The Mystery of Three Quarters: The New Hercule Poirot Mystery

‘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 seaside 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—’

‘Monsieur,’ said Poirot sternly. ‘To which letter are you referring?’

‘The one about … well, about old Barnabas Pandy,’ said Hugo Dockerill, beaming with renewed vitality now that the crucial name had been uttered. ‘I wouldn’t normally dare to suggest that the amazing Hercule Poirot might be wrong about something, but on this occasion … I’m afraid it wasn’t me. I thought that … well, if you could tell me what has led you to believe it was, maybe between us we could get this funny mess ironed out. As I say, I’m sure the misunderstanding is entirely my fault.’

‘You say it was not you, monsieur. What was not you?’

‘The person who murdered Barnabas Pandy,’ said Hugo Dockerill.

Having declared himself innocent of murder, Hugo Dockerill picked up an unused fork from the place setting opposite Poirot and helped himself to a chunk of Fee Spring’s Church Window Cake. Or perhaps it was Philippa the pilferer’s slice; Poirot could no longer remember which was which.

‘You don’t mind, do you?’ Dockerill said. ‘Shame for it to go to waste. Don’t tell my wife! She’s always complaining I’ve got the table manners of a guttersnipe. But we boys are a bit more robust when it comes to filling our bellies, eh?’

Poirot, aghast that anyone would find a half-eaten slice of cake tempting, made a tactfully non-specific noise. He permitted himself to reflect, briefly, upon similarity and difference. When many people do or say precisely the same thing, the effect is the opposite of what one might expect. Now two women and two men had come forward to communicate the same message: that they had received a letter signed in the name of Hercule Poirot and accusing them of the murder of Barnabas Pandy. Instead of pondering the similarities between these four encounters, Poirot found himself intrigued by the differences. He was now firmly of the view that if you wanted to see clearly how one person’s character diverged from that of another, the most efficient method was to place both in identical situations.

Sylvia Rule was egotistical and full of proud rage. Like John McCrodden, she was in the grip of a powerful obsession with a particular person. Both believed Poirot must have done the bidding of that person in writing the letters, be it Rowland ‘Rope’ McCrodden or the mysterious Eustace. John McCrodden’s anger, Poirot thought, was equal to Sylvia Rule’s but different: less explosive, more enduring. He would not forget, whereas she might if a new and more pressing drama occurred.

Of the four, Annabel Treadway was the hardest to fathom. She had not been angry at all, but she was withholding something. And afflicted, somehow.

Hugo Dockerill was the first and only letter-recipient to remain cheerful in the face of his predicament, and certainly the first to demonstrate a belief that all the world’s problems could be solved if only decent people sat down at a table together and set things straight. If he objected to being accused of murder, he concealed it well. He was still doing his best to split his face across the middle with a radiant smile, and muttering, between mouthfuls of Church Window Cake, about how sorry he was if anything he’d done had created the impression that he might be a killer.

‘Do not keep apologizing,’ Poirot told him. ‘You spoke of “old Barnabas Pandy” a moment ago. Why did you refer to him in that way?’