Agatha Christie – Poirot’s Early Cases

Miss Lemon ran an eye over the various letters, scribbling in turn a hieroglyphic on each of them. These marks were legible to her alone and were in a code of her own: ‘Soft soap’; ‘slap in the face’; ‘purr purr’; ‘curt’; and so on. Having done this, she nodded and looked up for further instructions.

Poirot handed her Amelia Barrowby’s letter. She extracted it from its double envelope, read it through and looked up inquiringly.

‘Yes, M. Poirot?’ Her pencil hovered – ready – over her short-hand pad.

‘What is your opinion of that letter, Miss Lemon?’

With a slight frown Miss Lemon put down the pencil and read through the letter again.

The contents of a letter meant nothing to Miss Lemon except from the point of view of composing an adequate reply. Very occasionally her employer appealed to her human, as opposed to her official, capacities. It slightly annoyed Miss Lemon when he did so – she was very nearly the perfect machine, completely and gloriously uninterested in all human affairs. Her real passion in life was the perfection of a filing system beside which all other filing systems should sink into oblivion. She dreamed of such a system at night. Nevertheless, Miss Lemon was perfectly capable of intelligence on purely human matters, as Hercule Poirot well knew.

‘Well?’ he demanded.

‘Old lady,’ said Miss Lemon. ‘Got the wind up pretty badly.’ ‘Ah! The wind rises in her, you think?’ Miss Lemon, who considered that Poirot had been long enough in Great Britain to understand its slang terms, did not reply. She took a brief look at the double envelope.

‘Very hush-hush,’ she said. ‘And tells you nothing at all.’ ‘Yes,’ said Hercule Poirot. ‘I observed that.’ Miss Lemon’s hand hung once more hopefully over the shorthand pad. This time Hercule Poirot responded.

‘Tell her I will do myself the honour to call upon her at any time she suggests, unless she prefers to consult me here. Do not type the letter – write it by hand.’ ‘Yes, M. Poirot.’ Poirot produced more correspondence. ‘These are bills.’ Miss Lemon’s efficient hands sorted them quickly. ‘I’ll pay all but these two.’ ‘Why those two? There is no error in them.’ ‘They are firms you’ve only just begun to deal with. It looks bad to pay too promptly when you’ve just opened an account looks as though you were working up to get some credit later on.’ ‘Ahl’ murmured Poirot. ‘I bow to your superior knowledge of the British tradesman.’ ‘There’ nothing much I don’t know about them,’ said Mis: Lemon grimly.

The letter to Miss Amelia Barrowby was duly written and sen but no reply was forthcoming. Perhaps, thought Hercule Poin the old lady had unravelled her mystery herself. Yet he felt a sha of surprise that in that case she should not have written a courteouo word to say that his services were no longer required.

It was five days later when Miss Lemon, after receiving her morning’s instructions, said, ‘That Miss Barrowby we wrote to no wonder there’s been no answer. She’s dead.’ Hercule Poirot said very softly, ‘Ah – dead.’ It sounded not so much like a question as an answer.

Opening her handbag, Miss Lemon produced a newspaper cutting. ‘I saw it in the tube and tore it out.’ Just registering in his mind approval of the fact that, though Miss Lemon used the word ‘tore’, she had neatly cut the entry out with scissors, Poirot read the announcement taken from the Births, Deaths and Marriages in the Morning Post: ‘On March 26th suddenly- at Rosebank, Charman’s Green, Amelia Jane Barrowby, in her seventy-third year. No flowers, by request.’ Poirot read it over. He murmured under his breath, ‘Suddenly’.

Then he said briskly, ‘If you will be so obliging as to take a letter, Miss Lemon?’ The pencil hovered. Miss Lemon, her mind dwelling on the intricacies of the filing system, took down in rapid and correct shorthand:

Dear Miss Barrowby, I have received no reply from you, but as I shall be in the neighbourhood of Charman’s Green on Friday, I will call upon you on that day and discuss more fully the matter mentioned to me in your letter.