After Jennie had composed herself and arranged her expression into something less abject and more guarded, she invited us into the house and bade us wait in a small dark room with shabby furniture. She then excused herself, saying that she would be back shortly.

“You said it was too late to save her!” I said angrily to Poirot. “You lied to me.”

He shook his head. “How did I know that I would find her here? It is thanks to you, mon ami. Again you help Poirot.”

“How?”

“I invite you to think back to your conversation with Walter Stoakley at the King’s Head Inn, to what he said about a woman who could have had a husband, children, a home of her own and a happy life. Do you recall?”

“What about it?”

“A woman who devoted her life to a substantial man? Who sacrificed everything for him? Then, later, Mr. Stoakley said, “She couldn’t marry some kid, not once she had fallen in love with a man of substance. So she left him behind.’ You remember telling me this, mon ami?”

“Of course I do! I’m not an imbecile.”

“You thought that you had found our older woman and much younger man, n’est-ce pas? Rafal Bobak had referred to them at the Bloxham Hotel—he told us that the three murder victims were talking about them—and you thought Walter Stoakley had in mind the same couple, so you asked Mr. Stoakley how much older this woman was than the man whose love she had spurned because you believed that you heard him say, ‘She couldn’t marry some kid.’ But, my friend, you did not hear him say this!”

“Yes—I did, as a matter of fact.”

“Non. What you heard him say was, ‘She couldn’t marry Sam Kidd,’ Mr. Samuel Kidd.”

“But . . . but . . . Oh, dash it all!”

“You leapt to an incorrect conclusion because Walter Stoakley had already used the word ‘kid’ more than once. The young man with whom he had been drinking he had called a kid. Eh bien, your error was one that many in your position would have made. Do not chastise yourself too severely.”

“And then, having misunderstood, I asked Stoakley about the difference in age between the woman who could have married but didn’t and the ne’er-do-well he had been drinking with before I arrived. He must have wondered why I wanted to know, when Jennie Hobbs had nothing to do with the ne’er-do-well.”

“Oui. This he might have asked you, had he not been stupefied by alcohol. Ah, well.” Poirot shrugged.

“So Jennie Hobbs was engaged to Samuel Kidd,” I said, trying to take it all in. “And . . . she left him behind in Cambridge in order to come to Great Holling with Patrick Ive?”