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Over the years of my association with the celebrated detective Hercule Poirot, I have put before the public a number of accounts of our cases together, from the notorious Styles affair to the devious events at End House. Yet life at the side of my friend has included any number of smaller incidents, which I have not previously depicted.
I take my pen in hand on this occasion to tell a small tale, not for the public but for a certain limited audience. It is a curious tale – but I am in advance of myself.
-
I had hurt my hand in a minor driving accident the week before. It was nothing to interfere with our planned excursion to the opera – not that I find the opera thrilling myself, but at least once a season I end up accompanying Poirot. He smiles very much like a cat during the most dramatic passages, when the opera house reverberates with passion, and I am fairly certain you can almost hear him purring.
What my hand did interfere with was tying my dashed tie.
It was after my third muffled imprecation that I felt a hand on my shoulder. “Allow me, mon ami.”
I turned from the mirror and let Poirot’s capable hands take over. As particular as my friend is about his own manner of dress – to an almost obsessive degree – I knew he could manage mine without batting an eye.
As his fingers fussed over my tie (and my collar), I had a moment of thought. All men will know the type. They are not active sorts of thoughts. I daresay the female population of Britain scarcely knows they exist. Yet every man alive has them, in sometimes the most inopportune moments, and sometimes about the most unlikely of subjects.
(I interject to warn the reader. This story is not for the general public, but for a particular audience. If you are not the intended audience, kindly stop reading at once.)
In this case: a thought sprang into my brain, unbidden and unwarned, that Poirot’s fingers were deuced capable, and how nimble might they be employed somewhere else?
I confess, in this private document, that it was not the first time an inappropriate thought about my friend had drifted into my consciousness. His egoism and fastidiousness have both featured heavily in my accounts of our cases, but the Poirot I know has other sides that are just as pronounced. The mercurial smile that flits across his face, one moment smug and the next contemplative, his eyes alight with it like twinkling stars. The thoughtfulness he has for others – often coloured with his own unique slant, but at heart a straightforward desire to do for them as he sees most fitting. The confidence he has in his body, from his inordinate pride in his famous moustaches, to his careful dress sense, to the unselfconscious way he holds himself at all times. Poirot is never awkward. Never out of place, never insecure. He is a titan, this little Belgian, a completely centred man.
Is it any wonder that the traitorous manly brain should venture to think what such a man might look like, should such confidence be turned to another avenue?
Or how it might feel to be the one to break that impeccable poise?
As I say, such thoughts were not new to me. Poirot had been my friend for many a year. I had never had a hint that he might harbour the same thoughts, and while it is not unknown in my circles for two confirmed bachelors to come to an understanding, it wouldn’t have been the sporting thing to introduce the topic when it could very easily lead to a breach of my dearest friendship. My thoughts must remain my own, where they could do no one any harm.
What was new, was that on this occasion, Poirot’s fingers paused.
Paused is one word. I might almost say stuttered. They halted in their path, and smoothed the tie for a moment in a distracted, almost absentminded flutter.
If we had been engaged in a case, my tie would no doubt have provided some crucial insight into an element that had until then proved elusive. There is little that can fire my blood as quickly as the flame in Poirot’s eyes when he solves a murder out of thin air, and it is all I can do to follow him as fast as I can (and then drive so quickly to our next destination that he shuts his eyes and hangs on).
But we had not had a case in some weeks. My tie was entirely pukka sahib, with nothing strange about it.
And then the most extraordinary thing occurred.
We were standing closer than we usually did. From that vantage point, I could distinctly see the moment Poirot’s cheeks flushed, a blush sweeping across above the moustaches as his fingers stayed frozen for an electric second in time.
Then the moment passed. The flush receded. Poirot straightened my tie and stepped away, already turning back towards his desk. We went to the opera, and met a good friend of mine who later was very helpful in a strange poisoning case in Surrey.
All evening, all I could think of was that moment, and the way Poirot blushed, his eyes cast away.
By the time I went to bed that night, I was halfway convinced of an incredible theory. If it was true, it changed everything about our life together. I wasn’t sure our friendship would ever be the same.
Poirot was telepathic.
-
Sometimes these hunches of mine wear off overnight. But in the cold light of day, it seemed even clearer.
There had always been something fey about Poirot, something not quite understandable. The way he made connections between pieces of evidence and found patterns that would never have occurred to other detectives such as Japp and myself. The way he sometimes seemed to know, even in advance of evidence, who was hiding guilty but non-murderous secrets and who were the actual most dangerous suspects. The way he looked right through you at times, with that little smile playing on his lips.
If he could read people’s minds -
Yes, it was an outlandish thought. But I’d met Captain Wilkins at my club, the famous polar explorer, and he’d told us about the experiments he and Harold Sherman carried out in 1937 during Wilkins’s Arctic exploration. My friend Perkins had scoffed at the very idea, but I’d left that night a little intrigued. So many scientific discoveries were being made those days. What if this was indeed another frontier of science for us to map? Or what if it was a known secret in certain circles, and humanity’s fear of witches was founded on something more than superstition?
All these theories crowded into my head, and I took my breakfast in some state of confusion. I watched Poirot over the lip of my cup, and tried to sort out my thoughts.
Poirot was his usual self as he read the morning newspapers. There was a little frown between his brows, as is common when it’s been too long between cases and there’s nothing promising in the paper. If we had been dining out, it could have also been the size of his eggs, but here at home Poirot always ensured they were identical.
After a while, however, he started shooting darting glances in my direction, attempting but failing at an offhand manner. I instantly became self-conscious of my own thoughts. I tried to think of golf, but then the drivers seemed vulgar. I tried to think of the Lagonda, but that flashed me a picture of Poirot with his eyes shut as I roared around a bend, and the pained concentration on his face could have been something else entirely. In a panic, I looked down at my plate, and even the soldiers threw me off.
“Hastings. What is wrong?”
“Nothing.” It sounded strangled, like a half-cough. Even my voice was betraying me, for all the world like that time in the Army with – and what if Poirot saw that image?
Poirot made an unconvinced noise. There was a playful edge to it. Sometimes in the mornings his moods are unpredictable. “Is that a challenge for Poirot? To find what has unsettled my friend? Perhaps it is the bacon.”
Poirot’s dislike for a hearty English breakfast was as familiar as it was unaccountable. I seized upon it with relief. “Maybe. It does taste a little off.”
Poirot arched an eyebrow, and I realized I hadn’t taken a bite of the bacon yet.
“I mean, looks a little off. You know, I’m not that hungry. Going to take a spin around town.”
It pains me to admit, but I fled the field.
-
I do my best thinking in the Lagonda. My nerves settled themselves, now that there was no playful detective peering into my mind, whether literally or metaphorically.
How had Poirot kept this secret for all the years of our friendship, if indeed he had? I had always thought him nearly omnipotent, the workings of the little grey cells opaque to me. Perhaps it had been a case of simply allowing me to assume that his formidable intelligence was solely behind his mastery, when it was only a contributor.
After all, we used to burn witches alive. Hang them too. You’d know from history that the talent would need to be hidden from everyone. Blackmail, murder – to say nothing of what the Government would do if presented with a telepath to use against our enemies.
Still. He could have trusted me. A kernel of hurt nestled in my chest.
I would have to show him he could trust me. And get these filthy thoughts out of my head. If he had seen them all these years, he would have spoken by now if he returned them. How could I claim to be a friend, if I was subjecting him to unwelcome visions of us together?
I mulled this for a while, slowly coming to the conclusion that this would be easier resolved than done. Man does not control his filthy thoughts. It is vexing.
Another few miles, and I had hit upon a solution.
I ducked into a village for a belated breakfast – my stomach reminding me that I hadn’t eaten my first one – and parked the Lagonda by a park.
I would sit there on a bench and let the thoughts come, playing them out in as much colourful detail as my mind desired. This would hopefully satisfy the old brain, and leave only the stray wisp of a thought to reoccur. Then on our next case, maybe there would be a lovely auburn-haired lady to distract me. This would pass, and our friendship would be serene once more.
(I laughed at the sudden realization that Poirot must have been driven nearly mad at times by the natural whimsy of my mind. An ordinary human being’s brain must be far too chaotic for his. Even the most well-ordered and logical mind could not meet his standards.)
Then I stopped being the odd duck loitering on a park bench laughing at nothing, and lost myself in contemplation.
I will draw a veil over these thoughts. Any red-blooded man can imagine the content, even if not all men would choose a similar subject. Our attractions are our own. Mine has long been catholic towards the female sex (with a preference for the auburn-haired) and particular in regards to my own.
I have an active imagination. It was some time before I left the park.
-
“Ah, Hastings,” Poirot said that evening, looking up from a letter he was pensively staring at. “A Mademoiselle Rice has written to tell us of a ruby that has been stolen from her.”
It did not sound like a case of the first order, but I was distracted.
You see, the moment I saw Poirot again, I realised just what a fool I’d been.
First, indulging those sorts of thoughts doesn’t always make them leave. Sometimes it just makes them multiply. The way he’d looked up, his eyes alight to see me, a smile playing at the corners of his mouth, just making a fellow want to -
And second, if he could read thoughts, what if he had read the ones in the park? I’d forgotten that whole part of Wilkins’s study. While he was in the Arctic, Sherman had been in New York!
I imagined Poirot sitting at his desk, a cup frozen in his hand as he observed certain flights of fancy with arrested horror -
“I’m sorry,” I blurted out, my tongue tripping over the words.
Poirot’s eyebrow went up. To trace that curve with a finger -
“I’m sorry,” I said again, desperately, trying to banish the thoughts by the power of will. My hat, between my hands, was being crushed. “I’m trying not to – but they just won’t stop.”
Poirot put the letter down on his desk and came over to me, gently taking the crushed hat out of my hands. “Mon ami,” he said, “what is troubling you?”
Of course he knew already, or perhaps he didn’t, but if he didn’t, why was he flushing again, just a little, his mouth tightening -
He sighed, a poignant little sound. “Do not trouble yourself, Hastings. I did not mean to alarm you last night. It was my mistake -”
I interrupted him, which I rarely do, but I was overcome at that point and scarcely knew what I did. “I’m the one who has been beastly. I really am trying to stop. I know you don’t think of me that way, the way that I … do.”
I had found myself trailing off at the end of that sentence, because Poirot’s eyes, which had been shadowed, were suddenly ablaze and fixed on mine. If you have never been the recepient of that fierce gaze, you can have no idea of the electrifying current it sends through you.
“Hastings,” he said, sounding very careful. “What is this way, that you think I do not feel?”
Something in his face was the very opposite of the abashed flush of the previous night. Something made every hair on the back of my neck stand up.
“Well,” I said, my brain spinning dizzily around my skull, “I mean. Um.”
“And what are you trying to stop?”
I surrendered. “Thinking of things you wouldn’t want to know.”
“I want to know everything,” Poirot said, as if that was common knowledge.
“Not - not these sorts of things.”
My own face felt hot, and Poirot’s eyes shone, and I had lost my footing entirely.
“Mais oui,” Poirot said, “these sorts of things.”
I met his gaze straight-on, and swallowed hard. “Poirot.”
And the damned man was most likely a telepath – which would mean he knew already – and if he knew, and if he stood there like that, it was beyond human strength to resist any longer.
For the record, his moustaches tickle.
-
My hat never recovered.
Poirot continues to twinkle secretively whenever the topic of his telepathy comes up. He refuses to confirm whether or not he is a telepath. I have my own theories on the subject. Wilkins and Sherman have published a book of their experiments.
But whatever the truth is, all that matters is this:
Imagination never compares to reality.
Poirot is confident and capable in all things.
And I am the luckiest fellow on God’s green earth.
-
Poirot, I have typed this all myself during Miss Lemon’s holiday. Happy Birthday.
A year on, will you tell me whether Wilkins was right?
-
(handwritten)
Mon chéri, I remain - your mystery.