Poirot, mademoiselle. From Belgium. I am delighted to make your acquaintance.’ He extended his hand.
She shook it. ‘Fee Spring. Euphemia really, but everyone calls me Fee. If they used my whole name, they’d never get round to the rest of what they wanted to say to me, would they? Not that I’d be any the worse off for that.’
‘Do you know the whole name of Mademoiselle Jennie?’
Fee nodded in the direction of Poirot’s table, where steam still rose from his heaped plate. ‘Eat your dinner. I’ll be out in two shakes of a lamb’s tail.’ She withdrew abruptly, closing the door in his face.
Poirot proceeded back to his seat. Perhaps he would take Fee Spring’s advice and make a further effort with the beef chop. How heartening it was to speak to somebody who observed details. Hercule Poirot did not encounter many such people.
Fee reappeared promptly with a cup in her hand, no saucer. She took a slurp from it as she sat down in the chair that Jennie had vacated. Poirot managed not to wince at the sound.
‘I don’t know a lot about Jennie,’ she said. ‘Just what I’ve picked up from odd things she’s said. She does for a lady with a big house. Lives in. That’s why she comes here regular, to collect Her Ladyship’s coffee and cakes, for her fancy dinners and parties and the like. Comes right across town—she said that once. Plenty of our regulars come quite a way. Jennie always stays for a drink. “My usual, please,” she says when she arrives, like she’s a lady herself. That voice is her playing at being grand, I reckon. It’s not the one she was born with. Could be why she doesn’t say much, if she knows she can’t keep it up.’
‘Pardon me,’ said Poirot, ‘but how do you know that Mademoiselle Jennie has not always spoken in this way?’
‘You ever heard a domestic talk all proper like that? Can’t say as I have.’
‘Oui, mais … So it is the speculation and nothing more?’
Fee Spring grudgingly admitted that she did not know for certain. For as long as she had known her, Jennie had spoken ‘like a proper lady’.
‘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 was 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 afterwards, cancel the order because he had decided it was not quite what he wanted.
Now was not the appropriate time to enquire if Fee had a name of the same order as Mr Not Quite for Hercule Poirot that she used in his absence—perhaps one that made reference to his exquisite moustaches.
‘So Mademoiselle Jennie does not wish to know the business of other people,’ Poirot said thoughtfully, ‘but unlike many who take no interest in the lives and ideas of those around them, and who talk only about themselves at great length, she does not do this either—is that not so?’
Fee raised her eyebrows. ‘Powerful memory you’ve got there. Dead right again. No, Jennie’s not one to talk about herself. She’ll answer a question, but she won’t linger on it. Doesn’t want to be kept too long from what’s in her head, whatever it is. Her hidden treasure—except it don’t make her happy, whatever she’s dwelling on. I’ve long since given up trying to fathom her.’
‘She dwells on the heartbreak,’ Poirot murmured. ‘And the danger.’
‘Did she say she was in danger?’
‘Oui, mademoiselle. I regret that I was not quick enough to stop her from leaving. If something should happen to her …’ Poirot shook his head and wished he could recover the settled feeling with which he had arrived. He slapped the tabletop with the flat of his hand as he made his decision. ‘I will return here demain matin. You say she is here often, n’est-ce pas? I will find her before the danger does. This time, Hercule Poirot, he will be quicker!’
‘Fast or slow, don’t matter,’ said Fee. ‘No one can find Jennie, not even with her right in front of their noses, and no one can help her.’ She stood and picked up Poirot’s plate. ‘There’s no point letting good food go cold over it,’ she concluded.
That was how it started, on the evening of Thursday, 7 February 1929, with Hercule Poirot, and Jennie, and Fee Spring; amid the crooked, teapot-huddled shelves of Pleasant’s Coffee House.
Or, I should say, that was how it appeared to start. I’m not convinced that stories from real life have beginnings and ends, as a matter of fact. Approach them from any vantage point and you’ll see that they stretch endlessly back into the past and spread inexorably forward into the future. One is never quite able to say ‘That’s that, then,’ and draw a line.
Luckily, true stories do have heroes and heroines. Not being one myself, having no hope of ever being one, I am all too aware that they are real.
I wasn’t present that Thursday evening at the coffee house. My name was mentioned—Edward Catchpool, Poirot’s policeman friend from Scotland Yard, not much older than thirty (thirty-two, to be precise)—but I was not there. I have, nevertheless, decided to try to fill the gaps in my own experience in order make a written record of the