“Once safely back at Frellingsloe House after the hospital visit, Vivienne Laurier set to work,” said Poirot. “She begged her husband to die at home instead of moving to the hospital, using her fear of this roaming murderer as her very convenient reason. Monsieur Laurier, however, could not be persuaded. He insisted he must spend his last days at St. Walstan’s, for where else was there an intriguing, unsolved murder case just waiting to be solved by him? That was when his wife’s fear gave way to resignation. By the time she decided that killing him was the only way she could prevent the exposure of her secret, she had lost all hope of any good outcome. As she said herself, her heart had already died.”
“Where does Mr. Hurt-His-Head come into it?” I asked.
“Ah, yes, Professor Burnett,” said Poirot. “Without the help of his extraordinary behavior, I should not have been able to put together the pieces as soon as I did. He witnessed the murder of Stanley Niven. Then, moments later, he saw the killer—Vivienne Laurier—appear in the room next door. That is why the professor left his room, walked to Ward 6 and stood outside the door of Arnold Laurier’s designated room. For all he knew, the other people in the room were in mortal danger. He did not stretch out his arms to Vivienne Laurier in an appeal for her to rescue him. What he meantto do waspointto Madame Laurier, while saying the words, ‘To hurt his head. To hurt his head.’ He was doing his best to identify Stanley Niven’s murderer. He then continued to repeat those same words in an agitated manner—days, weeks, months later—whenever he saw Nurse Bee Haskins. Why? Because before Vivienne Laurier lost a large amount of weight, there was a clear facial resemblance between her and her sister Bee.”
“There was,” Dr. Osgood agreed. “How on earth did I not see it until now? But... their voices were so different, and their mannerisms...”
“Now Madame Laurier’s cheeks are hollow,” said Poirot. “It has changed the shape of her face entirely—the resemblance is no longer obvious. Before, however, it was unmistakable. When I was in the study, surveying the scene of Arnold Laurier’s murder, I caught sight of some photographs on the desk. There were several of Vivienne Laurier as she had once looked. I said to myselftout de suite, ‘Of course: she is a close relation of Bee Haskins. How can she not be, with that face?’ You did not notice anything amiss, Catchpool, because you had never met Bee Haskins. You saw nothing suspicious in those old photographs—only a rounder-faced Vivienne Laurier.”
Indeed, I thought. In which case, why had Poirot said to me—admittedly some time later—that I had all the elements I needed in order to work out who the murderer was? I did not. Never having met Bee Haskins, I had not been in a position to deduce that it might have been her facial similarity to Vivienne Laurier in her plumper days that hadcaused Mr. Hurt-His-Head to point and shout at her in an accusatory fashion. No doubt Poirot believed I should have been able to tumble to the truth even without that missing piece; still, there was no doubt that he had benefited, in his attempt to solve this puzzle, from a strong visual clue that I had lacked.
“Iris was clever to think of the vase and the paper flowers,” said Vivienne. “And the water. She made the scene look as much like Mr. Niven’s murder as possible. Vivienne had an alibi for Stanley Niven’s murder, you see, so everyone would assume she had not killed either of the two victims, if she used the same method. Killers tend to have very distinctive methods, I believe, that they use over and over.”
“Youare Vivienne.” Maddie took hold of her arm and shook it. “You are talking about yourself as if it’s not you. Stop it!”
“How did you put it all together?” I asked Poirot. “You knew everythingbeforewe heard from Scotland Yard that there was no trace of Vivienne Laurier having existed before she married Arnold Laurier at the age of 29, even under her supposed maiden name, Vivienne March.”
“Like the March sisters inLittle Women,” said Vivienne. “I loved that book.”
“From the start, Madame Laurier stood out to me as being suspicious,” said Poirot. “Everybody else in this house, everyone I met, presented, as far as I could tell, a coherent picture of themselves—or at least, not a profoundly incoherent one. Vivienne Laurier was the exception. She seemed to be a strangemélangeof facts that did not fit together.She has the strong-as-an-ox constitution,n’est-ce pas? The good genes that will cause her to live to be a hundred and fifty? Yet also I am told that she had lost her entire family by the time she married Monsieur Laurier, and she married him at the age of 29. And Monsieur Surtees, did you not tell Catchpool that, like you, she was one of five siblings?”
Terence Surtees nodded.
“I heard, also, that Janet Laurier believed her mother-in-law favored Maddie, her older sister, because she herself was an eldest child.” Poirot looked around the table, observing our reactions. “The eldest of five siblings,” he said. “Good strong genes. And yet all those younger siblings, as well as both of her parents, are dead by the time Madame Laurier is 29? How, then, did they die? Surely not from a range of illnesses—not if she comes from a family of such sound and healthy constitutions. In which case, there must have been a terrible accident. Or else a heinous crime was committed and they were all murdered in their beds one night. Those are the only other possibilities, are they not, once we have ruled out the kind of natural causes that afflict those with poor health and weak constitutions? Of course, sometimes even a strong and healthy person catches a virus and dies—but for this to have happened to all six of Vivienne Laurier’s parents and siblings? That I could not believe.”
So that was why he had made me lie in wait for Vivienne Laurier earlier, ready to ambush her with those particular questions as soon as she had finished talking to him in the library. And she had looked baffled and been unable toanswer, because there had been no accident all those many years ago, and no crime. Her four younger siblings were all still alive and in good health, no doubt. Perhaps one or both of her parents were too. Come to think of it, Vivienne had not told me that all the members of the family into which she was born were dead, only that she had “lost” them by the time she met and married Arnold Laurier. Now I understood that she had lost them by ceasing to be Iris Haskins; by leaving her past behind.
Questions pressed in on my mind: what was the vicious betrayal that Poirot had mentioned? What was so unbearable that it had required the abandoning of everything she had known and, presumably, loved, and the creation of a new identity?
Inspector Mackle walked into the room. He appeared to be alone, and stood watching the door as if he expected it to do something. A few seconds later, two women entered: one around fifty years of age and the other much older—perhaps closer to seventy. The younger woman had to be Bee Haskins, I thought. Poirot was right: her face was very similar to that of the less haggard Vivienne Laurier that I had seen in the photographs on Arnold’s desk. The older woman had white hair in a peculiar arrangement: curled in parts and straight in parts. She was inappropriately dressed for the occasion, in a red, floor-length evening gown and red shoes with heels high enough to make a person dizzy.
“Mr. Prarrow, this is Miss Verity Hunt, whose cottage you visited the other day,” said Inspector Mackle. “She is Nurse Zillah’s mother.”
“Well...” said Verity Hunt, as if there was a lot more she could add if she so chose.
“And of course, you know Nurse Bee already,” said the inspector.
Nurse Zillah, the child of this woman in the red dress, with the white hair? I doubted it. Bee Haskins and Zillah Hunt had exactly the same mouth and chin as each other. And Verity Hunt looked nothing like either of them. It was funny the way family resemblances worked. Zillah did not resemble Vivienne Laurier, even when Vivienne was more rotund than she was now, yet both she and Vivienne were strikingly similar to Bee Haskins, though in very different ways.
“Bee.” Vivienne rose to her feet. “What are you doing here?”
“Iris,” said Bee. She started to cry. “I have missed you so much, in spite of everything.”
“I am a little confused.” Vivienne looked around. “Who are all these people? Where is Nicholas? Is he coming to visit today?”
“There is no point in this charade, Vivienne,” Dr. Osgood said coldly. “They will hang you no matter what you say. Pretending to be a lunatic will not save you.”
“She is not pretending,” Bee Haskins said.
Jonathan Laurier was staring at his mother. After a few seconds, he seemed able to bear it no longer and tore his eyes away. Janet was looking down at her lap, crying silently. Maddie kept opening and closing her mouth. The curate, Felix Rawcliffe, was breathing loudly, looking from oneface to another. Terence and Enid Surtees were holding hands, muttering to one another every now and then. Olga Woodruff’s attention was focused solely on the frowning, hunched Dr. Osgood.
There was a frozen quality about the scene. Only Douglas Laurier seemed the same as he had been before the truth about his mother had been revealed. He looked as if he was busy thinking; possibly he was trying to formulate a plan of some kind.
Verity Hunt tottered over to Poirot on her absurdly high heels. “You have revealed all of Iris’s secrets to everybody, I believe? Or you are in the process of doing so. In which case, she has no need to pretend any more. Let me give all of you in this room the best advice you will ever hear from anybody,” she said immodestly, looking sternly at each of us in turn. “Whatever you most wish to keep hidden, steel yourself for the ordeal ahead, and then tell it to the whole world. At once, you will be free—and that freedom is glorious! It is far more worth having than the approval of others.”
“Bee?” said Vivienne. “Will you stay with me? You have been gone for a very long time.”
“Of course, dear.” Bee Haskins wiped away a tear. “I will stay with you until the end.”
