Closed Casket: The New Hercule Poirot Mystery

by Hannah, Sophie

  ‘First, I would change my will and announce the change to everybody. Now, imagine Joseph—having put about the fiction that he is soon to die of Bright’s disease—imagine him hearing this news. I say that I have left everything to him, and that the very next day I intend to take him to see my doctor. That would induce a state of panic in him, no? He cannot very well refuse me in the circumstances—I might change my mind about leaving everything to him, which I doubt he would wish to risk; the honest and the dishonest are equally keen on large amounts of money and land, I have found. And my doctor would of course take one look at him and say, “A fine, healthy specimen”. The game would be up! I might send him away from Lillieoak in disgrace! Of course, I would do no such thing, but he was not to know that, was he? He believed his fibs had fooled me good and proper.

  ‘With the visit to my doctor looming the very next day, Joseph had one night only—mere hours—to think of a way out of the pickle he had created for himself. As far as I could see, there were only two routes of escape for him. He could try to kill me, or he could throw himself upon my mercy and tell me everything. What? Of course I would have forgiven him! Wholly and completely. What? No, no little black book entry for Joseph! If he had only decided, finally, to be completely truthful with me, I believe I could have cured him—of whatever was wrong with his mind that made him feel the need to indulge in these fabrications.

  ‘I notice you don’t ask if I would have forgiven him if he had crept into my bedroom with a length of piano wire and had a go at strangling me! I would have. Absolutely. We are all capable of acting unwisely when forced into a corner. If Joseph was desperate enough to resort to murder, prompted by my mischievous new will, then that was my fault. I was not, however, prepared to be murdered, so I asked Michael Gathercole to conceal himself behind my bedroom curtain that night, so that if Joseph were to creep in and try to smother me in my sleep, Michael would be there to stop him.

  ‘What you must understand, Edward, is that Michael was there, hiding in my room, in order to save not only me, but Joseph too. Mainly Joseph. Picture the scene: Michael springs out from behind the curtain and seizes the knife or gun or whatever it might be from Joseph’s hand. I sit up in bed and am told by Michael what has occurred. What would Joseph do then, once he had been caught in the act of trying to kill me—his employer, his friend? Perhaps then he would admit all and beg to be forgiven, and then I could help him.

  ‘You see, in the normal run of things, people who lie as easily as they breathe never admit to it. They have an endless capacity to invent new lies to explain the old ones. It is not a moral problem, in my opinion, so much as a mental illness. I see that you disagree, Edward, but I am right about this and you are wrong. In any event … catching Joseph red-handed and on the verge of committing murder was perhaps the only way to force the truth out of him, I thought. Because, you see, he might then have offered up his longstanding deception and his desperation to conceal it as mitigating factors, once he was accused of attempted murder—which is so much more serious than lying. He may have been willing, at that point, to say anything to make me believe he wasn’t simply a callous killer who wanted to get his hands on my money as soon as he could. And then, once he had admitted to his true problem, he and I could have addressed, together, the unhappiness that must have been plaguing him for so long. With my help, Joseph Scotcher could have become the man he was destined to be. But instead …

  ‘My plotting proved inadequate, as we now know. I never dreamt that anyone would … that anyone would … kill my darling Joseph.

  ‘I must say, Edward, I had not anticipated that you would prove quite so unsympathetic an audience. Can you not understand that Joseph, for me, was like a magician? He transformed my whole life, using nothing more than his words. Even his big lie, once I tumbled to it, felt like the most amazing feat of magic. Ah—you are confused. Well, I guarantee you will look at me as if I am a lunatic when I explain, and who knows? Maybe I am! All right, then: quite simply, Joseph had cured a fatal illness for which there was no cure. The world’s most brilliant kidney specialists had failed to find one, but Joseph Scotcher—my devoted, talented secretary—had succeeded! Do you see? He cured his Bright’s disease by turning out not to have it after all!

  ‘Don’t! There is no need to tell me that turning out to be a liar is not the same as curing an illness. I know that as well as you do. I merely mean to say that the effect upon me was that one minute I was in anguish because I was about to lose my beloved Joseph, and the next I learned that he was not dying after all and was very likely in perfectly sound health! It was as if he had cured a fatal illness. I meant it as a metaphor, not as a summary of the facts of the matter.

  ‘Look at your disapproving face, Edward! I wonder if you are angry with Joseph for misleading you too, in the short time that you knew him. Please try to see: he did not lie to you, or to me, or to anybody in particular. He simply … altered the truth, because he felt more comfortable doing so. And now I shall never get to the bottom of it. I shall never understand why he did it.’

  CHAPTER 32

  The Kidnapped Racehorse

  ‘My very first suspicions about Scotcher’s integrity and decency, or lack thereof?’ said Michael Gathercole. It was the next day. He and I had left Lillieoak and ventured as far as O’Donovan’s Hotel in Clonakilty. It was a great relief to be able to sit and talk and drink tea in a room where we would not at any moment be ambushed by an aggrieved Claudia or a fretting Dorro.

  The lounge at O’Donovan’s smelled musty and was stuffed too full of faded furniture. The curtains had lost any colour they had ever had, but the tea and cakes could not have been better and, in all honesty, I would cheerfully have sat on a packing crate in order to spend an hour or two in a relaxed and pleasant atmosphere. I could tell that Gathercole felt it too: as if something dark and heavy had been temporarily removed. He seemed more at ease than usual.

  ‘I remember the very moment,’ he said. ‘For a long time, it made no sense to me. Now it does. Scotcher said something about one of the Shrimp books—this was while the two of us were waiting to be interviewed by Lady Playford—and it was incorrect in every particular. He said, “Which is the book about the racehorse that gets kidnapped? The title escapes me.” I thought it odd, because he had said only a moment before that he knew all of Lady Playford’s books by heart, and I had told him I did too—and the thing is, there is no Shrimp book about a kidnapped racehorse, so he must have known that I would know that. Much later, I tumbled to what he was up to. He knew I would assume it was a mistake, albeit a rather inexplicable one. No civilized fellow would turn to a chap he’s only just met and say, “That’s a lie. You’re a liar.” And actually, I did assume it was a mistake at first.’

  ‘So did you set him straight?’

  ‘I tried to, yes. I said the only Shrimp book featuring a horse—in a very minor way—is Shrimp Seddon and the Voyage Around the World. The ship-building chap, Sir Cecil Devaux, has a horse named Sapphire, and Shrimp solves the mystery when she realizes that Mr Brancatisano, being Italian, pronounces Sapphire’s name incorrectly—“fear” for the second syllable instead of “fire”, making it sound like Sphere, Sir Cecil’s ship-building company, and causing no end of bother and confusion.’

  ‘Do you know, I think that is one of the Shrimp books I’ve read,’ I told him.

  ‘It’s one of the very best.’

  ‘Is there a dreadful person in it called Higgins, who ends up falling into the sea, never to be seen again?’

  ‘That’s the one!’ Gathercole smiled. ‘Well, you know more about Lady Playford’s books than Scotcher did when I first met him. I can see now that he asked his question about a kidnapped horse to draw me out. In correcting him, and in the conversation that followed, I provided him with enough detail to pass himself off, during his interview with Lady Playford, as someone who knew more about Shrimp Seddon and her exploits than anyone else in the world. Do you know what he said after I told him all
that about Sapphire and Sphere and Lord Cecil Devaux? He said, “Oh, yes—of course.” That was when I first suspected he was not so much an odd chap with a poor memory as a bit of a scoundrel. Only suspected, you understand. But an honest man would have said, “Golly, I got that quite wrong, then, didn’t I? I wonder how I could have misremembered so badly.” Instead, Scotcher’s “of course” implied he had known all along, and simply needed to be reminded. Tripe and twaddle! Anyone who had read Voyage Around the World would not have misremembered it in that particular way.’

  Gathercole seemed to want to say more, so I waited. A young woman came to ask if we would like more tea, and I told her that we would.

  ‘By then it was too late. I had already told Scotcher too much about Lady Playford’s work and all my bright ideas about it. When the time came for me to be interviewed, she barely asked me anything. I had to sit and listen as she told me about Scotcher—how awfully perceptive he was, and wasn’t it clever of him to notice this and that about the structures and the themes of her novels? All, needless to say, were things he had heard from me an hour or so earlier. Oh—did I not say? His interview lasted a full hour. Mine took only twenty minutes.’

  ‘But … did you not tell Lady Playford what had happened?’ I said.

  ‘No. I do not like to disparage others, and I have never forgiven myself for not speaking up—for failing to protect Lady Playford from that fraud Scotcher. Still, I doubt she would have listened to me.’

  ‘She most certainly would not have,’ I assured him.

  ‘Well, in any event, I was duly sent away after my short interview, and Scotcher got the job. And then four years later—no, almost five—Lady Playford summoned me and said, “I did not give you a fair chance, Michael. I see that now. I should like you to become my lawyer and handle my affairs henceforth—that is how I intend to make it up to you!” I was delighted, naturally. She had already arranged for Orville Rolfe to employ me, almost immediately after not giving me the job as her secretary.’

  ‘Yes, she told me.’

  ‘I owe everything to her.’ Gathercole frowned. ‘Everything. She also told me, that same day, that even though I was to be her lawyer and nothing to do with her writing, she intended to test out her Shrimp stories on me from now on—me and nobody else. The way she said “nobody else” so pointedly made me think that she was referring to Scotcher. And … well, now, many years later, I know that is precisely what she meant. “You are my number one, Michael”—that is what she said. I believe she meant it. Scotcher was her secretary, but he was not the one she confided in about her books. Never.’

  I nodded, seeing that this was important to Gathercole.

  ‘That same day, she told me about Scotcher’s Bright’s disease, only she related the news in a most unusual way. Instead of saying, “He is dying”, she said, “Joseph has told me that he is dying.”’

  ‘She wanted to indicate to you, without saying so explicitly, that she did not believe him.’

  ‘Yes, and I am afraid I could not restrain myself,’ Gathercole said. ‘You will think me petty, but I was as sure as I could be that Scotcher had still not read a single word Lady Playford has published, nearly five years after becoming her secretary. He could easily have read them all as soon as he got the job, but he did not. He preferred to fool everybody. I believe he revelled in his own dishonesty, though I have no evidence, just a feeling. Do you remember at dinner, the night he died, when he revealed the solution of The Lady in the Suit in front of Poirot, who had not read it?’

  ‘Hirsute, not her suit,’ I said. ‘How could I forget?’

  ‘That alone ought to be all the proof anyone needs that Scotcher cared not one jot for Lady Playford’s books! No one who cares about mystery stories would reveal a solution in such a cavalier fashion. And his advice to Poirot about reading the books in the wrong order, not chronologically, because that would be more akin to real life? I have no proof, but Joseph was forever producing fascinating insights and theories about the Shrimp books that cannot have been his own. I strongly suspect he got them from letters, which he then destroyed.’

  ‘Letters to Lady Playford?’ I said.

  ‘Yes—as her secretary, Joseph dealt with all her correspondence. He saw all the letters that came from readers before she did. Her publisher sends them in sacks. Joseph waded through them all—until he became too pretend-sick and Sophie took over. My uncharitable guess is that he stole those that were particularly interesting, memorized the opinions contained therein, then burned the originals. I recall walking into the drawing room once and catching him throwing a pile of paper on the fire. He looked startled and began to stammer about something quite irrelevant.’

  ‘You said that you could not restrain yourself, when Lady Playford told you about Scotcher’s allegedly fatal illness,’ I reminded him. ‘What did you do?’

  ‘What did I …? Oh, yes, that. I said, “Forgive me, Lady Playford, but what do you mean, ‘If Joseph dies’? Is he going to die or is he not?”’

  ‘How did she reply?’ I asked.

  ‘She smiled sadly and said, “That is the question, Michael. Oh, indeed, that is the question.”’

  CHAPTER 33

  The Two True Things

  Poirot returned two days later, in the morning. I had overslept, and was woken late by the sound of rapping on my bedroom door. I put on my dressing gown, went to open it, and found Poirot outside on the landing. ‘You’re back! Thank goodness.’

  This greeting seemed to please him inordinately.

  ‘I am back, mon ami, oui. And we can once again make progress. What do you have to tell me since we spoke on the telephone?’

  I told him about my conversation with Gathercole. Then I asked him if he had found what he was looking for in Malmesbury.

  ‘Yes—I learned much that was relevant and interesting, but I suspected most of it already. Get dressed, mon ami. I shall await you in the library. There we will talk. I have left out the copy of Shakespeare’s King John that I have been reading.’

  ‘Why are you reading it?’ King John—could that be the work of literature to which Poirot had alluded, the one that he thought relevant to Scotcher’s murder?

  ‘Dr Kimpton has been trying to draw it to our attention since we arrived,’ he said. ‘You have not thought to read it yourself while I have been away?’

  ‘No. If you wanted me to do so, you should have said so.’

  ‘Never mind, mon ami.’ With that, he turned his back on me and started to move towards the stairs.

  I washed and dressed quickly, and joined him in the library twenty minutes later. He was ensconced in an armchair in the corner, with King John on the table beside him.

  ‘Well, here I am,’ I said. ‘Tell me, then: why Malmesbury?’

  ‘It is where Joseph Scotcher’s mother lives. With the help of the local police, I was able to find her.’

  ‘What does she look like?’

  ‘It is interesting that you ask that. Would you not expect the mother of Scotcher to be beautiful, like a delicate angel? This woman was not. She was not pleasing to the eye. Also, she had …’ Poirot pointed to the top of his nose.

  ‘One eyebrow that went all the way across her face?’ I guessed aloud.

  ‘Yes. Like … a moustache above her nose instead of below!’ Poirot sounded delighted to have found the perfect description. I could not help smiling. ‘How did you know, mon ami?’

  I told him the one detail that I had omitted to mention over the telephone: that the woman Claudia Playford had seen in Scotcher’s company at the Randolph Hotel had appeared to have one long, continuous eyebrow.

  Poirot threw up his hands. ‘Did I not ask you to tell me everything? And you leave out this piece of the story? Sacré tonnerre!’

  ‘Accidentally,’ I told him, unwilling to feel remiss when I had done nothing but cooperate. ‘You deliberately did not tell me why you were at the hospital or who this eminent doctor was. Incidentally, how many patients died in the
corridors after you commandeered that office to talk to me for an hour?’

  ‘Died?’ Poirot frowned in puzzlement. ‘No one died. Now, I have made some important discoveries. I will tell you. Blake Scotcher, the younger brother of Joseph. He is real.’

  ‘Then it was not Joseph Scotcher in disguise who met Randall Kimpton at Queen’s Lane Coffee House?’ I said.

  ‘On the contrary, I am certain that it was. And if I am wrong … well, whoever it was that met Dr Kimpton, it was not Blake Scotcher, the younger son of Ethel Scotcher of Malmesbury.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘Because he died when he was six years old, from influenza.’

  ‘Goodness!’

  ‘Mrs Scotcher, having lost one son already, is beside herself with grief at losing another. This is made worse by the guilt that for so long she has felt on Joseph’s account. She neglected him as a child, she told me. He seemed always to be well and happy, while his brother Blake was sickly and needed her attention. He was forever coming down with one illness after another.’

  ‘I say!’

  ‘Oui. And Dr Kimpton says that the psychology cannot be proof of anything!’

  ‘Anything else from Mrs Scotcher?’

  ‘No. But interesting details from elsewhere. I went to Balliol College in Oxford, where both Kimpton and Scotcher studied—where they met, also. Did you know that before Scotcher took the position as Lady Playford’s secretary, he was what you might call “a Shakespeare man”?’

  ‘What? Like Kimpton was, before he went into medicine?’

  ‘Précisément. Many at Balliol remember both young men very well. The consensus of opinion is that Scotcher idolized Kimpton, and modelled himself upon him.’

  So Phyllis had been wrong about the direction of mimicry: she had naturally assumed that the man she loved was, as it were, the original, and Randall Kimpton the imitator—but it had been the other way round.