“Comment? Mais bien évidemment! If murder began with a D! Of course! That is it! Mon ami, you do not know how you have helped me. Now I think . . . yes, that is it. That must be it. The younger man and the older woman—ah, but it is so clear to me now!”

“Please explain.”

“Yes, yes. When I am ready.”

“Why are you not ready now? What are you waiting for?”

“You must allow me more than twenty seconds to compose and arrange my ideas, Catchpool. That is necessary if I am to explain to you, who do not understand a thing. Your every word shows me that you comprehend nothing. You talk about having all the answers, but the story we heard from Jennie Hobbs this morning was an elaborate embroidery of lies! Do you not see this?”

“Well . . . I mean . . . um . . .”

“Richard Negus agrees with Harriet Sippel that perhaps Nancy Ducane should hang for three murders she did not commit? He is willing to leave Nancy’s fate to be decided by Jennie Hobbs? Richard Negus the leader, the respected authority figure—the same Richard Negus who, for sixteen years, has felt so terribly guilty for unjustly condemning Patrick Ive? The Richard Negus who realized too late that it is wrong to condemn and persecute a man for understandable human weaknesses? Who ended his engagement to Ida Gransbury because she dogmatically insisted that every transgression must be punished with the utmost harshness—this Richard Negus would entertain the idea of allowing Nancy Ducane, whose only crime was to love a man who could never belong to her, to be condemned by law and face the gallows for three murders of which she is innocent? Pah! It is nonsense! There is no consistency. It is a fantasy dreamed up by Jennie Hobbs to mislead us yet again.”

I listened to most of this with my mouth open. “Are you sure, Poirot? I believed her, I have to say.”

“Of course I am sure. Did not Henry Negus tell us that his brother Richard spent sixteen years in his home as a recluse, seeing and speaking to nobody? Yet according to Jennie Hobbs, he spent these same years persuading Harriet Sippel and Ida Gransbury that they were responsible for Patrick and Frances Ive’s deaths and must pay the price. How was Richard Negus able to do this persuading without his brother Henry noticing his regular communications with two women from Great Holling?”

“You might have a point there. I didn’t think of that.”

“It is a minor point. Surely you noticed all that was more substantially wrong with Jennie’s story?”

“To frame an innocent person for murder is unquestionably wrong,” I said.