“Oui. I do not wish to be far from my home,” Poirot explained. “It is most pleasing to me that I am able to see it: the beautiful view!” He gazed at the apartment house with pride, and for a few moments I wondered if he had forgotten I was there. Then he said, “Travel is a wonderful thing. It is stimulating, but not restful. Yet if I do not take myself away somewhere, there will be no vacances for the mind of Poirot! Disturbance will arrive in one form or another. At home one is too easily found. A friend or a stranger will come with a matter of great importance comme toujours—it is always of the greatest importance!—and the little gray cells will once more be busy and unable to conserve their energy. So, Poirot, he is said to have left London for a while, and meanwhile he takes his rest in a place he knows well, protected from the interruption.”

He said all this, and I nodded along as if it made perfect sense, wondering if people grow ever more peculiar as they age.

Mrs. Unsworth never cooks dinner on a Thursday evening—that’s her night for visiting her late husband’s sister—and this was how Poirot came to discover Pleasant’s Coffee House. He told me he could not risk being seen in any of his usual haunts while he was supposed to be out of town, and asked if I could recommend “a place where a person like you might go, mon ami—but where the food is excellent.” I told him about Pleasant’s: cramped, a little eccentric, but most people who tried it once went back again and again.

On this particular Thursday evening—the night of Poirot’s encounter with Jennie—he arrived home at ten past ten, much later than usual. I was in the drawing room, sitting close to the fire but unable to warm myself up. I heard Blanche Unsworth whispering to Poirot seconds after I heard the front door open and shut; she must have been waiting for him in the hall.

I couldn’t hear what she was saying, but I could guess: she was anxious, and I was the cause of her anxiety. She had arrived back from her sister-in-law’s house at half past nine and decided that something was wrong with me. I looked a fright—as if I hadn’t eaten and wouldn’t sleep. 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.