Closed Casket: The New Hercule Poirot Mystery

by Hannah, Sophie

  I didn’t know I was going to say it until the words came out of my mouth: ‘Iris Gillow—what if she is the key to all of this?’

  ‘What do you know about her?’ asked Poirot.

  ‘Only that Randall Kimpton needs to tell us who she is—because it seems to me that she must be a vital part of this story.’

  ‘Not really.’ The voice came from behind us as we stood outside Lillieoak’s front door.

  I turned. It was Kimpton, strolling towards us with his hands in the pockets of a long grey coat. ‘I do not deny that Iris is important, but she is not relevant. There is a difference. Shall we go inside? I said I would tell you after the inquest, and enough time has been wasted already.’

  No lights were on inside the house; it was as if we had entered the mouth of a cave. ‘“Here walk I in the black brow of night, to find you out,”’ said Kimpton in a tone of exasperation. ‘Except it’s not yet night and it would be nice to be able to see where one was going.’

  Once we were in the library with the lights lit, Poirot said, ‘Dr Kimpton, you knew, did you not?’

  ‘Knew what?’

  ‘That Mr Scotcher was not dying at the time of his murder. That he did not suffer from Bright’s disease of the kidneys, or any other illness.’

  ‘Well … that depends on your definition of knowledge.’

  We waited for him to say more. He, in turn, appeared to be waiting for us to speak, with his usual charming smile in place. After a few seconds, he adjusted it to a frown. ‘Strong suspicion is not knowledge, as any detective will tell you,’ he said. ‘I see you that are uninterested in this line of enquiry, so I will abandon it. Yes, in the sense that you mean, I knew. I did not believe for a moment that Scotcher was dying, or that there was anything the matter with his kidneys. I never believed it.’

  ‘Why did you not tell me this immediately, monsieur?’

  ‘Do you mean immediately after Scotcher was murdered, or immediately upon your arrival at Lillieoak?’

  ‘The former,’ said Poirot.

  ‘Conservation of energy.’

  ‘Would you care to explain what you mean by that?’

  ‘I did not wish to have an argument, or waste my time trying to persuade you,’ said Kimpton. ‘Why should you have believed me if I’d told you Scotcher was no more dying of a fatal kidney disease than you are or I am? Most people do not encourage everyone of their acquaintance to believe they are about to meet their maker when they are not. I knew that if I told you, you would go to Athie for confirmation, or Sophie, or both, and I knew what both would say: that I was the liar. You would have said, “Come, come, Dr Kimpton, you have let your imagination run clean away. Don’t be cruel. Nobody would do such a thing,” or words that conveyed the same meaning. Let me tell you, Poirot: somebody would always do such a thing, no matter how wildly implausible the thing. Anyway, happily we do not need to have this argument because the truth is now revealed. At long last.’

  ‘What about Mademoiselle Claudia? Did she believe in Scotcher’s illness?’

  ‘Claudia?’ Kimpton laughed. ‘Not a bit of it. Neither did Athie, or Sophie, or Hatton, or anybody with a shred of sense.’

  ‘Sophie Bourlet assures me that Scotcher was dying,’ Poirot told him. ‘She accuses the police doctor of lying about the state of his kidneys. What do you say to that, Dr Kimpton?’

  ‘It’s bunkum. As a doctor, I can tell you that no nurse—and Sophie is, I believe, a very good one—could have spent as long as she did tending to Scotcher’s every need and not tumble to the truth of the matter. You are not a scientific or medical man yourself, Poirot—I quite see that—so let me explain: Scotcher talked a lot about his impending death, and he was thin. In every other respect, he and the dying had little in common. He was never too weak or in too much pain to be witty, considerate and charming. Ask any doctor or nurse about their death’s door patients and you will find that flattering their interlocutors is generally not among their priorities. Yet for Scotcher, it was, always.’

  Kimpton pulled a chair away from a highly polished round table and sat down. ‘Sophie Bourlet is no fool,’ he said. ‘She is a shrewd and perceptive woman. She knew Scotcher was a fraud, but it didn’t stop her loving him. Now she is lying to protect his reputation.’

  ‘What about Viscount Playford and his wife?’ asked Poirot.

  ‘Harry and Dorro? Oh, they would have believed Scotcher, absolutely. I dare say that numbskull Phyllis believed him too.’

  ‘I do not understand,’ said Poirot. ‘If Lady Playford knew that Mr Scotcher was deceiving her so shamelessly, why was his employment at Lillieoak not terminated?’

  ‘Aha! That is an excellent question. You must ask her. I should be interested to hear her answer.’

  ‘Did you never ask her? Did Claudia not ask—Lady Playford’s own daughter?’

  ‘No. Neither of us referred to it.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘We had different reasons. I will tell you mine first. I gave the matter careful consideration and decided that Athie was every bit as clever as I am. She also spent much of each day in Scotcher’s company. She therefore had the capacity and the opportunity to suspect him, and, what is more, I was certain that she did. So! What would have been the point of telling her that I shared her suspicion? She had evidently decided not to act on it—to retain Scotcher in employment and to talk to us all about his illness as if it were real—which, to my mind, meant that she too was a liar.

  ‘She then took it further: she engaged Sophie Bourlet to cater comprehensively to Scotcher’s non-existent invalid needs. Now she was almost an equal partner in Scotcher’s edifice of lies! Oh, no, I was not about to issue any challenges—not without certain knowledge. Athie would have defended Scotcher to the hilt and taken against me. That would have upset Claudia dreadfully. She enjoys savaging her mother, and does not realize how much under Athie’s influence she remains. I do not believe she would ever marry a man of whom her mother seriously disapproved.’

  ‘And what was Mademoiselle Claudia’s reason for failing to speak to Lady Playford about Scotcher’s lies?’

  ‘Sport.’ Kimpton grinned. ‘It’s always sport with Claudia. She adores two things: drama and power. In that respect, she is an exact replica of Athie. She dropped just enough hints to let Athie know that she knew—’

  ‘Aha!’ Poirot said triumphantly. ‘So Claudia knew, but you only suspected?’

  Kimpton sighed wearily. ‘I am disappointed in you, Poirot. How could Claudia have known any more than I did? She had her suspicions, however, and she made the most of them. Imagine that Claudia had faced Scotcher across the breakfast table one day and said, “Your illness—it’s a great big whopping lie, old bean!” in front of Athie and everyone. What would have happened? Scotcher and his collaborators in deception would have denied it, and Claudia and I would have insisted that we did not believe them, and that would have been that. There would have been no way to settle the matter, no more suspense infusing every conversation at Lillieoak, no more mystery to enliven our humdrum lives. Most of all, there would have been no more scope for Claudia to drift menacingly around the place as if at any moment she might spill the beans and cause the most almighty scene. My impression was that Athie feared she might one day, which gave her a certain power. My dearest one adores power. Do you understand at all, Poirot? Catchpool? I expect our ways seem very strange to you.’

  ‘No stranger than the ways of anybody else,’ said Poirot.

  ‘Oh, I would not say that,’ said Kimpton. Something about his tone conveyed a sense of a warning. ‘Tell me this: have you ever before met a man who pretended to be dying any day now when in truth he was perfectly healthy?’

  ‘That precise pretence? No, I have not.’

  ‘There you are, then.’

  ‘Although I did encounter a criminal several years ago, a man who very much wished to avoid playing chess—’

  ‘Incidentally, whoever murdered Scotcher …’ Kimpton interru
pted Poirot’s reminiscences. ‘That person is not why he died. He died because, quite needlessly, he invited death into his life. I have never been more convinced of anything. Death had not spotted him, nor sought him out—it was, for the time being, steering clear of him, but then he dangled the bait in front of death’s nose, with all his lies, and Death repaid him by snatching his life away. That is what I think.’

  ‘That does not sound very scientific,’ said Poirot.

  ‘I will concede: it does not,’ Kimpton agreed. ‘There must be a little of the Shakespeare scholar still left in me. And, as if that were not enough, there is also Iris. She is the reason why no opinion I offer about Scotcher could ever be objective.’

  ‘Iris Gillow?’ asked Poirot.

  ‘Yes.’ Kimpton stood up and walked over to the window again. ‘Though her name was Iris Morphet when I first met her. Shall I tell you about her?’

  CHAPTER 27

  The Iris Story

  ‘I met Iris Morphet when I was studying at Oxford. That is also where, and when, I met Joseph Scotcher. I cannot resist adding, though it is quite irrelevant, that I met them on the very same day, although they did not until later meet each other.

  ‘Do I wish they had never met? That is a tricky question! How does one choose between the present and what was once a possible future? Very hard indeed.

  ‘In college, Scotcher and I had rooms that were adjacent to one another. We met one day after both popping out of our little doors at the same time, like the man and woman from one of those old German weather houses! We soon became friendly. Scotcher flattered me most determinedly, and I lapped it up, rotten egotistical creature that I was in those days. I felt that befriending him was the least I could do. At the risk of sounding pleased with myself … well, it was clear to me that everything I was, he desired to be: rich, handsome, confident.

  ‘You think Joseph is handsome, I suppose? Pretty perhaps—altogether too delicate-looking for a man. And you think he is confident, I dare say? Well, not in those days, he wasn’t. Timid as a mouse! Hung on my every word. In due course, I noticed that a lot of his words were in fact mine. I once heard him tell a mutual friend about something amusing that had happened to him in Sevenoaks, in Kent—except it was an incident that had happened to me, not to him. I’d told him about it and, not knowing I was within earshot, he retold it as if it were his own experience.

  ‘I soon started to question whether anything I heard from him was the truth. Was it really his grandmother who had once dropped a hairnet into a bowl of rice pudding or was it some other chap’s? Was it Scotcher’s childhood home that had flooded, destroying all his treasured possessions, or that of a train porter who had once carried his suitcase? Was there ever a flood at all? Who could tell?

  ‘What? No, I never challenged him. Oh, I don’t know. I felt sorry for him, I suppose. I hoped that he mostly told the truth—perhaps he had only got carried away on that one occasion, I told myself, because my caper in Sevenoaks had been such a riot!

  ‘Then there was the flattery. I wrote something for my tutor that had Scotcher in raptures. He asked my permission to have copies made, at his own expense, so that he could share it with his mother and his brother, both of whom would love it, he told me. I thought it rather lumbering and uninspired myself, but a few weeks later Scotcher told me that his brother had declared it to be simply the best prose he had ever read, and what cogent arguments, and what intellectual brilliance …

  ‘Gentlemen, please remember this brother of Scotcher’s, for I shall mention him again in due course. His name is Blake. Scotcher and he grew up in Malmesbury, and Scotcher was the older of the two—and that is the sum total of what I learned about my new best friend at Oxford, who was remarkably reluctant to talk about himself or his family. I had the sense that they had no means to speak of, and that Scotcher was rather ashamed of them—but, at a distance of this many years, I can’t recall whether he told me anything of the sort. My imagination might have filled in the gaps.

  ‘It was about two months after I met Scotcher that he first raised the subject of his health. He returned from a trip to the doctor, or what he told me was a trip to the doctor, and announced that he had bad news: there was something wrong with his kidneys—so wrong that it might kill him. Well, I duly felt even sorrier for him! Who wouldn’t? There was I, stepping out with the lovely Iris Morphet …

  ‘I’m supposed to be telling you about her, aren’t I? Not Scotcher. The trouble is, other people’s romantic histories are so tedious, and the man I was then is not the man I am today. Besides, I’m eager to get to the exciting part of the story. I must, however, lay the foundations.

  ‘I was in love with Iris and she with me—that is all that needs to be said about that! She was not a beauty like Claudia, and neither did she have Claudia’s alluring quick-wittedness that I find so irresistible, or her sharp tongue. My dearest one is a minx, is she not? I do adore a minx! Iris was more the good girl sort, I suppose, and unfailingly kind. She had big red lips that needed no paint, flawless skin like a statue made of marble, and flaming red hair. There was something comforting about her. She was calm and serene, but passionate too: as if she had claimed and tamed the fire. She seemed to the young Randall Kimpton to be the very essence of womanhood. Once again, quite different from Claudia.

  ‘I’m convinced that Claudia is merely disguised as a beautiful young woman and is in fact a cruel Roman Emperor, fixated upon revenge. She is never happier than when she decides the world has done her a grievous wrong—which is every day, as reliable as the rising of the sun. Iris was different: grateful for a smile or a pleasant word, rarely angry or ill-tempered.

  ‘You might think it strange that I was drawn to two so different women. I disagree. Opposites attract, as everyone knows—but there is also something satisfying about meeting the female version of oneself. Claudia is, quite simply, a version of me that I wish to defile in all the usual enjoyable ways. Really, what could be better?

  ‘Do I shock you, gentlemen? I apologize. It’s only that I’m rather keen on the truth. If it’s true, then one ought to be able to come out and say it. I don’t give a fig for virtue—who can say what that is, anyway?—but without truth, we are all doomed to live out our days in darkness. And all this talk of truth brings me back to Scotcher.

  ‘The news he brought back from his medical consultations grew progressively worse. Many people in Oxford knew about his kidney condition by now, but I was closer to him than anybody in those days, and no one else monitored him in quite the way I did. What? Oh, yes, he had met Iris by now, many times. And I do her an injustice by saying that I was closer to Scotcher than anyone else. Iris took more of an interest in his ailing, failing kidneys than I did. She was always fussing over him—our poor, sick friend—always fetching things for him and inflicting her sensible advice on him: he must be stoical and optimistic, but at the same time practical; he must make sure to have fun and enjoy life, but not too much fun—on and on ad nauseam. It reached the point where I was sick of hearing about Scotcher’s blasted kidneys.

  ‘Being an observant fellow, I couldn’t help noticing that having the most wretched kidneys on this fair isle—that fair isle, I should say, since I’m talking about England—never stopped Scotcher from doing any of the things he most wanted to do. Whereas it regularly prevented him from undertaking life’s more tedious tasks. I won’t bore you with the details. Suffice to say, I became suspicious. I shared my suspicions with several friends and one university official, and quickly learned that most people would much rather not know an inconvenient truth—and besides, what was I able to prove? Scotcher by now was flattering everyone he met, it seemed, where once he had only bothered to flatter me, and nobody wanted to think ill of him. Think ill—oh, the irony! Most people did not want to consider that he might be perfectly well and thoroughly dishonest. They preferred to take their Joseph Scotcher sick and saintly.

  ‘I said nothing about any of this to Iris, which was silly of me, b
ut she was forever telling me I ought to be softer, kinder, more like her.

  ‘One day I followed Scotcher, without his knowledge, to what he had told me was a meeting with his doctor. Unsurprisingly, he went nowhere near a surgery or hospital. He met the wife of the master of … well, I won’t say which college it was, for I have no wish to cause trouble for the lady in question. The point is, while Scotcher was supposed to be consulting a kidney specialist—a man—he was strolling through the botanic garden, exchanging confidences with another man’s wife.

  ‘Naïvely, I assumed that if he was busy with her, he would not also be busy with Iris, but I was wrong. I had not yet proposed marriage to Iris. Like a damned fool, I took too long about it, waiting for some sort of sign that she was the right girl for me. Imagine my shock when one day she announced that Joseph Scotcher had proposed to her and she had accepted him! Scotcher needed her so much more than I did, she explained tearfully. I was strong, whereas he was weak.

  ‘You’re going to ask me if I told her then of my suspicions. I did not. I had not done so before, and to announce them now, suddenly, would have made everybody question my motives and my honour. Iris would have thought I was prepared to say anything to discredit Scotcher. I did not wish to lower myself, and, as I have already said, I did not know for certain. What if I was wrong? I would have looked like a prize blockhead! Surely no one would tell a lie of such enormity, I kept trying to persuade myself.

  ‘To be frank, I was so angry with Iris that I found the idea of her marrying a complete charlatan rather entertaining. She and Scotcher deserved one another, I thought.

  ‘Scotcher threw himself upon my mercy. All I had to do was ask, he said, and he would explain to Iris that he could not marry her after all, though they were desperately in love. Ha! Called his bluff, I did! “I should very much like you to call off your engagement and return my young lady,” I told him. You should have seen the look on his face. He started to splutter. He assured me that once I thought about it, I would realize that I could never be truly happy with a woman who had betrayed me—and with my closest friend, too.