Closed Casket: The New Hercule Poirot Mystery (Hercule Poirot Mystery 2) (29 page)

Poirot said sternly to Kimpton. ‘I might have been snoring, but everyone had
not
retired for the night, Doctor. Catchpool was in the gardens, looking for Mr Gathercole and Mademoiselle Sophie, who were at that time missing. He, or they, might have returned at any moment. All three did, a little later, return to the house. That is
three people
who might have seen you coming out of Scotcher’s room, or on your way to the orangery to dispose of the glass. You are not as clever as you think you are.’

‘That is quite apparent.’ Kimpton threw up his hands. ‘You, meanwhile, are
far
cleverer than I imagined you could be. The casket business—well, that was an impressive leap you made!’

‘It was,’ Poirot agreed. ‘And many things started to come together in my mind when I knew the true meaning of the “open casket” metaphor—the
King John
meaning,’ he said. ‘If “casket” was a person, what did that mean about the argument overheard by Mr Rolfe? I wondered. I will tell you what it meant. It meant that the disagreement was between Randall Kimpton and Claudia Playford. She knew of his plan to murder Scotcher one day and, maybe fearing that it would go wrong, was trying to talk him out of it. He said, “Open casket: it’s the only way”—in other words, “I must murder Scotcher if I am to have satisfaction”. She said, “No, you must do no such thing.”’

‘And I was right,’ said Claudia. ‘It had already gone wrong—three days earlier, to be precise. I had found the strychnine. Randall took off his jacket rather carelessly and the damned bottle fell out of the pocket. Before that, I was blissfully ignorant of his deranged plan. Had he told me, he would have had the benefit of my opinion a good deal sooner. My opinion was that it was madness—the madness of an unhinged schoolboy.’

‘Dashed bad luck, the poison falling out of my pocket like that,’ said Kimpton. ‘You needn’t have known anything about it, dearest one. I’d have got away with it if you hadn’t found out, you know.’

‘When I asked Randall what was in the little bottle, he lied to me,’ Claudia told Poirot. ‘I could see that he was lying. I made it clear that I would not be fobbed off, and forced him to tell me the truth. Out it all came: Iris Gillow, née Morphet, Oxford; Joseph’s first pretence that he was dying, many years earlier, his impersonation of his own brother, to bolster his fakery. And of course, Randall’s plan to commit the perfect murder.

‘What I heard frightened me, and there’s not a lot that does that. I did not want Randall to risk his neck, and besides, there was no need for the whole silly to-do! It was perfectly obviously that Joseph was not dying! No one needed to commit murder in order to prove it!’

‘I couldn’t make her understand the need for
proof
, Poirot,’ said Kimpton. ‘That is why I am so glad that you understand.’

‘I was frantic with worry and I was careless,’ said Claudia gravely. ‘How could I have been so
stupid
as to discuss it in the house, when anyone could have overheard. Well, someone did! Orville Rolfe did. I thought using the open and closed casket metaphor would provide enough cover—I was wrong. This is all my fault, Randall.’

‘No, dearest one. The fault is entirely mine. If I had made the perfect plan I ought to have made, I would not have carried a vial of poison around with me for nearly two years—or else I would, at the very least, have put it in a more secure pocket.’

‘Mademoiselle Claudia, did you see, at the dinner table, what Dr Kimpton did to the glass of water before he passed it to Sophie Bourlet to give to Mr Scotcher? You knew he had the poison concealed in his clothing, I assume.’

‘I knew that, but, no, I did not see him put the poison in the water.’

‘When, then, did you discover that he had poisoned Mr Scotcher?’ Poirot asked her.

‘Later that evening. After dinner, and after Orville Rolfe’s digestive system had stirred us all up into a frenzy, Randall and I retired for the night. Immediately, he confessed to me what he had done, with the glass of water. Joseph would be dead by now, he said, and in the morning his body would be found, and so Randall needed to go and remove the relevant glass. There was a chip on its stem, he said, so he would be able to identify it. He also needed to put strychnine in one of the bottles of pretend medicine in Joseph’s bedroom. That way, everyone would imagine that the poisoning had taken place much earlier.’

Claudia stood and walked over to near where Lady Playford was sitting. ‘I was incandescent with rage, Mother,’ she said. ‘I had not merely suggested that Randall abandon his idea of murdering Joseph—I had
ordered
him to do so, earlier that very same day. And he had disobeyed me! All for the sake of a wretched post-mortem that would tell us nothing we did not already know! For that, he risked going to the gallows and leaving me alone. Very well then, I thought to myself. I am going to show him that no future husband of Claudia Playford disobeys her and gets away with it! I told him to go and do his water-glass-stealing and bottle-poisoning. Once he’d gone, I went after him and tiptoed down the stairs. I heard him close the door of Joseph’s bedroom after a few minutes—having successfully put the poison in the blue bottle, I assumed. From the sound of his footsteps getting fainter, I guessed he had gone next to the kitchen to look for the glass. I gambled on being able to go to Joseph’s room and find no one in it but Joseph.

‘Well, don’t all look at me as if you can’t imagine what’s coming next! He was dead, obviously. Stone-cold dead, as you would say, Dorro. I put him in his wheelchair, wheeled him to the parlour, tipped him out, and used that ugly club of Daddy’s to try and see to it that Randall was thwarted! He had defied me for the sake of his stupid obsessive need to open the casket that was Joseph Scotcher? Fine! I would punish him by making the cause of death so glaringly obvious that there would be no need for a post-mortem—Randall would be deprived of the thing he most wanted, and it would serve him right! It would teach him to listen to me in future.’

Claudia paused to compose herself. ‘I did not realize that a suspicious death always leads to an autopsy. Randall told me that later, when we made up. Oh, yes, we kissed and made up! I made it clear to him that, although I still loved him, I would never forgive him. I am not terribly good at forgiving people. Anyway, that is why I smashed up the skull of an already dead man. And do you know what, Poirot? I thoroughly enjoyed doing it—battering Joseph’s head the way I did—because I was livid! With Randall for being so fixated on Joseph and this silly proof that he had been hankering after for
years
, and with Joseph for causing all the trouble in the first place with his needless, idiotic lies, but most of all with myself—for loving Randall and being so fascinated by Joseph, when it had just become abundantly clear that I was better off without either of them!’

‘How your words wound my heart, dearest one,’ Kimpton said with a sigh. For once, he sounded neither pleased with himself nor determined.

‘What happened after you had disposed of the glass and put poison in the blue bottle?’ Poirot asked him.

‘I returned to my bedroom. I expected to find Claudia there, but she had vanished. I looked everywhere, and then I found her—with Scotcher’s body, in the parlour, beating his head to a pulp and yelling at him at the same time. I begged her to stop—that was what Sophie heard. And yes, I was in the library, with the door open. I could not bear to go any nearer. Oh, it was not the blood and gore that repelled me. You will laugh, Poirot, but it was at that moment—when I saw Claudia setting about Scotcher with the club, and all that blood, and she was even talking to him,
talking
to a dead man! It was at that moment that it dawned on me how badly—how irreparably, I feared—my plan had gone awry. I stood and stared and could not move—either towards the gruesome scene or away from it. It was the worst moment of my life, the nadir. “Somehow we have to make this right,” I thought. “Cover every trace.” I had not been so prudent and restrained for so many years only to have the woman I loved convicted of murder! And then I heard the sound of a door closing, and I knew somebody else was about.’ Kimpton stared coldly at Sophie Bourlet, as if the predicament in which he found himself were her fault and not his own.

‘Poirot, you must tell us how you worked all of this out,’ said Lady Playford. ‘I appreciate the aspect about
King John
and the casket reference, but really, was that all it took for you to put it all together?’

‘No, it was not all,’ Poirot told her. ‘I found a doctor in Oxford who had at one time been Joseph Scotcher’s doctor. He furnished me with some very interesting facts. That Scotcher had, to his knowledge, always been healthy was the first. Then, that Iris Gillow had been to see him only two days before she died. She had wanted to know if Scotcher truly suffered from a debilitating kidney disease that would one day kill him. This doctor said, quite properly, that he was unable to disclose information of that sort. He had then contacted Scotcher to ask if Scotcher had any idea why a young lady should make such a peculiar enquiry. Two days later, Iris Gillow was dead—murdered by Scotcher, wearing the same fake beard he wore to impersonate Blake Scotcher for the benefit of Randall Kimpton.

‘I also went to a hospital and spoke with another doctor, a Dr Jowsey—he provided some of your medical training, Dr Kimpton. He remembers you asking, on your very first day, about the difference, in visual terms, between a healthy kidney and a diseased one, and whether a doctor performing an autopsy would easily be able to distinguish between the two. It struck him as a most unusual question. Also worthy of note is
when
you decided to abandon the study of Shakespeare’s plays and pursue medicine. You made your first enquiry only fifteen days after Iris Gillow’s death
.
That was the catalyst that made you feel you
had
to know the truth about Scotcher’s health.

‘That is almost all of it,’ said Poirot. ‘Before I finish, however, I must say that my friend Catchpool helped me a great deal in this matter. You see, there was one thing that would not fit, no matter how much the rest of it made sense:
how could Joseph Scotcher have been, at the same time, dead from poisoning and alive and begging for his life in the parlour?
And then Catchpool made a very useful suggestion to me. He advised me to find the third thing—the one that makes the two things we know to be true not inconsistent with one another! If Scotcher was dead and yet Sophie Bourlet had heard what she claimed to have heard … why, then it becomes obvious that the man she heard speaking was not Scotcher! Then it all fell nicely into place, and everything pointed to Randall Kimpton as the murderer. Only one thing remains that I do not understand. Perhaps, Dr Kimpton …?’

‘Ask and ye shall be told,’ said Kimpton. ‘And, no, that isn’t a quote from anything. I expect it’s the green dress, is it? You want to know where it got to?’

‘I should like to know,’ said Claudia quietly. ‘It was my favourite dress.’

‘I’m rather proud of myself on the hiding-the-dress front,’ said Kimpton. ‘It was covered in blood, and the house was full of gardaí poking around. Then Fate smiled upon me and gave me an inspired idea. I thought of the one place where they would be guaranteed not to look.’

‘And that was?’ Poirot asked.

‘The messy leather bag belonging to the even messier police doctor, Clouder,’ Kimpton told him. ‘The same doctor who misplaced the key to his car and so could not attend the inquest. The gardaí wouldn’t have searched the possessions of their own medical chap, and indeed they did not. I tore up the dress and stuffed it into Clouder’s bag, pushing it right down to the bottom. When I saw what else was in there, I knew he wasn’t a fellow who was likely to shake it all out onto a table for a good old sorting out any time soon. That bag was a veritable shrine to detritus and decay! I’m sure the bloodstained strips of green material are still in there, and will remain
in situ
for years—unless you give him the order to fish them out, Inspector Conree.’

Conree bared his teeth at Kimpton, but said nothing.

‘That ought to have occurred to me,’ Poirot muttered. ‘The doctor’s bag—of course. Where else?’

Kimpton pulled a small bottle out of his jacket pocket, removed its lid and swallowed its contents in one gulp. ‘Never have too little of anything useful, that’s my advice, Poirot. Always equip yourself with a spare or two.’

I gasped, and heard others do the same. I saw Gathercole shudder. A yelp came from Lady Playford at the back of the room.

‘No!’ Dorro cried out. ‘Oh, how ghastly. I can’t bear it. Surely something can be done so that …’ She did not finish her sentence.

‘Again, you give up,’ Claudia said quietly to Kimpton. ‘So be it. Let us go upstairs, darling. That’s allowed, isn’t it, Poirot? I’m sure we can spare everybody else yet another gruesome spectacle.’

‘You should let me go alone, dearest one.’

‘I shall do no such thing,’ said Claudia.

‘Randall, before you go …’ Lady Playford began shakily. ‘I wish to say … well, only that it is rather peculiar and fascinating how different people are from one another. For you, the mystery of Joseph Scotcher is now solved, whereas for me what you have done has ensured it can
never
be solved. We knew already, those of us who cared to notice, that Joseph was not truthful about his health. What we did not know was
why
, or if anything could be done about it. I could not have given a fat fiddlestick whether his kidneys were dark and shrivelled, plump and pink or purple with yellow stripes! I wanted to find out about his hopes and fears, his loves and losses—whether, underneath all the lies, there was an honest heart waiting to be put to good use! Thanks to you, it is now impossible for me ever to know any of that. I don’t mean to make you feel any worse than you already do. It is only that I cannot understand a person who would go to such lengths to prove something of so little interest or importance.’