“I’ll say this for Jennie: she’s a tea girl, so she’s got some sense in her head at least.”

“A tea girl?”

“That’s right.” Fee sniffed at Poirot’s coffee cup. “All you that drinks coffee when you could be drinking tea want your brains looking at, if you ask me.”

“You do not know the name of the lady for whom Jennie works, or the address of the big house?” Poirot asked.

“No. Don’t know Jennie’s last name neither. I know she had a terrible heartbreak years and years ago. She said so once.”

“Heartbreak? Did she tell you of what kind?”

“S’only one sort,” said Fee decisively. “The sort that does a heart right in.”

“What I mean to say is that there are many causes of the heartbreak: love that is unreturned, the loss of a loved one at a tragically young age—”

“Oh, we never got the story,” said Fee with a trace of bitterness in her voice. “Never will, neither. One word, heartbreak, was all she’d part with. See, the thing about Jennie is, she don’t talk. You wouldn’t be able to help her none if she still sat here in this chair, no more than you can now with her run off. She’s all shut up in herself, that’s Jennie’s trouble. Likes to wallow in it, whatever it is.”

All shut up in herself . . . The words sparked a memory in Poirot—of a Thursday evening at Pleasant’s several weeks ago, and Fee talking about a customer.

He said, “She asks no questions, n’est-ce pas? She is not interested in the social exchanges or the conversation? She does not care to find out what is the latest news in the life of anybody else?”

“Too true!” Fee looked impressed. “There’s not a scrap of curiosity in her. I’ve never known anyone more wrapped up in her own cares. Just doesn’t see the world or the rest of us in it. She never asks you how you’re rubbing along, or what you’ve been doing with yourself.” Fee tilted her head to one side. “You’re quick to catch on, aren’t you?”

“I know what I know only from listening to you speak to the other waitresses, mademoiselle.”

Fee’s face turned red. “I’m surprised you’d go to the bother of listening.”

Poirot had no wish to embarrass her further, so he did not tell her that he greatly looked forward to her descriptions of the individuals he had come to think of, collectively, as “The Coffee-House Characters”—Mr. Not Quite, for instance, who, each time he came in, would order his food and then, immediately afterward, cancel the order because he had decided it was not quite what he wanted.