love him, M. Poirot. It’s impossible not to love him.’ For the first time since arriving, Annabel Treadway smiled, and the thick layer of sadness in the room’s atmosphere lifted a little. ‘I must get back to him. You’ll think me foolish, but I miss him dreadfully. And I’m not afraid—truly. If the person who sent the letter wasn’t willing to put his name to it, then it’s not a serious accusation, is it? It’s a silly trick, that’s all it is, and I’m very glad to be able to see you and straighten it out. Now, I must go.’
‘Please, mademoiselle, do not leave yet. I would like to ask you more questions.’
‘But I must get back to Hoppy,’ Annabel Treadway insisted, rising to her feet. ‘He needs … and none of them can … When I’m not there, he … I’m so sorry. I hope whoever sent those letters causes you no further trouble. Thank you for seeing me. Good day, M. Poirot.’
‘Good day, mademoiselle,’ Poirot said to a room that was suddenly empty apart from himself and a lingering feeling of desolation.
The next morning felt peculiar to Hercule Poirot. By ten o’clock, no stranger had telephoned. Nobody had appeared at Whitehaven Mansions to accuse him of accusing them of the murder of Barnabas Pandy. He waited in until forty minutes after eleven (one never knew when a faulty alarm clock might cause an accusee to oversleep), then set off across town to Pleasant’s Coffee House.
Unofficially in charge at Pleasant’s was a young waitress by the name of Euphemia Spring. Everyone called her Fee for short. Poirot liked her enormously. She said the most unexpected things. Her flyaway hair defied gravity by refusing to lie flat against her head, though there was nothing floaty or flighty about her mind, which was always sharply in focus. She made the finest coffee in London, then did all she could to discourage customers from drinking it. Tea, she was fond of proclaiming, was a far superior beverage and beneficial to health, whereas coffee apparently led to sleepless nights and ruination of every sort.
Poirot continued to drink Fee’s excellent coffee in spite of her warnings and entreaties, and had noticed that on many subjects (other than the aforementioned) she had much wisdom to impart. One of her areas of expertise was Poirot’s friend and occasional helper Inspector Edward Catchpool—which was why he was here.
The coffee house was starting to fill with people. Moisture dripped down the insides of the windows. Fee was serving a gentleman on the other side of the room when Poirot walked in, but she waved at him with her left hand: an eloquent gesture that told him precisely where to sit and wait for her.
Poirot sat. He straightened the cutlery on the table in front of him as he always did, and tried not to look at the teapot collection that filled the high shelves on the walls. He found the sight of them unbearable: all angled differently and apparently at random. There was no logic to it. To be someone who cared about teapots, enough to collect so many, and yet not to see the need to point all the spouts in the same direction … Poirot had long suspected Fee of creating a deliberately haphazard arrangement solely to cause him distress. He had once, when the teapots were lined up in a more conventional fashion, remarked that one was positioned incorrectly. Each time he had come to Pleasant’s since that day, there had been no pattern at all. Fee Spring did not respond well to criticism.
She appeared by his side and slammed a plate down between his knife and fork. There was a slice of cake on it, one Poirot had not ordered. ‘I’ll be needing your help,’ she said, before he could ask her about Catchpool, ‘but you’ll have to eat up first.’
It was her famous Church Window Cake, so called because each slice comprised two yellow and two pink squares that were supposed to resemble the stained glass of a church window. Poirot found the name bothersome. Church windows were coloured, yes, but they were also transparent and made of glass. One might as well call it ‘Chess Board Cake’—that was what it brought to Poirot’s mind when he saw it: a chess board, albeit too small and in the wrong colours.
‘I telephoned to Scotland Yard this morning,’ he told Fee. ‘They say that Catchpool is at the seaside on holiday, with his mother. This did not sound to me likely.’
‘Eat,’ said Fee.
‘Oui, mais—’
‘But you want to know where Edward is. Why? Has something happened?’ She had started, in recent months, to refer to Catchpool as ‘Edward’, though never when he was present, Poirot noticed.
‘Do you know where he is?’ Poirot asked her.
‘Might do.’ Fee grinned. ‘I’ll gladly tell all’s I know, once you’ve said you’ll help me. Now, eat.’
Poirot sighed. ‘How will it help you if I eat a slice of your cake?’
Fee sat down beside him and rested both her elbows on the table. ‘It’s not my cake,’ she whispered, as if talking about something shameful. ‘Looks the same, tastes the same, but it isn’t mine. That’s the problem.’
‘I do not understand.’
‘Were you ever served by a girl here, name of Philippa—all bones, teeth like a horse?’
‘Non. She does not sound familiar.’
‘She wasn’t here long. I caught her pilfering food and had to have words. Not that she didn’t need feeding up, but I wasn’t having her taking food from plates of those who’d paid fair and square. I told her she was welcome to leftovers, but that weren’t good enough for her. Didn’t like being spoken to like a thief—thieves never do—and so she never came back after. Well, now she’s at the new coffee house, Kemble’s, near the wine merchants’ place on Oxford Street. They can keep her and good luck to ’em—but then customers start telling me she’s making my cake. I didn’t believe ’em at first. How could she know the recipe? Passed down from my great-granny, it were, to my granny, then my ma, then to me. I’d cut out my own tongue before I’d tell it to anyone outside the family, and I haven’t, to no one—certainly not to her. I’ve not written it down. Only way she could know’s if she’s secretly watched me making it … and when I thought carefully, I thought, yes, she might’ve. She’d have only needed to do it once if she’d paid attention, and I can’t swear she didn’t. All that time, the two of us together in a tiny kitchen …’
Fee pointed an accusatory finger, as if the kitchen of Pleasant’s were to blame. ‘Easy enough to look like she’s busy with somethin’ else. And she was a proper little sneak-about. Anyhow, I had to go and try it, didn’t I? And I think they’re right, those who’ve told me she’s making my cake. I think they’re dead right!’ Her eyes blazed with indignation.
‘What would you like me to do, mademoiselle?’
‘Haven’t I said? Haven’t I been saying? Eat that and tell me if I’m right or wrong. That’s hers, not mine. I shoved it in a coat pocket when she wasn’t looking. She never even knew I was in her coffee house, that’s how careful I was. I went in disguise—wore a proper costume!’
Poirot did not wish to eat a slice of cake that had been in anybody’s pocket. ‘I have not sampled your Church Window Cake for many months,’ he told
