispering to
    Poirot that he must press me to accept the foul-
    smelling blue bottle or the herb pillow.
    Poirot is normally back from Pleasant’s and
    reading in the drawing room by nine o’clock on a
    Thursday evening. I had returned from the Bloxham
    Hotel at a quarter past nine, determined not to think
    about what I had encountered there, and very much
    looking forward to finding Poirot in his favorite chair
    so that we could talk about amusing trivialities as we
    so often did.
    He wasn’t there. His absence made me feel
    strangely remote from everything, as if the ground had
    fallen away beneath my feet. Poirot is a regular sort
    of person who does not like to vary his routines—“It
    is the unchanging daily routine, Catchpool, that makes
    for the restful mind” he had told me more than once—
    and yet he was a full quarter of an hour late.
    When I heard the front door at half past nine, I
    hoped it was him, but it was Blanche Unsworth. I
    nearly let out a groan. If you’re worried about
    yourself, the last thing you want is the company of
    somebody whose chief pastime is fussing over
    nothing.
    I was afraid I might not be able to persuade myself
    to return to the Bloxham Hotel the following day, and
    I knew that I had to. That was what I was trying not to
    think about.
    “And now,” I reflected, “Poirot is here at last, and
    he will be worried about me as well because Blanche
    Unsworth has told him he must be.” I decided I would
    be better off with neither of them around. If there was
    no possibility of talking about something easy and
    entertaining, I preferred not to talk at all.
    Poirot appeared in the drawing room, still wearing
    his hat and coat, and closed the door behind him. I
    expected a barrage of questions from him, but instead
    he said with an air of distraction, “It is late. I walk
    and walk around the streets, looking, and I achieve
    nothing except to make myself late.”
    He was worried, all right, but not about me and
    whether I had eaten or was going to eat. It was a huge
    relief. “Looking?” I asked.
    “ Oui. For a woman, Jennie, whom I very much
    hope is still alive and not murdered.”
    “Murdered?” I had that sense of the ground
    dropping away again. I knew Poirot was a famous
    detective. He had told me about some of the cases
    he’d solved. Still, he was supposed to be having a
    break from all that, and I could have done without his
    producing that particular word at that moment, in such
    a portentous fashion.
    “What does she look like, this Jennie?” I asked.
    “Describe her. I might have seen her. Especially if
    she’s been murdered. I’ve seen two murdered women
    tonight, actually, and one man, so you might be in
    luck. The man didn’t look as if he was likely to be
    called Jennie, but as for the other two—”
    “ Attendez, mon ami, ” Poirot’s calm voice cut
    through my desperate ramblings. He took off his hat
    and began to unbutton his coat. “So Madame Blanche,
    she is correct—you are troubled? Ah, but how did I
    not see this straight away? You are pale. My thoughts,
    they were elsewhere.