I am back! At least, back to my blog. If you are concerned, know that I am safe in a secret location in London. I am not staying in the country of England but I am in fact moving to France very soon. I believe it is long overdue to go to a country where I speak my native language after all!

Some of you have have come up to me, noting the fact that I am Belgian, disadvantaged in my height, advantaged in my girth, balding and moustached, and noted my abilities of observation. In noting it you have called me by a name that I never wished to be called. In my agitation I fought back, and occasionally quite rudely, and for this I feel I must explain.

I am a man who by my nature deduces. I observe, and then I use the little gray cells to find the solution to the problem before me. But in suddenly being swept up into this time and place I suddenly encountered a grave problem and realized that I had no means to solve it. I can find much in a crime scene that is out of place, that is troubling, and with them I understand the solution. But I am not in such a room or house; I am in a place unknown to me where I have no idea what is normal or out of place, and in being flooded with all the new information I retreated to the confines of the Widdecombe residence, where I was sheltered in the polite high society that I could understand. I took on an alias and refused to say who I was because I could not explain why; I could not account for my identity, and in a world where I was without reputation I would have sounded positively mad. And perhaps I got angry at people who seemed to understand who I was, justified with the most maddening nonsense not befitting the name of deduction, because in reality I had nothing that I could replace it with.

However, in this crisis I have come to discover that I have pushed away the people who care about my safety and are most capable of understanding and accepting my predicament, so I will break the silence I committed to and tell you la verité: I am inspector Hercule Poirot!

I do have something else to discuss with you; this morning I discovered that this Monsieur Hefner tried to find me and in doing so raided an apartment; not, I should mention, my true apartment but a decoy which I had provided to a source which I knew this Hefner character – if he really was so keen on finding me – would follow up on. This Belgian is too clever to give out the address of his real location so that I could be stolen from! Still this heinous act has injured whatever trust I held for the man, and it is clear that his interest in me was not temporary to the case. In that apartment I sent him a message as to who he is dealing with. It will not be the only message I send to him before I leave for France…

Yours sincerely,

Hercule Poirot