“Yes, ‘ah.’ You knew perfectly well that Jennie Hobbs wasn’t dead, so why make such an effort to mislead me into suspecting that her body might have been removed from room 402 by three of the most unlikely means imaginable?”

“Because, my friend, I wanted to encourage you to imagine. If you do not consider the unlikeliest of possibilities, you will not be the best detective that you can be. It is the education for the little gray cells, to force them to move in unusual directions. From this comes the inspiration.”

“If you insist,” I said doubtfully.

“Poirot, he goes too far, you think—beyond what is necessary. Perhaps.”

“All that fuss you made about the trail of blood in room 402 leading from the pool of blood in the center of the room toward the door, all your exclaiming about the width of the doorway—what was that about? You knew that Jennie Hobbs had not been murdered and dragged anywhere!”

“I did, but you did not. You believed, as did our friend Signor Lazzari, that Mademoiselle Jennie was dead and that it was her blood on the floor. Alors, I wanted you to demand of yourself: a suitcase, a laundry cart on wheels—both of these are objects that could have been brought into room 402, right to the spot where the dead body was. Why, then, would a killer pull the body toward the door? He would not! She would not! The trail of blood going in the direction of the door was a hoax; its aim was to suggest to us that the body had been dragged out of the room, since it was not in the room. It was the small detail of verisimilitude, so important to lend credence to the murder scene.

“But for Hercule Poirot, it was a detail that allowed him to know what he already strongly suspected: that Jennie Hobbs had not been murdered in that room and neither had anybody else. I could imagine no method of removing a corpse that would necessitate the trail of blood smears going toward the door. No killer would take his victim’s body out into the public corridor of a hotel without first hiding it inside some sort of receptacle—a container. Every container I could think of could easily have been taken into the room, traveling toward the body rather than requiring the body to travel toward it. It was such simple logic, Catchpool. I was surprised you did not grasp this point at once.”

“Handy tip for you, Poirot,” I said. “Next time you’d like me to grasp something at once, open your mouth and tell me facts, whatever they are. Be straightforward about it. You’ll find it saves a lot of bother.”