Closed Casket

by Sophie Hannah

  “I am nothing if not ingenious,” Kimpton muttered. His air of good cheer had worn off a little.

  “No, Dr. Kimpton. In this instance, you were not ingenious but foolish. As you say: suddenly anybody could have poisoned Scotcher if the poison was put into the blue bottle before five o’clock . . . but who would have had a motive before five o’clock? Only you: the man whose first love had been stolen by Joseph Scotcher! The new will of Lady Playford was only announced at the dinner table that evening. By planting misleading evidence about the time of death, you made yourself the only viable suspect.”

  “Balderdash!” Kimpton said easily. “Pure bunkum! Anyone might have found out about Athie’s new will before she announced it—by fair means or foul. She might have confided in somebody, keen on secrets as she is—secrets are much more fun when shared than when kept absolutely to oneself—or the murderer might have come by the information illicitly. Athie had been planning the big announcement for weeks, no doubt—perhaps months. I was confident that the new will would still be viewed as the most likely motive. Even if it had not been, I didn’t see that I had much choice. As you pointed out, Poirot, Scotcher had announced to you all at dinner that the water he had drunk was bitter! True, Dorro thought his remark was aimed at her, but that did not make me feel safe at all. You said it yourself, old boy: all the water glasses had been filled before we sat down at the table. Why would I give mine to Scotcher when he had one of his own? And you had all seen me do it! I was afraid that, in due course, one of you would remember, and make the connection between that and Scotcher’s ‘bitter’ remark. It seemed glaringly obvious to me, that . . . well, that I had done it, that I was the guilty party.”

  Kimpton sighed. “I suppose knowledge of one’s own guilt will do that to a chap. But, in the hope of rendering it a good deal less obvious to everybody else, I took steps. Once I was confident that everyone had retired for the night—well, all apart from Poirot, who was snoring in a chair on the landing for a reason I couldn’t quite fathom, but he was deeply asleep and hardly likely to wake—I put poison in the blue bottle, knowing that was the five-o’clock-every-day bottle. Then I disposed of my water glass from the dinner table, so that no one could later find traces of poison in it. I hunted it down in the kitchen, smashed it and buried the fragments near a pile of broken glass and a smashed jam jar that I had seen in the orangery.”

  “So it was you who stole my glass!” Brigid Marsh announced loudly, startling us all. “I could have sworn it was Mr. Catchpool.” Remarkably, she glowered at me as she said this, not at Kimpton.

  Now I understood: she had noticed that a glass was missing and—for some reason best known to herself—decided I had taken it up to my room so that I could drink water in the night. On account of my dry lips—a description I would robustly dispute any day of the week. My lips were entirely normal.

  No doubt Brigid had searched my room, failed to find the missing glass, and decided I must have smashed it and hidden the pieces somewhere—hence the anecdote about her thieving nephew who had stolen sweets and broken a bowl.

  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 gotten 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 pretense 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 obvious 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 postmortem 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 d
own 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 parlor, 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 postmortem—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 parlor, 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 inquiry. 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 inquiry 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 parlor? 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 favorite 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 anytime 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 shriveled, 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.”

  Kimpton appeared to consider this. “Yes,” he said after a few moments. “Yes, I can see that you might see it that way. I saw it differently. That, no doubt, is why you enjoy inventing stories and I prefer to establish facts. I’m afraid to say that, in my estimation, my approach is the clear winner. After all, without the occasional solid fact, anyone could ask one to believe anything, and then no story is better than any other.” He turned to Claudia. “Come, dearest one. Let us depart.”

  Hand in hand, they left the room.

  Epilogue

  The next morning, Poirot and I waited outside the house for the car to be brought round. It was hard to believe that we were about to leave Lillieoak. I made a remark to this effect and got no answer.

  “Poirot? Are you all right?”

  “I am thinking.”

  “It looks serious, whatever it is.”

  “Not particularly. I do, however, find it interesting.”

  “What?”

  “We were invited to Lillieoak, you and I, as an insurance policy. Lady Playford believed that nobody would dare to commit a murder with Hercule Poirot in the house! No one would be so foolish. But someone did dare—Randall Kimpton was foolish enough to attempt it. And now he is dead. He could so easily have waited. In a week, Poirot, he would be gone! In a week, the obsession with opening the closed casket of Joseph Scotcher’s body would still have been there, as strong as ever! Why did Kimpton not wait?”