police. As a detective, his flair had been extraordinary, and he had achieved triumphs by unravelling some of the most baffling cases of the day.
In his English life Poirot occasionally spoke of these Belgian days, and when he did it was almost always of the one case in which he had been utterly fooled.
This dreadful experience was recounted one stormy night as Poirot and Hastings traded confidences before the fire (‘Outside, the wind howled malevolently, and the rain beat against the windows in great gusts’). ‘You ask me if I have ever made the complete ass of myself, as you say over here?’ said Poirot, and there followed the story of ‘The Chocolate Box’,7 a case of a political murder in Brussels in which, outfoxed by a most unlikely killer, he had completely misread the evidence and nearly arrested the wrong person. ‘Sapristi! It does not bear thinking of!’ he cried (but what a consolation for Hastings, one can’t help thinking).
Another case Poirot recalled from time to time – ‘one of my early successes’ – was the affair of the soap manufacturer of Liège, a man of porcine appearance who was found guilty of poisoning his wife in order to marry his secretary. In ‘The Nemean Lion’, while gazing upon ‘the swelling jowl, the small pig eyes, the bulbous nose, and the close-lipped mouth’ of his client, Sir Joseph Hoggin, ‘a memory stirred dimly. A long time ago … in Belgium … something, surely, to do with soap …’ On a hunch that his client was up to no good, Poirot immediately recounted the story of The Soapmaker of Liège to Sir Joseph, who went quite pale. Before long his wife, Lady Hoggin, was saying to her husband: ‘Funny, this tonic tastes quite different. It hasn’t got that bitter taste any more. I wonder why?’ Poirot was especially proud of this case. ‘Prevention, always, is better than cure,’ he said of it in Hickory Dickory Dock.
Two collaborations with the British police in these earlier days (Poirot spoke a tolerable, if mannered, English) were to have important consequences as it was through them that he met the ebullient Inspector Jimmy Japp of Scotland Yard. In 1916, in The Mysterious Affair at Styles – Poirot’s first case as a private detective in England – he encountered Japp again:
‘I fear you do not remember me, Inspector Japp.’
‘Why, if it isn’t Mr Poirot!’ cried the Inspector. He turned to the other man. ‘You’ve heard me speak of Mr Poirot? It was in 1904 he and I worked together – the Abercrombie forgery case – you remember, he was run down in Brussels. Ah, those were great days, moosier. Then, do you remember “Baron” Altara? There was a pretty rogue for you! He eluded the clutches of half the police in Europe. But we nailed him in Antwerp – thanks to Mr Poirot here.’
After this, Japp took Poirot under his wing – or was it the other way around? No matter, in England their guarded friendship would flourish for years.
In the long run, the most significant link Poirot forged with England in his Belgian days was the assistance he gave to Arthur Hastings, a young employee of Lloyd’s. The nature of the business that brought Hastings from London to Brussels is not recorded, but through it he met Poirot and fell hopelessly under his spell. Hastings was ripe for this. ‘Well, I’ve always had a secret hankering to be a detective!’ he confessed to a new friend in The Mysterious Affair at Styles.
‘The real thing – Scotland Yard? Or Sherlock Holmes?’
‘Oh, Sherlock Holmes by all means. But really, seriously, I am awfully drawn to it.’
Hastings came back from Belgium inspired and reciting, at every opportunity, ‘the various exploits and triumphs of Hercule Poirot’. That in a few years he would be permitted to work under the tutelage of this great man would have been, at that time, the stuff of his wildest dreams.
As we have seen, Poirot was due to retire in about 1914. Perhaps he had already begun to plan a quiet new life amidst ‘les dunes impeccables’ of Knocke-sur-Mer? In August of 1914, however, catastrophe struck with the invasion of neutral Belgium by Germany. The Great War had begun.
The years of German occupation were a period of great suffering for Belgium. Under a German governor, many Belgians who refused to collaborate were executed or deported. In defiance workers withdrew their services, universities voluntarily closed, and newspapers ceased publication. A British heroine, Edith Cavell, the Matron of the Belgian School of Nursing, was shot for aiding escaped Allied soldiers. Countless patriots went underground.
Somewhere in this resistance, we may be sure, was Poirot. As chief of a police force that declined to co-operate, he would have been a prime target for imprisonment by les Bosches – or worse, for under the occupation the penalty for those in the Belgian intelligence service was death. For almost two years Poirot dropped from sight. Evidence of his importance to the resistance surfaced towards the end of the war in the case of ‘The Kidnapped Prime Minister’, a commission which came from the highest levels of the British Government. ‘What made you come to me?’ he asked a delegation from the War Cabinet. ‘I am unknown, obscure in this great London of yours.’ From the reply it is clear that it had been King Albert himself, the Belgians’ monarch in exile, who had suggested his small compatriot as the one person in England capable of wresting a missing prime minister from the enemy.
In the spring of 1916 the Germans must have been closing in on Poirot. Badly wounded, he was smuggled out of Belgium into France. Years later, in Murder on the Orient Express, he reminded a French General of the debt he owed him:
‘But indeed, do I not remember that once you saved my life?’ And then the General had made another fitting reply to that, disclaiming any merit for that past service; and with more mention of France, of Belgium, of glory, of honour and of such kindred things they had embraced each other heartily.
From France Poirot came, ‘a sad and weary refugee to England’.
From the outset of the war the English had opened their hearts and homes to Belgian refugees. ‘REMEMBER BELGIUM’, admonished enlistment posters, and ‘Vivent les braves Belges!’ was the cry, even some seven years later, of the young people in ‘Christmas Adventure’. Hard-working officials toiled to place these bewildered exiles with appropriate benefactors. Where, they must have wondered, should they send this funny little policeman? Perhaps to Mrs Inglethorp?
Emily Inglethorp, the autocratic mistress of Styles Court in the pretty Essex village of Styles St Mary, had already established a colony of six Belgians in a small cottage called Leastways, not far from the park gates. In the early summer of 1916 her seventh refugee limped down from a train at the village station.
‘A kind lady gave me hospitality,’ said Poirot of Mrs Inglethorp. ‘We Belgians will always remember her with gratitude.’ At Leastways he was given an upstairs room and there he seems to have spent most of his days sitting by a window overlooking the village street, smoking an occasional Russian cigarette, and pondering his fate. ‘You may speak for yourself, Hastings,’ said Poirot in Curtain. ‘For me, my arrival at Styles St Mary was a sad and painful time. I was a refugee, wounded, exiled from home and country, existing by charity in a foreign land.’
What was he to do now, the famous Hercule Poirot, suddenly without aim and far from young? Time must have passed very slowly in this quiet sanctuary ‘in the midst of green fields and country lanes’.
I am sure that, as an occasional diversion, Poirot and his compatriots were hospitably summoned to Styles Court – Styles, as the family called it – to have tea with Mrs Inglethorp and her ménage. At Mrs Inglethorp’s side would have been her new husband, her junior by twenty years, the black-bearded Alfred Inglethorp (the ‘fortune
