“Oui. For a woman, Jennie, whom I very much hope is still alive and not murdered.”

“Murdered?” I had that sense of the ground dropping away again. I knew Poirot was a famous detective. He had told me about some of the cases he’d solved. Still, he was supposed to be having a break from all that, and I could have done without his producing that particular word at that moment, in such a portentous fashion.

“What does she look like, this Jennie?” I asked. “Describe her. I might have seen her. Especially if she’s been murdered. I’ve seen two murdered women tonight, actually, and one man, so you might be in luck. The man didn’t look as if he was likely to be called Jennie, but as for the other two—”

“Attendez, mon ami,” Poirot’s calm voice cut through my desperate ramblings. He took off his hat and began to unbutton his coat. “So Madame Blanche, she is correct—you are troubled? Ah, but how did I not see this straight away? You are pale. My thoughts, they were elsewhere. They arrange to be elsewhere when they see that Madame Blanche approaches! But please tell Poirot immédiatement: what is the matter?”

“THREE MURDERS ARE THE matter,” I said. “And all three of them like nothing I’ve seen before. Two women and one man. Each one in a different room.”

Of course, I had encountered violent death before many times—I had been with Scotland Yard for nearly two years, and a policeman for five—but most murders had about them an obvious appearance of lost control: somebody had lashed out in a fit of temper, or had one tipple too many and blown his top. This business at the Bloxham was very different. Whoever had killed three times at the hotel had planned ahead—for months, I guessed. Each of his crime scenes was a work of macabre art with a hidden meaning that I could not decipher. It terrified me to think that this time I was not up against a chaotic ruffian of the sort I was used to, but perhaps a cold, meticulous mind that would not allow itself to be defeated.

I was no doubt being overly gloomy about it, but I couldn’t shake my feelings of foreboding. Three matching corpses: the very idea made me shudder. I told myself I must not develop a phobia; I had rather to treat this case as I would any other, no matter how different it seemed on the surface.

“Each of the three murders in a different room in the same house?” Poirot asked.

“No, at the Bloxham Hotel. Up Piccadilly Circus way. I don’t suppose you know it?”

“Non.”

“I had never been inside it before tonight. It’s not the sort of place a chap like me would think to go. It’s palatial.”