“So you believed that Richard Negus would find you and kill you because you did not arrive at the Bloxham Hotel to kill him?”

“Yes. I assumed that he would not be content to die without knowing why I didn’t come to the hotel as planned.”

“Yet he was,” I said, thinking furiously.

Jennie nodded.

I could see now that it all made sense: the identical positioning of the three dead bodies for one thing—in a perfectly straight line, feet pointing toward the door, between a small table and a chair. As Poirot had said, Harriet Sippel, Ida Gransbury and Richard Negus were unlikely all to have fallen naturally into that exact position.

There was a suspicious amount of similarity between the three murder scenes, and at last I thought I understood why: the conspirators needed the police to believe there was only one killer. In fact, any detective worth his salt would have assumed this purely from the cufflinks in the mouths and the fact of all three bodies having turned up at the same hotel on the same night, but the killers were in the grip of paranoia. They knew they were more than one person, and so they feared, as the guilty tend to, that the truth might be apparent to others. So they went to great lengths to create three murder scenes that were more similar to one another than they needed to be.

The laying out of the bodies, perfectly straight and identical, was also consistent with the notion that the killings at the Bloxham Hotel were not murders but executions. There are procedures that one follows after an execution—formalities and rituals. It would have felt important, I thought, to do something with the bodies rather than simply leave them lying exactly as they fell, as a common or garden-variety murderer would.

An image of a much younger Jennie Hobbs came to my mind: at Cambridge University’s Saviour College, moving from one room to another, making beds. She would have made each one identically, following the prescribed pattern . . . I shuddered, then wondered why a vision of a young woman innocently making beds in a college should give me such a chill.

Beds, and deathbeds . . .

Patterns, and the disruption of patterns . . .