Closed Casket (New Hercule Poirot Mysteries, #2)

by Sophie Hannah

Conceal and reveal: how appropriate that those two words should rhyme. They sound like opposites and yet, as all good storytellers know, much can be revealed by the tiniest attempts at concealment, and new revelations often hide as much as they make plain.

At Lillieoak, apart from ourselves and the servants, there is our hostess, Lady Playford, the two lawyers we have talked about—Gathercole and Rolfe. There is also Lady Playford’s secretary, Joseph Scotcher, a nurse by the name of Sophie Bourlet—’ ‘A nurse?’ I perched on the arm of a chair. ‘Is Lady Playford in poor health, then?’ ‘No. Let me finish. Also here are Lady Playford’s two children, the wife of one and the young gentleman friend of the other. In fact, I believe Mr Randall Kimpton and Miss Claudia Playford are engaged to be married. She lives at Lillieoak. He is visiting from England. An American by birth, but also an Oxford man, I think Lady Playford said.’

‘You Englishmen! However strong the emotion, however fierce the fury, stronger still is the desire to smother it, to pretend it was never there at all.’

‘My theory is simply this: when you read the Shrimp books in the wrong order, you meet Shrimp and Podge and the gang not at the beginning of their story, but in the middle. Certain things have already happened to them, and if you want to find out more about their histories, you have to read the earlier books. Now, to my mind, this is much more faithful to real life.

Privacy! That was rich, coming from Poirot, the world’s most zealous interferer in other people’s romantic affairs.

‘Why do we allow words to have such power over us?’ Kimpton asked of nobody in particular. He had started to walk slowly around the room. ‘They are lost in air the moment they leave our mouths, yet they stay with us forever if they’re arranged in a memorable order.

My enemies were able to produce many scholars who agreed with them, as if an army of head-nodders were proof of anything.

‘One ought not to use words carelessly, or even spontaneously. Once they are launched, they cannot be called back.

‘People are peculiar little machines, Edward,’ she whispered to me. ‘Considerably more peculiar than anything else in the world.’

Poirot is not one to dash about the place and tire himself out unnecessarily. He prefers to solve whatever is his case of the moment by sitting in a comfortable armchair and giving it thorough consideration.

‘Good sense appears the most underhand of tactics to a man who has no reserves of his own to draw upon.’

Most people are scared of most things—never forget that! It is really only writers and artists who can cope with the puzzling ambiguities—and those with an investigative inclination.

Sometimes the brain forgets what it has more recently discovered, and reverts to prior false knowledge of what turned out to be untrue.

‘When you know two things are true, and those two things seem to go against each other, instead of telling yourself one must not be true, shouldn’t you ask yourself what third thing that you have not yet thought of would allow both true things to be true at the same time?’

That was what was happening, and for a very simple reason: people do not care to listen to those who thrust unpalatable scenarios in front of them; they prefer to hear only gilded pleasantries.