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CHAPTER 1
Poirot is Accused

Hercule Poirot smiled to himself as his driver brought the motorcar to a stop with satisfying symmetry. As a lover of neatness and order, Poirot appreciated such perfect alignment with the entrance doors of Whitehaven Mansions where he lived. One could draw a straight line from the middle of the vehicle to the exact point where the doors met.

The luncheon from which he was returning had been très bon divertissement: the most excellent of food and company. He alighted, bestowed a warm thank-you upon his driver, and was about to go inside when he had a peculiar feeling that (this was how he put it to himself) something behind him was in need of his attention.

He expected, on turning, to observe nothing out of the ordinary. It was a mild day for February, but perhaps a light breeze had put a tremor in the air around him.

Poirot soon saw that the disturbance had not been caused by the weather, though the well-turned-out woman approaching at a great pace did, in spite of her fashionable pale blue coat and hat, resemble a force of nature. ‘She is the whirlwind most fierce,’ Poirot murmured to himself.

He disliked the hat. He had seen women in town wearing similar ones: minimal, without ornament, fitted close to the scalp like bathing caps made of cloth. A hat ought to have a brim or some manner of embellishment, thought Poirot. At least, it should do something more than cover the head. No doubt he would soon get used to these modern hats—and then, once he had, the fashion would change as it always did.

The blue-clad woman’s lips twitched and curled, though no sound came from her. It was as if she was rehearsing what she would say when she finally reached Poirot’s side. There was no doubt that he was her target. She looked determined to do something unpleasant to him as soon as she was close enough. He took a step back as she marched towards him in what he could only think of as a stampede—one consisting of nothing and nobody but herself.

Her hair was dark brown and lustrous. When she came to an abrupt halt directly in front of him, Poirot saw that she was not as young as she had looked from a distance. No, this woman was more than fifty years old. She was perhaps sixty. A lady in her middle age, expert at concealing the lines on her face. Her eyes were a striking blue, neither light nor dark.

‘You are Hercule Poirot, are you not?’ she said in the loudest of whispers. Poirot noted that she wished to convey anger but without being overheard, though there was nobody nearby.

‘Oui, madame. I am he.’

‘How dare you? How dare you send me such a letter?’

‘Madame, pardon me, but I do not believe we know one another.’

‘Don’t act the part of the innocent with me! I am Sylvia Rule. As you know perfectly well.’

‘Now I know, because you have told me. A moment ago, I did not know. You referred to a letter—’

‘Will you force me to repeat your slander of me in a public place? Very well, then, I shall. I received a letter this morning—a most disgusting and objectionable letter, signed by you.’ She stabbed the air with a forefinger that would have poked Poirot in the chest had he not hopped to one side to avoid it.

‘Non, madame—’ he tried to protest, but his attempt at denial was swiftly demolished.

‘In this travesty of a letter, you accused me of murder. Murder! Me! Sylvia Rule! You claimed that you could prove my guilt, and you advised me to go at once to the police and confess to my crime. How dare you? You cannot prove anything against me, for the simple reason that I am innocent. I have not killed anybody. I am the least violently inclined person I have ever met. And I have never heard of a Barnabas Pandy!’

‘A Barnabas—’

‘It is monstrous that you accuse me, of all people! Simply monstrous. I shall not stand for it. I have a good mind to go to my solicitor about this, except I don’t want him to know I have been so defamed. Perhaps I shall go to the police. The slur I have suffered! The insult! A woman of my standing in the world!’

Sylvia Rule went on in this manner for some time. There was a lot of hiss and fizz in her agitated whispering. She made Poirot think of the loud, turbulent waterfalls he had encountered on his travels: impressive to watch, but mainly alarming on account of their relentlessness. The flow never stopped.

As soon as he could make himself heard, he said, ‘Madame, please accept my assurance that I have written no such letter. If you have received one, it was not sent by me. I too have never heard of Barnabas Pandy. That is the name of the man you are accused of murdering, by whoever wrote the letter?’

‘You wrote it, and do not provoke me further by pretending you didn’t. Eustace put you up to it, didn’t he? You both know that I have killed nobody, that I am as blameless as it is possible for a person to be! You and Eustace have hatched a plan together to send me out of my wits! This is exactly the sort of thing he would do, and no doubt he will claim later that it was all a joke.’

‘I know of no Eustace, madame.’ Poirot continued to make his best effort, though it was plain that nothing he said made the slightest bit of difference to Sylvia Rule.

‘He thinks he’s so clever—quite the cleverest man in England!—with that disgusting smirk that never leaves his appalling face. How much did he pay you? I know it must have been his idea. And you did his dirty work. You, the famed Hercule Poirot, who are trusted by our loyal and hardworking police. You are a fraud! How could you? Slandering a woman of my good character! Eustace would do anything to defeat me. Anything! Whatever he has told you about me, it’s a lie!’

If she had been willing to listen, Poirot might have told her that he would be unlikely to cooperate with any man who considered himself to be the cleverest man in England for as long as he, Hercule Poirot, resided in London.

‘Please show me this letter you received, madame.’

‘Do you think I kept it? It made me ill to hold it in my hand! I tore it into a dozen pieces and tossed it on the fire. I should like to toss Eustace on a fire! What a pity such actions are against the law. All I can say is that whoever made that particular law must never have met Eustace. If you ever traduce me in this way again, I shall go straight to Scotland Yard—not to confess to anything, for I am entirely innocent, but to accuse you, M. Poirot!’

Before Poirot could formulate a suitable response, Sylvia Rule had turned and marched away.

He did not call her back. He stood for a few seconds, shaking his head slowly. As he mounted the steps to his building, he muttered to himself, ‘If she is the least violently inclined person, then I do not wish to meet the most.’

Inside his spacious and well-appointed flat, his valet awaited him. George’s rather wooden smile turned to an expression of consternation when he saw Poirot’s face.

‘Are you quite well, sir?’

‘Non. I am perplexed, Georges. Tell me, as one who knows much about the upper echelons of English society … do you know a Sylvia Rule?’

‘By reputation only, sir. She is the widow of the late Clarence Rule. Extremely well connected. I believe she sits on the boards of various charities.’

‘What about Barnabas Pandy?’

George shook his head. ‘That name is not familiar to me. London society is my area of special knowledge, sir. If Mr Pandy lives elsewhere—’

‘I do not know where he lives. I do not know if he lives, or if he was, perhaps, murdered. Vraiment, I could not know less about Barnabas Pandy than I do presently—that would be an impossibility! But do not try, Georges, to tell this to Sylvia Rule, who imagines that I know all about him! She believes I wrote a letter accusing her of his murder, a letter I now deny having written. I did not write the letter. I have sent no communication of any kind to Mrs Sylvia Rule.’

Poirot removed his hat and coat with less care than he usually took, and handed both to George. ‘It is not a pleasant thing, to be accused of something one has not done. One ought to be able to brush the untruths aside, but somehow they take hold of the mind and cause a spectral form of guilt—like a ghost in the head, or in the conscience! Someone is certain that you have done this terrible thing, and so you start to feel as if you have, even though you know you have not. I begin to understand, Georges, why people confess to crimes of which they are innocent.’

George looked doubtful, as he frequently did. English discretion, Poirot had observed, had an outward appearance that suggested doubt. Many of the politest English men and women he had met over the years looked as if they had been ordered to disbelieve everything that was said to them.

‘Would you like a drink, sir? A sirop de menthe, if I might be permitted to make a suggestion?’

‘Oui. That is an excellent idea.’

‘I should also mention, sir, that you have a visitor waiting to see you. Am I to bring your drink immediately, and ask him to wait a little longer?’

‘A visitor?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘What is his name? Is it Eustace?’

‘No, sir. It’s a Mr John McCrodden.’

‘Ah! That is a relief. No Eustace. I can cherish the hope that the nightmare of Madame Rule and her Eustace has departed and will not return to Hercule Poirot! Did Monsieur McCrodden state the nature of his business?’

‘No, sir. Though I should warn you, he seemed … displeased.’

Poirot allowed a small sigh to escape his lips. After his more than satisfactory luncheon, the afternoon was taking a disappointing turn. Still, John McCrodden was unlikely to be as vexatious as Sylvia Rule.

‘I shall postpone the pleasure of sirop de menthe and see Monsieur McCrodden first,’ Poirot told George. ‘His name is familiar.’

‘You might be thinking of the solicitor Rowland McCrodden, sir?’

‘Mais oui, bien sûr. Rowland Rope, that dear friend of the hangman—though you are too polite, Georges, to call him by the soubriquet that suits him so well. The gallows, they are not allowed by Rowland Rope to have a moment’s rest.’

‘He has been instrumental in bringing several criminals to justice, sir,’ agreed George, with his customary tact.

‘Perhaps John McCrodden is a relation,’ said Poirot. ‘Allow me to settle myself and then you may bring him in.’

As it transpired, George was prevented from bringing in John McCrodden by McCrodden’s determination to stride into the room without help or introduction. He overtook the valet and positioned himself in the middle of the carpet where he stopped as if frozen in the manner of one sent to play the part of a statue.

‘Please, monsieur, you may sit down,’ Poirot said with a smile.

‘No, thank you,’ said McCrodden. His tone was one of contemptuous detachment.

He was forty years old or thereabouts, Poirot guessed. He had the kind of handsome face that one rarely encountered apart from in works of art. His features might have been chiselled by a master craftsman. Poirot found it difficult to reconcile the face with the clothes, which were shabby and showed patches of dirt. Was he in the habit of sleeping on park benches? Did he have recourse to the usual domestic amenities? Poirot wondered if McCrodden had sought to cancel out the advantages that nature had bestowed upon him—the large green eyes and the golden hair—by making himself look as repellent as possible.

McCrodden glared down at Poirot. ‘I received your letter,’ he said. ‘It arrived this morning.’

‘I’m afraid I must contradict you, monsieur. I have sent you no letter.’

There was a long, uneasy silence. Poirot did not wish to leap to any hasty conclusions, but he feared he knew the direction the conversation was about to take. But it could not be! How could it be? Only in his dreams had he encountered this sensation before: the doom-laden knowledge that one is trapped in a predicament that makes no sense and will never make sense, no matter what one does.

‘What did it say, this letter that you received?’ he asked.

‘You ought to know, since you wrote it,’ said John McCrodden. ‘You accused me of murdering a man named Barnabas Pandy.’