“Catchpool—think. Jennie Hobbs says she did not go to the Bloxham Hotel that night. So, either Samuel Kidd cooperated with Richard Negus to make the plan work without her, or else the two men did not cooperate. If they did not, then why would Mr. Kidd enter Mr. Negus’s hotel room uninvited, by an open window, and remove two keys from it? What reason would he have for doing so? And if the two men did cooperate, surely Samuel Kidd would have ended up with three keys to place in Nancy Ducane’s pocket rather than two. Additionally . . . if Richard Negus committed suicide, as you now believe, causing the cufflink to fall far back in his mouth, then who arranged his body in the perfectly straight line? Do you believe that a man could swallow poison and then contrive to die in that exceptionally neat position? Non! Ce n’est pas possible.”

“I shall need to think about this another time,” I said. “You’ve made my head spin. It’s full of a jumble of questions that weren’t there before.”

“For example?”

“Why did our three murder victims order sandwiches, cakes and scones and then not eat any of them? And if they didn’t eat the food, why wasn’t it still on the plates in Ida Gransbury’s room? What happened to it?”

“Ah! Now you think like a proper detective. Hercule Poirot is educating you in how to use the little gray cells.”

“Did you think of that—the food discrepancy?”

“Bien sûr. Why did I not ask Jennie Hobbs to account for it, when I asked her to explain many other inconsistencies? I did not do so because I wanted her to imagine that we believed her story by the time we left her. Therefore, I could not ask her a question for which she would be unable to provide an answer.”

“Poirot! Samuel Kidd’s face!”

“Where, mon ami?”

“No, I don’t mean that I can see his face, I mean . . . Remember the first time you met him at Pleasant’s, he had cut himself shaving? There was a cut on a small shaved area of his cheek, while the rest was covered by a growth of beard?”

Poirot nodded.

“What if that was not a shaving cut that we saw but a cut from a sharp branch of a tree? What if Samuel Kidd cut himself on his way into or out of the open window of Room 238? He knew that he was going to approach us with his lie about having seen Nancy Ducane run from the hotel, and he didn’t want us to connect the mysterious scratch on his face with the tree outside Richard Negus’s open window, so he shaved a small patch of skin.”