Agatha Christie’s Poirot - Anne Hart

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impending crimes.

      Nevertheless, the affair of the ‘Yellow Iris’ did tear him away, on a chilly night, from the contemplation of his beloved electric radiator to the far less certain pleasures of a champagne supper at a fashionable restaurant. Here – according to an anonymous phonecall – someone at a table decorated with yellow irises was in danger of being murdered. Dutifully insinuating himself into this lively scene, Poirot encountered hazards of his own. Seated beside a well-known South American dancer, he murmured:

      ‘Señora, as the evening advances I become more brave. If you would dance with me now –’

      ‘Oh, yes, indeed. You are – you are ze cat’s whiskers, M. Poirot. I inseest on dancing with you.’

      ‘You are too kind, Señora.’

      Altogether it turned out to be a tense evening. So quickly and cleverly did Poirot foil a murderer, however, that his amour propre returned in a rush:

      ‘Señora, as the evening advances I become more brave. If you would dance with me now – ‘

      ‘Oh, yes, indeed. You are – you are ze cat’s whiskers, M. Poirot. I inseest on dancing with you.’

      ‘You are too kind, Señora.’

      Poirot found events in ‘The Dream’ far less exciting. In this case a summons for help took him to the somewhat déclassé mansion of a reclusive millionaire, Benedict Farley, a man constantly tormented by a dream that at exactly twenty-eight minutes past three he will shoot himself. Poirot firmly declined the case (‘For that, Monsieur Farley, I should recommend Napoleon’s Book of Dreams – or the latest practising psychologist from Harley Street’), but within a week Farley’s dream had come true, and Poirot was summoned again. Gathered together were Farley’s widow, his daughter, his secretary, his doctor and a police inspector. Poirot heard out their stories, sat back, and inquired:

      ‘One more question, Mrs Farley. Had your husband good sight?’

      ‘No. Not without his glasses.’

      ‘He was very short-sighted?’

      ‘Oh, yes, he was quite helpless without his spectacles.’

      ‘He had several pairs of glasses?’

      ‘Yes.’

      ‘Ah,’ said Poirot. He leaned back. ‘I think that that concludes the case …’

      There was silence in the room. They were looking at the little man who sat there complacently stroking his moustache.

      Disturbing as all this was, at the outset of the case Poirot was preoccupied with anxieties of his own:

      There are certain humilating moments in the lives of the greatest of men. It has been said that no man is a hero to his valet. To that may be added that few men are heroes to themselves at the moment of visiting their dentist.

      Hercule Poirot was morbidly conscious of this fact.

      He was a man who was accustomed to have a good opinion of himself. He was Hercule Poirot, superior in most ways to other men. But in this moment he was unable to feel superior in any way whatever. His morale was down to zero. He was just that ordinary, that craven figure, a man afraid of the dentist’s chair.

      ‘It is a beautiful thought,’ said a deliriously happy Poirot half an hour later to a taxi driver, ‘that I have been to the dentist and I need not go again for six months.’ But even as he was digesting a celebratory lunch, George handed him the telephone: ‘It’s Chief Inspector Japp, sir.’ Astonishingly, within an hour of Poirot’s departure, Mr Morley, his chatty and inoffensive dentist, had committed suicide.

      Or was it murder? Or espionage? Or a monstrous double bluff of which poor Mr Morley was but an accidental victim? Steadily gathering victims, and paced by a familiar nursery rhyme, the case advanced like a juggernaut. Who was he really up against, Poirot began to wonder. Was he trying to avenge his dentist? Or was he, in fact, trying to save England? When Japp was called off the case by the highest authority, Poirot soldiered on alone:

      George entered the room with his usual noiseless tread. He set down on a little table a steaming pot of chocolate and some sugar biscuits.

      ‘Will there be anything else, sir?’

      ‘I am in great perplexity of mind, George.’

      ‘Indeed, sir? I am sorry to hear it.’

      Hercule Poirot poured himself out some chocolate and stirred it thoughtfully.

      When the case was all over, Poirot found himself exhausted. ‘Is it possible,’ he said to himself with astonishment, ‘that I am growing old?’

      The murder in Poirot’s last case of the 1930s occurred on 27 July 1939, and his investigation of it is superbly recounted in Sad Cypress, published in 1940. It is a story of letters and wills, love and greed.

      The centrepiece of Sad Cypress is the trial for murder of a young woman, Elinor Carlisle. Caught in a love triangle, her rival poisoned, the evidence against her is overwhelming. When all appears lost, a friend and would-be lover calls in Poirot.

      It was a most tactful and beguiling Poirot, looking ‘very Londonified’ and ‘wearing patent leather shoes’, who descended upon the village of Maidensford to interview a majestic housekeeper, a lovelorn garage mechanic, and a confused under-gardener. The re-examination of old evidence over many cups of tea became, at times, a game of cat and mouse. To win the confidence of the housekeeper, for example (‘for Mrs Bishop, a lady of conservative habits and views, strongly disapproved of foreigners’), Poirot had to play a trump card:

      He recounted with naive pride a recent visit of his to Sandringham. He spoke with admiration of the graciousness and delightful simplicity and kindness of Royalty.

      Mrs Bishop, who followed daily in the court circular the exact movements of Royalty, was overborne. After all, if They had sent for Mr Poirot … Well, naturally, that made All the Difference. Foreigner or no foreigner, who was she, Emma Bishop, to hold back where Royalty had led the way?

      NOTES

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