Curtain: Poirot's Last Case: A Hercule Poirot Mystery: The Official Authorized Edition

by Agatha Christie

Hercule Poirot! Since those days he had been my dearest friend, his influence had moulded my life. In company with him, in the hunting down of yet another murderer, I had met my wife, the truest and sweetest companion any man could have had. She lay now in Argentine soil, having died as she would have wished, with no long drawn out suffering, or feebleness of old age. But she had left a very lonely and unhappy man behind her.

Lore drop.

He was now a very old man, and riddled with arthritis. He had gone to Egypt in the hopes of improving his health, but had returned, so his letter told me, rather worse than better.

She is a good manage, that one, but the tongue like vinegar, and the poor Colonel, he suffers much from it. If it were me I would take a hatchet to her!

I had no ties and no settled home. Of my children, one boy was in the Navy, the other married and running the ranch in the Argentine. My daughter Grace was married to a soldier and was at present in India. My remaining child, Judith, was the one whom secretly I had always loved best, although I had never for one moment understood her. A queer, dark, secretive child, with a passion for keeping her own counsel, which had sometimes affronted and distressed me. My wife had been more understanding.

Judith’s feelings, she said, were too intense, too concentrated, and her instinctive reserve deprived her of any safety valve. She had queer fits of brooding silence and a fierce, almost bitter power of partisanship.

She had taken her B.Sc. about a year ago, and had then taken the post of secretary to a doctor who was engaged in research work connected with tropical disease. His wife was somewhat of an invalid.

Judith was, I believed, fond of me, but she was very undemonstrative by nature, and she was often scornful and impatient of what she called my sentimental and outworn ideas. I was, frankly, a little nervous of my daughter!

Styles St. Mary was altered out of all recognition. Petrol stations, a cinema, two more inns and rows of council houses.

Here we seemed to recede again from modern times. The park was much as I remembered it, but the drive was badly kept and much overgrown with weeds growing up over the gravel.

I’m Mrs. Luttrell. My husband and I bought this place in a fit of madness and have been trying to make a paying concern of it.

Behind the veneer of her charming old lady manner, I caught a glimpse of flint-like hardness.

I’m not sure that I like all this science, Captain Hastings.

She'd Be a flat earther or an antivaxxer.

He was a very tall, attenuated old man, with a cadaverous face, mild blue eyes and a habit of irresolutely tugging at his little white moustache.

Col Lutrell.

In the doorway we encountered a grey-haired man, slightly built, who was hurrying out with a pair of field glasses.

“That’s Norton. Nice fellow. Crazy about birds.”

Birder!

He was very good-looking, though a man well over fifty, with a deeply tanned face. He looked as though he had led an out-of-doors life, and he looked, too, the type of man that is becoming more and more rare, an Englishman of the old school, straightforward, fond of out-of-doors life, and the kind of man who can command. I was hardly surprised when Colonel Luttrell introduced him as Sir William Boyd Carrington. He had been, I knew, Governor of a province in India, where he had been a signal success.

The sort of man, I reflected sadly, that we no longer seemed to breed in these degenerate days.

Don't Be a eugenisist about it.

These girls nowadays always seem embarrassed at having to admit to a father or mother at all.”

Your Judith is a very good-looking wench, but terribly highbrow. I find it rather alarming.”

Ew.

As I walked along the corridor some of the doors were open and I saw that the old-fashioned large bedrooms had been partitioned off so as to make several smaller ones.

Nothing is so sad, in my opinion, as the devastation wrought by age.

Riddled with arthritis, he propelled himself about in a wheeled chair. His once plump frame had fallen in. He was a thin little man now. His face was lined and wrinkled. His moustache and hair, it is true, were still of a jet black colour, but candidly, though I would not for the world have hurt his feelings by saying so to him, this was a mistake. There comes a moment when hair dye is only too painfully obvious.

Only his eyes were the same as ever, shrewd and twinkling, and now—yes, undoubtedly—softened with emotion.

When the very young girls come and talk to you kindly, oh so kindly—it is the end! ‘The poor old man,’ they say, ‘we must be nice to him. It must be so awful to be like that.’ But you, Hastings—vous êtes encore jeune. For you there are still possibilities.

Mercifully, though the outside decays, the core is still sound.”

I was not referring to the heart. The brain, mon cher, is what I mean by the core. My brain, it still functions magnificently.”

Then, the cooking, it is English at its worst. Those Brussels sprouts so enormous, so hard, that the English like so much. The potatoes boiled and either hard or falling to pieces. The vegetables that taste of water, water, and again water.

The bathrooms, the taps everywhere and what comes out of them? Lukewarm water, mon ami, at most hours of the day. And the towels, so thin, so meagre!”

I remembered the clouds of steam which had gushed from the hot tap of the one bathroom Styles had originally possessed, one of those bathrooms in which an immense bath with mahogany sides had reposed proudly in the middle of the bathroom floor. Remembered, too, the immense bath towels, and the frequent shining brass cans of boiling hot water that stood in one’s old-fashioned basin.

“You may speak for yourself, Hastings. For me, my arrival at Styles St. Mary was a sad and painful time. I was a refugee, wounded, exiled from home and country, existing by charity in a foreign land. No, it was not gay. I did not know then that England would come to be my home and that I should find happiness here.”

You attribute always to others the sentiments that you yourself experience. Hastings was happy—everybody was happy!”

Read him.

You had recently been severely wounded, you were fretting at being no longer fit for active service, you had just been depressed beyond words by your sojourn in a dreary convalescent home and, as far as I remember, you proceeded to complicate matters by falling in love with two women at the same time.”

Continues To read him.

You may not have observed that I gave you no answer. I will give the answer now. I am here to hunt down a murderer.”

Etherington died, apparently of food poisoning. Doctor not satisfied. As a result of autopsy, death discovered to be due to arsenical poisoning. Supply of weed killer in the house, but ordered a long time previously. Mrs. Etherington arrested and charged with murder.

No suggestion of actual infidelity, but evidence of deep sympathy between them. Young man had since become engaged to be married to girl he met on voyage out.

Great sympathy felt with her at trial owing to husband’s character and the bad treatment she had received from him.

Mrs. Etherington was acquitted. General opinion, however, was that she was guilty. Her life afterwards very difficult owing to friends, etc., cold-shouldering her. She died as a result of taking an overdose of sleeping draught two years after the trial.

She was looked after by her niece, Freda Clay. Miss Sharples died as a result of an overdose of morphia. Freda Clay admitted an error, saying that her aunt’s sufferings were so bad that she could not stand it and gave her more morphia to ease the pain.

CASE C. EDWARD RIGGS Agricultural labourer. Suspected his wife of infidelity with their lodger, Ben Craig. Craig and Mrs. Riggs found shot. Shots proved to be from Riggs’s gun. Riggs gave himself up to the police, said he supposed he must have done it, but couldn’t remember. His mind went blank, he said. Riggs sentenced to death, sentence afterwards commuted to penal servitude for life.

Bradley died of potassium cyanide administered in his beer. Mrs. Bradley arrested and tried for murder. Broke down under cross-examination. Convicted and hanged.

One evening on returning home, he was attacked outside his side door and killed by a blow on the head. Later, after police investigation, his eldest daughter, Margaret, walked into the police station and gave herself up for her father’s murder. She did it, she said, in order that her younger sisters might be able to have a life of their own before it was too late.

“What you gave me was an account of five different murders. They all occurred in different places and amongst different classes of people. Moreover there seems no superficial resemblance between them.

The only point that you might have mentioned, but did not, was the fact that in none of those cases did any real doubt exist.”

In each case, you see, Hastings, there was one clear suspect and no other.”

Supposing, Hastings, that in each of these cases that I have outlined, there was one alien note common to them all?”

Let me tell you this. X is in this house.”

There are, in fact, only three methods. The first is to warn the victim. To put the victim on his or her guard. That does not always succeed, for it is unbelievably difficult to convince some people that they are in grave danger—possibly from someone near and dear to them.

The second course is to warn the murderer. To say, in language that is only slightly veiled, ‘I know your intentions. If so-and-so dies, my friend, you will most surely hang.’

For a murderer, my friend, is more conceited than any crea...

You have to guess exactly how and when the blow is timed to fall and you have to be ready to step in at the exact psychological moment. You have to catch the murderer, if not quite red-handed, then guilty of the intention beyond any possible doubt.