I wasn’t present that Thursday evening at the coffee house. My name was mentioned—Edward Catchpool, Poirot’s policeman friend from Scotland Yard, not much older than thirty (thirty-two, to be precise)—but I was not there. I have, nevertheless, decided to try to fill the gaps in my own experience in order make a written record of the Jennie story. Fortunately, I have the testimony of Hercule Poirot to help me, and there is no better 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.