Hercule Poirot sat down and had breakfast in his small but comfortable apartment at Whitehall Mansion. He had enjoyed his brioche and a cup of steaming hot chocolate. Surprisingly, since he was a man of habits and rarely changed his breakfast routine, he asked his servant, George, to prepare him another chocolate drink. While waiting for it, he glanced again at the morning correspondence that was on his breakfast table. Meticulously orderly as always, he had placed the sorted envelopes in a neat pile. He had opened them very carefully with his letter opener, which was a miniature sword gifted to him on a birthday many years ago by his old friend Hastings. A second pile contained the correspondence he did not find interesting – mainly informational pamphlets – which he would eventually ask George to take to the wastebasket. The third pile consisted of those letters to which he needed to send a reply – or at least an acknowledgment of receipt. He would deal with these after breakfast and, in any case, not before ten o’clock.
Poirot did not consider it very professional to start work before ten. When he was working on a case… ah, then things were, of course, different. He remembered how once he and Hastings had started well before dawn in order to… But no, Poirot did not want his thoughts to turn to the past; to the happy past. Their last case, which involved an international criminal organization known as "The Big Four," had been brought to a satisfactory conclusion and Hastings had returned to Argentina, to his wife and his ranch. Although his old friend had temporarily returned to London for business related to the ranch, it was highly unlikely that they would collaborate again to solve a crime.