“Justice can be done,” said Poirot. “I am here to ensure that it is.”
“I hope you have more luck than Inspector Mackle,” said Felix Rawcliffe.
“Fortunately, I do not need to rely on luck, monsieur. I have the little grey cells.” Poirot pointed to his head. “They never let me down.”
“My main concern now is for the health and happiness of the living,” said Dr. Osgood. “I am talking about mental welfare as well as physical. What has Mrs. Catchpool—Cynthia—told you about the condition of Vivienne Laurier?”
“I know only that her husband, Arnold Laurier, is gravely ill,” said Poirot.
“Arnold will be lucky if he lives to see another summer,” the doctor said. “It is possible, but unlikely. However, his state of mind is substantially better than that of his wife. I am far more worried about her—which is why I implore you, Mr. Poirot: please do everything you can to solve this murder expeditiously. Vivienne’s future sanity depends upon your being able to do so.”
“Please tell me more,” said Poirot.
Mother was shaking her head. “There is nothing wrong with Vivienne that would not be wrong with anyone in her position. She is as sane as you or I, doctor. She is merely grieving the impending loss of the man she has loved for forty years. Do you expect her to dance a jig? It is possible to grievebeforea death, you know. I have seen several of my about-to-be-widowed friends do precisely that. The grief comes first, and at the most inconvenient time, while there is still serious illness and a rapid demise to contend with, and the back-breaking drudgery that accompanies all of that. The death, when it finally arrives, can be a relief.”
“That may be true,” said Dr. Osgood, “but—”
Mother did not let him finish. “You are as bad as my friend Sunny,” she said. “There was a horrid rift in our little group of Kent ladies for a while, after Sunny refused to try and understand why one might treat the loss of a husband after half a century as anything but a boon and a blessed liberation. I have met plenty like her, too. It is striking that those with that particular inclination do not have the wit to refrain from saying so to those with the opposite view. Sunny caused a thoroughly unpleasant dust-up—at the Chelsea Flower Show, too. Did she really have to do it in a public place? Even when she was given a good, hard shove and staggered backwards into some climbing Noisette roses, she kept going. I could scarcely credit it. I mean, we all know that some women of Sunny’s age do rather want rid of their husbands and hope for a few years of freedom at the end of their lives—but is it necessary to say so, repeatedly, to a friend who would dearly have loved to retain her late beloved for the duration?” Mother shook her head. “It fell to me to break up the scuffle, as the only person who could see both sides of the argument.”
Dr. Osgood looked a little stunned. Recovering himself, he said to Poirot, “It is not Vivienne’s unhappiness that alarms me the most. A baffling irrationality has taken hold of her. She says she is afraid, but it is a fear that makes no sense.”
“Afraid of what?” I asked.
“She believes that someone will murder Arnold if he so much as sets foot in St. Walstan’s Hospital,” said Dr. Osgood. “Months ago, the family made the plan of moving himthere, to Ward 6. It is a good plan. Undoubtedly, it is in Arnold’s best interests. He will very soon need hospital staff in attendance at all times of the day and night. Vivienne has done sterling work caring for him until now, and of course it has helped that I have taken a room in the Laurier household, but I am not always able to be there. The time has come when, really, a hospital like St. Walstan’s is where Arnold needs to be. It was all agreed. The move would happen at the beginning of January. I advised that it should be sooner, but Arnold was quite determined to spend his last Christmas at Frellingsloe House.”
Dr. Osgood, I noticed, did not refer to the place as Frelly. Good for him. I entertained myself with a fanciful notion: perhaps he and Felix Rawcliffe were the Poirot and Catchpool of yesteryear: compelled first to visit Frellingsloe House and then, later, to take up residence. I shivered at the idea that, once inside the Laurier family home, one was unable to escape.
Poirot and I would be escaping imminently, however. Two days at most: that was all it would take. This was far from the first time I had desperately looked forward to leaving a place before I had arrived; it was a state of mind I had inhabited almost daily, come to think of it, for most of my life. First boarding school, then more recently Scotland Yard... I wondered if anyone else shared my habit, or if I was the only fool in the world who regularly set off for destinations he had no desire to reach. There was only one thing I did habitually that I looked forward to: watching Poirot’s brilliant mind in action. I would havefound it a thoroughly stimulating prospect to observe his solving of the murder of Stanley Niven, had a generous helping of Mother not come as part of the bargain.
“So, Arnold got his way,” Osgood went on. “It was agreed that this coming Christmas would be spent at his home, and he would proceed to St. Walstan’s thereafter. Then Stanley Niven was murdered on the ward: a complete stranger, with no connection whatsoever to the Lauriers—yet Vivienne immediately started to carry on as though Arnold were sure to be the hospital killer’s next victim.”
“I do not find it surprising that Madame Laurier is reluctant to send her ailing husband to a place where a murder has occurred,” said Poirot.
“Neither would I, if that were all this was.” Dr. Osgood had turned back around and was facing forward in his seat. I could not see his expression.
“What do you mean?” Poirot asked him.
“I spend half of my working week at St. Walstan’s. The relatives of many of the patients on Ward 6 have told me that they share Vivienne’s worries about safety on the ward and at the hospital more generally. Some of the other doctors and nurses have said so too. St. Walstan’s no longer feels quite like the haven it was before. Yet most people have retained a sense of perspective. They understand that hatred of an individual is what leads to murder.”
“That is not always true,” said Poirot. “Money, very often, is the reason.”
The doctor frowned. “To inherit money, do you mean?”
“Sometimes that, assuredly. Sometimes blackmail isinvolved. The blackmailed party exhausts his supply of funds—”
“You prove my point, Monsieur Poirot. Whether it is done for an inheritance, or after blackmail, or from a deep personal hatred, the motive always applies to an individual.”
“Ah!” Poirot nodded. “I comprehend. You believe that those who happen to share a hospital ward with the victim are in no more danger than, let us say, people in hospitals a hundred miles away.”
“And those not in hospital at all,” said Osgood. “Yes, indeed. If this killer has a motive that also applies to other patients at St. Walstan’s, why have there been no further murders since 8 September, more than three months ago? And why should the culprit kill anyone else, at the hospital or elsewhere? There is no good reason to believe that he will, it seems to me. No one knows his name, his circumstances or anything about him. He is just as likely, therefore—more likely, I should say—to have a motive that applied only to Stanley Niven and nobody else.”
“If Mother has briefed us correctly, Arnold Laurier has assigned himself the task of solving Stanley Niven’s murder,” I said. “Might that be what his wife is frightened of—that he will make himself an irresistible target for the killer?”
“No,” said Osgood. “From the moment we learned that Stanley Niven had been murdered, Vivienne was terrified for Arnold. I was standing right beside her when she was given the news. Arnold had not yet announced his intention to meddle in the investigation. He had not at that pointheard about the murder on Ward 6. I saw how Vivienne reacted, Monsieur Poirot: she was not merely concerned, not simply anxious as anyone would have been. She was immediatelyin a state of terror.As if—” Osgood stopped.
“Continue, please,” said Poirot.
“I was going to say: as if she knew exactly who the killer was, why he had killed Stanley Niven, and why he would be coming for Arnold next,” said the doctor.
