“Jennie!” Sam Kidd cried out, and suddenly he too was out of his chair and moving toward her. As I watched him, I had the peculiar sense of time having slowed down. Why was Kidd running? What was the danger? He clearly thought there was one, and, though I did not understand why, my heart had started to beat hard and fast. Something terrible was about to happen. I started to run toward Jennie.

She opened her bag. “So you want to be reunited with Patrick, do you?” she said to Nancy. I recognized the voice as hers, but at the same time it was not hers. It was the sound of unremitting darkness molded into words. I hope never again to hear anything like it, as long as I live.

Poirot had also started to move, but both of us were too far away. “Poirot!” I called, and then, “Someone stop her!” I saw metal, and light dancing upon it. Two men at the table next to Nancy’s rose to their feet, but they were not moving fast enough. “No!” I called out. There was a rapid movement—Jennie’s hand—and then blood, a rush of it, flowing down Nancy’s dress and on to the floor. Nancy fell to the ground. Somewhere at the back of the room, a woman started to scream.

Poirot had stopped moving, and now stood perfectly still. “Mon Dieu,” he said, and closed his eyes.

Samuel Kidd reached Nancy before I could. “She’s dead,” he said, staring down at her body on the floor.

“Yes, she is,” said Jennie. “I stabbed her in the heart. Right in the heart.”

25. If Murder Began with a D

If Murder Began with a D

I LEARNED THAT DAY that I am not afraid of death. It is a state that contains no energy; it exerts no force. I see dead bodies in the course of my work, and it has never bothered me unduly. No, the thing I dread above all else is proximity to death in the living: the sound of Jennie Hobbs’s voice when the desire to kill has consumed her; the state of mind of a murderer who would, with cold calculation, put three monogrammed cufflinks in his victims’ mouths and take the trouble to lay them out: straightening their limbs and their fingers, placing their lifeless hands palms downward on the floor.

“Hold his hand, Edward.”

How can the living hold the hands of the dying and not fear being pulled toward death themselves?

If I had my way, no person, while alive and vital, would have any involvement with death at all. I accept that this is an unrealistic hope.