Rafal Bobak inclined his head in greeting as he came toward us, pushing a large cart on wheels full of what looked like sheets in need of laundering. “Monsieur Poirot,” he said, stopping when he saw us. “I have been going over and over it in my mind, to see if I can remember any more of what was said in Room 317 on the night of the murders.”

“Oui?” Poirot sounded hopeful.

“I haven’t remembered anything else, sir. I’m sorry.”

“Never mind. Thank you for trying, Mr. Bobak.”

“Look,” said Lazzari. “Here comes the lift, and I am afraid to step into it! In my own hotel! I do not know, any more, what I will find, or not find. I am afraid to turn one more corner, to open one more door . . . I fear the shadows in the corridors, the creaks of the floorboards . . .”

As we went up in the lift, Poirot tried to get some sense out of the distraught hotel manager, but to no avail. Lazzari seemed unable to manage more than six linked words at a time: “Miss Jennie Hobbs reserved the room . . . What? Yes, fair hair . . . But then where did she go? . . . Yes, brown hat . . . We have lost her! . . . She was without cases . . . I saw her myself, yes . . . I was too late to the room! . . . What? Yes, a coat. Pale brown . . .”

On the fourth floor, we followed Lazzari as he hurried ahead of us along the corridor. “Harriet Sippel was on the first floor, remember?” I said to Poirot. “Richard Negus was on the second and Ida Gransbury on the third. I wonder if it means anything.”

By the time we caught up with Lazzari, he had unlocked the door to Room 402. “Gentlemen, you are about to see a most anomalous scene of ugliness in the beautiful Bloxham Hotel. Please prepare yourselves.” Having issued this warning, he flung open the door so that it banged against the wall inside the room.

“But . . . Where is the body?” I asked. It was not inside the room, laid out like the others. Immense relief suffused me.

“Nobody knows, Catchpool.” Poirot’s voice was quiet but there was anger in it. Or it might have been fear.

Between a chair and a small occasional table—positioned exactly where the bodies had been in rooms 121, 238 and 317—there was a pool of blood on the floor, with a long smear mark at one side, as if something had been dragged through part of it. Jennie Hobbs’s body? An arm perhaps, from the shape of the smear. There were small lines breaking up the red that might have been fingermarks . . .

I turned away, sickened by the sight.

“Poirot, look.” In one corner of the room there was a dark brown hat, upturned. There was something inside it, a small metal object. Could it be . . . ?