‘I am a consultant,’ said Hercule Poirot loftily.

This flavour of Harley Street encouraged Mrs Sutcliffe a great deal.

‘What do you want to talk to Jennifer about?’ she demanded.

‘Just to get her impressions of things,’ said Poirot. ‘She is observant—yes?’

‘I’m afraid I wouldn’t say that,’ said Mrs Sutcliffe. ‘She’s not what I call a noticing kind of child at all. I mean, she is always so matter of fact.’

‘It is better than making up things that have never happened at all,’ said Poirot.

‘Oh, Jennifer wouldn’t do that sort of thing,’ said Mrs Sutcliffe, with certainty. She got up, went to the window and called ‘Jennifer.’

‘I wish,’ she said, to Poirot, as she came back again, ‘that you’d try and get it into Jennifer’s head that her father and I are only doing our best for her.’

Jennifer came into the room with a sulky face and looked with deep suspicion at Hercule Poirot.

‘How do you do?’ said Poirot. ‘I am a very old friend of Julia Upjohn. She came to London to find me.’

‘Julia went to London?’ said Jennifer, slightly surprised. ‘Why?’

‘To ask my advice,’ said Hercule Poirot.

Jennifer looked unbelieving.

‘I was able to give it to her,’ said Poirot. ‘She is now back at Meadowbank,’ he added.

‘So her Aunt Isabel didn’t take her away,’ said Jennifer, shooting an irritated look at her mother.

Poirot looked at Mrs Sutcliffe and for some reason, perhaps because she had been in the middle of counting the laundry when Poirot arrived and perhaps because of some unexplained compulsion, she got up and left the room.

‘It’s a bit hard,’ said Jennifer, ‘to be out of all that’s going on there. All this fuss! I told Mummy it was silly. After all, none of the pupils have been killed.’

‘Have you any ideas of your own about the murders?’ asked Poirot.

Jennifer shook her head. ‘Someone who’s batty?’ she offered. She added thoughtfully, ‘I suppose Miss Bulstrode will have to get some new mistresses now.’

‘It seems possible, yes,’ said Poirot. He went on, ‘I am interested, Mademoiselle Jennifer, in the woman who came and offered you a new racquet for your old one. Do you remember?’

‘I should think I do remember,’ said Jennifer. ‘I’ve never found out to this day who really sent it. It wasn’t Aunt Gina at all.’

‘What did this woman look like?’ said Poirot.

‘The one who brought the racquet?’ Jennifer half closed her eyes as though thinking. ‘Well, I don’t know. She had on a sort of fussy dress with a little cape, I think. Blue, and a floppy sort of hat.’

‘Yes?’ said Poirot. ‘I meant perhaps not so much her clothes as her face.’

‘A good deal of make-up, I think,’ said Jennifer vaguely. ‘A bit too much for the country, I mean, and fair hair. I think she was an American.’

‘Had you ever seen her before?’ asked Poirot.

‘Oh no,’ said Jennifer. ‘I don’t think she lived down there. She said she’d come down for a luncheon party or a cocktail party or something.’