by Tony Medawar
‘Ah!’ cried Poirot. ‘The ball!’
He blushed and appeared uncomfortable. I guessed that he had not meant the ball to be seen.
‘Come on, Mollie,’ shouted Graham now in a towering passion.
The girl had retrieved the ball and handed it to Poirot.
‘I did not know that you kept a dog, M. Poirot,’ she said.
‘I do not, Mademoiselle,’ said Poirot.
The girl followed her cousin out of the room. Poirot turned to me.
‘Quick, mon ami,’ he said. ‘Let us visit the companion, the now rich Miss Lawson. I wish to see her before she is in any way put upon her guard.’
‘If it wasn’t for the fact that James Graham knew about the new will, I should be inclined to suspect him of having a hand in this business. He was down that last weekend. However, since he knew that the old lady’s death would not benefit him—well, that puts him out of court.’
‘Since he knew—’ murmured Poirot thoughtfully.
‘Why, yes, he admitted as much,’ I said impatiently.
‘Mademoiselle was quite surprised at his knowing. Strange that he should not tell her at the time. Unfortunate. Yes, unfortunate.’
Exactly what Poirot was getting at I did not quite know, but knew from his tone that there was something. However, soon after, we arrived at Clanroyden Mansions.
VII
Miss Lawson was very much as I had pictured her. A middle-aged woman, rather stout, with an eager but somewhat foolish face. Her hair was untidy and she wore pince-nez. Her conversation consisted of gasps and was distinctly spasmodic.
‘So good of you to come,’ she said. ‘Sit here, won’t you? A cushion. Oh! dear, I’m afraid that chair isn’t comfortable. That table’s in your way. We’re just a little crowded here.’ (This was undeniable. There was twice as much furniture in the room than there should have been, and the walls were covered with photographs and pictures.) ‘This flat is really too small. But so central. I’ve always longed to have a little place of my own. But there, I never thought I should. So good of dear Miss Wheeler. Not that I feel at all comfortable about it. No, indeed I don’t. My conscience, M. Poirot. Is it right? I ask myself. And really I don’t know what to say. Sometimes I think that Miss Wheeler meant me to have the money and so it must be all right. And other times—well, flesh and blood is flesh and blood—I feel very badly when I think of Mollie Davidson. Very badly indeed!’
‘And when you think of Mr James Graham?’
Miss Lawson flushed and drew herself up.
‘That is very different. Mr Graham has been very rude—most insulting. I can assure you, M. Poirot—there was no undue influence. I had no idea of anything of the kind. A complete shock to me.’
‘Miss Wheeler did not tell you of her intentions?’
‘No, indeed. A complete shock.’
‘You had not, in any way, found it necessary to—shall we say, open the eyes—of Miss Wheeler in regard to her nephew’s shortcomings?’
‘What an idea, M. Poirot! Certainly not. What put that idea into your head, if I may ask?’
‘Mademoiselle, I have many curious ideas in my head.’
Miss Lawson looked at him uncertainly. Her face, I reflected, was really singularly foolish. The way the mouth hung open for instance. And yet the eyes behind the glasses seemed more intelligent than one would have suspected.
Poirot took something from his pocket.
‘You recognise this, Mademoiselle?’
‘Why, it’s Bob’s ball!’
‘No,’ said Poirot. ‘It is a ball I bought at Woolworth’s.’
‘Well, of course, that’s where Bob’s balls do come from. Dear Bob.’
‘You are fond of him?’
‘Oh! yes, indeed, dear little doggie. He always slept in my room. I’d like to have him in London, but dogs aren’t really happy in town, are they, M. Poirot?’
‘Me, I have seen some very happy ones in the Park,’ returned my friend gravely.
‘Oh! yes, of course, the Park,’ said Miss Lawson vaguely. ‘But it’s very difficult to exercise them properly. He’s much happier with Ellen, I feel sure, at the dear Laburnums. Ah! what a tragedy it all was!’
‘Will you recount to me, Mademoiselle, just what happened on that evening when Miss Wheeler was taken ill?’
‘Nothing out of the usual. At least, oh! of course, we held a séance—with distinct phenomena—distinct phenomena. You will laugh, M. Poirot. I feel you are a sceptic. But oh! the joy of hearing the voices of those who have passed over.’
‘No, I do not laugh,’ said Poirot gently.
He was watching her flushed excited face.
‘You know, it was most curious—really most curious. There was a kind of halo—a luminous haze—all round dear Miss Wheeler’s head. We all saw it distinctly.’
‘A luminous haze?’ said Poirot sharply.
‘Yes. Really most remarkable. In view of what happened, I felt, M. Poirot, that already she was marked, so to speak, for the other world.’
‘Yes,’ said Poirot. ‘I think she was—marked for the other world.’ He added, completely incongruously it seemed to me, ‘Has Dr Lawrence got a keen sense of smell?’
‘Now it’s curious you should say that. “Smell this, doctor,” I said, and held up a great bunch of lilies of the valley to him. And would you believe it, he couldn’t smell a thing. Ever since influenza three years ago, he said. Ah! me—physician, heal thyself is so true, isn’t it?’
Poirot had risen and was prowling round the room. He stopped and stared at a picture on the wall. I joined him.
It was rather an ugly needlework picture done in drab wools, and represented a bulldog sitting on the steps of a house. Below it, in crooked letters, were the words ‘Out all night and no key!’
Poirot drew a deep breath.
‘This picture, it comes from The Laburnums?’
‘Yes. It used to hang over the mantelpiece in the drawing-room. Dear Miss Wheeler did it when she was a girl.’
‘Ah!’ said Poirot. His voice was entirely changed. It held a note that I knew well.
He crossed to Miss Lawson.
‘You remember Bank Holiday? Easter Monday. The night that Miss Wheeler fell down the stairs? Eh bien, the little Bob, he was out that night, was he not? He did not come in.’
‘Why, yes, M. Poirot, however did you know that? Yes, Bob was very naughty. He was let out at nine o’clock as usual, and he never came back. I didn’t tell Miss Wheeler—she would have been anxious. That is to say, I told her the next day, of course. When he was safely back. Five in the morning it was. He came and barked underneath my window and I went down and let him in.’
‘So that was it! Enfin!’ He held out his hand. ‘Goodbye, Mademoiselle. Ah! Just one more little point. Miss Wheeler took digestive tablets after meals always, did she not? What make were they?’
‘Dr Carlton’s After Dinner Tablets. Very efficacious, M. Poirot.’
‘Efficacious! Mon Dieu!’ murmured Poirot, as we left. ‘No, do not question me, Hastings. Not yet. There are still one or two little matters to see to.’
He dived into a chemist’s and reappeared holding a white-wrapped bottle.
VIII
He unwrapped it when we got home. It was a bottle of Dr Carlton’s After Dinner Tablets.
‘You see, Hastings. There are at least fifty tablets in that bottle—perhaps more.’
He went to the bookshelf and pulled out a very large volume. For ten minutes he did not speak, then he looked up and shut the book with a bang.
‘But yes, my friend, now you may question. Now I know—everything.’
‘She was poisoned?’
‘Yes, my friend. Phosphorus poisoning.’
‘Phosphorus?’
‘Ah! mais oui—that is where the diabolical cleverness came in! Miss Wheeler had already suffered from jaundice. The symptoms of phosphorus poisoning would only look like another attack of the same complaint. Now listen, very often th
e symptoms of phosphorus poisoning are delayed from one to six hours. It says here’ (he opened the book again) ‘“The person’s breath may be phosphorescent before he feels in any way affected.” That is what Miss Lawson saw in the dark—Miss Wheeler’s phosphorescent breath—“a luminous haze”. And here I will read you again. “The jaundice having thoroughly pronounced itself, the system may be considered as not only under the influence of the toxic action of phosphorus, but as suffering in addition from all the accidents incidental to the retention of the biliary secretion in the blood, nor is there from this point any special difference between phosphorus poisoning and certain affections of the liver—such, for example, as yellow atrophy.”’
‘Oh! it was well planned, Hastings! Foreign matches—vermin paste. It is not difficult to get hold of phosphorus, and a very small dose will kill. The medicinal dose is from 1/100 to 1/30 grain. Even .116 of a grain has been known to kill. To make a tablet resembling one of these in the bottle—that too would not be too difficult. One can buy a tablet-making machine, and Miss Wheeler she would not observe closely. A tablet placed at the bottom of this bottle—one day, sooner or later, Miss Wheeler will take it, and the person who put it there will have a perfect alibi, for she will not have been near the house for ten days.’
‘She?’
‘Mollie Davidson. Ah! mon ami, you did not see her eyes when that ball bounced from my pocket. The irate M. Graham, it meant nothing to him—but to her! “I did not know you kept a dog, M. Poirot.” Why a dog? Why not a child? A child, too, plays with balls. But that—it is not evidence, you say. It is only the impression of Hercule Poirot. Yes, but everything fits in. M. Graham is furious at the idea of an exhumation—he shows it. But she is more careful. She is afraid to seem unwilling. And the surprise and indignation she cannot conceal when she learns that her cousin has known of the will all along! He knew—and he did not tell her. Her crime had been in vain. Do you remember my saying it was unfortunate he didn’t tell her? Unfortunate for the poor Miss Wheeler. It meant her death sentence and all the good precautions she had taken, such as the will, were in vain.’
‘You mean the will—no, I don’t see.’
‘Why did she make that will? The incident of the dog’s ball, mon ami.
‘Imagine, Hastings, that you wish to cause the death of an old lady. You devise a simple accident. The old lady, before now, has slipped over the dog’s ball. She moves about the house in the night. Bien, you place the dog’s ball on the top of the stairs and perhaps also you place a strong thread or fine string. The old lady trips and goes headlong with a scream. Everyone rushes out. You detach your broken string while everyone else is crowding round the old lady. When they come to look for the cause of the fall, they find—the dog’s ball where he so often left it.
‘But, Hastings, now we come to something else. Suppose the old lady earlier in the evening after playing with the dog, puts the ball away in its usual place, and the dog goes out—and stays out. That is what she learns from Miss Lawson on the following day. She realises that it cannot be the dog who left the ball at the top of the stairs. She suspects the truth—but she suspects the wrong person. She suspects her nephew, James Graham, whose personality is not of the most charming. What does she do? First she writes to me—to investigate the matter. Then she changes her will and tells James Graham that she has done so. She counts on his telling Mollie though it is James she suspects. They will know that her death will bring them nothing! C’est bien imaginé for an old lady.
‘And that, mon ami, was the meaning of her dying words. I comprehend well enough the English to know that it is a door that is ajar, not a picture. The old lady is trying to tell Ellen of her suspicions. The dog—the picture above the jar on the mantelpiece with its subject—‘Out all night’ and the ball put away in the jar. That is the only ground for suspicion she has. She probably thinks her illness is natural—but at the last minute has an intuition that it is not.’
He was silent for a moment or two.
‘Ah! if only she had posted that letter. I could have saved her. Now—’
He took up a pen and drew some notepaper towards him.
‘What are you going to do?’
‘I am going to write a full and explicit account of what happened and post it to Miss Mollie Davidson with a hint that an exhumation will be applied for.’
‘And then?’
‘If she is innocent—nothing—’ said Poirot gravely. ‘If she is not innocent—we shall see.’
IX
Two days later there was a notice in the paper stating that a Miss Mollie Davidson had died of an overdose of sleeping draught. I was rather horrified. Poirot was quite composed.
‘But no, it has all arranged itself very happily. No ugly scandal and trial for murder—Miss Wheeler she would not want that. She would have desired the privacy. On the other hand one must not leave a murderess—what do you say?—at loose. Or sooner or later, there will be another murder. Always a murderer repeats his crime. No,’ he went on dreamily ‘it has all arranged itself very well. It only remains to work upon the feelings of Miss Lawson—a task which Miss Davidson was attempting very successfully—until she reaches the pitch of handing over half her fortune to Mr James Graham who is, after all, entitled to the money. Since he was deprived of it under a misapprehension.’
He drew from his pocket the brightly coloured rubber ball.
‘Shall we send this to our friend Bob? Or shall we keep it on the mantelpiece? It is a reminder, n’est ce pas, mon ami, that nothing is too trivial to be neglected? At one end, Murder, at the other only—the incident of the dog’s ball …’
AGATHA CHRISTIE
Agatha Christie (1890–1976) became in her lifetime the world’s most celebrated mystery novelist, a status she retains today, one hundred years after her first novel was published and more than forty years after her death. Her work encompasses detective stories, thrillers and tales of the supernatural as well as plays and some light romantic fiction. Her work continues to be filmed, with Kenneth Branagh’s new version of Death on the Nile (1937) appearing in 2020 with a cast including Gal Gadot, Armie Hammer and Annette Bening, and, at the time of writing, her plays are being performed not only in London and New York but in theatres all around the world. There are websites and events devoted to her work, the foremost being the annual International Agatha Christie Festival, held in her birthplace, Torquay, each September to coincide with her birthday.
Almost uniquely among crime writers of the Golden Age, Christie created two equally famous detectives, the misleadingly genteel Jane Marple and the retired Belgian detective Hercule Poirot, who remains extraordinarily popular almost despite the fact that 2020 marks the centenary of his first case being published, The Mysterious Affair at Styles (1920). Poirot, self-styled as ‘probably the greatest detective in the world’, appeared in thirty-three novels and over fifty short stories, compared to Miss Marple’s canon of twelve novels and twenty short stories. Yet, when asked by a fan in 1971, Christie said, ‘On the whole, Miss Marple is my favourite. She fits more naturally into a normal world and one can give her more natural surroundings.’
Among her contemporaries Christie’s favourite writers included the sorely neglected Ellery Queen and John Dickson Carr, of whose work she once said: ‘In spite of a good deal of technical knowledge myself, I hardly ever solve one of his mysteries, though when I come to the end I feel I ought to have noted several points which had been given to me, but which I did not see.’ While her favourites among her own work varied over the years, in 1971—not long before her death—she identified them in a private letter as The Murder of Roger Ackroyd (1926), And Then There Were None (1939), The Moving Finger (1943), Crooked House (1949)—a book whose writing she described as ‘pure pleasure’—and Ordeal by Innocence (1958). Christie herself recognised that the author isn’t the best judge of their own work but, while readers might not agree entirely with her selection, most of them would surely appear on everyone’s list.
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Much has been written about the secret of Agatha Christie’s success but quite simply she had an astonishingly fertile imagination and a profound understanding of human nature. Time and again in her work, she shrewdly anticipates how her reader will engage with her characters and ruthlessly exploits the assumptions they will make about them and their actions to misdirect attention away from her solution. While some suggest that Christie always fixes on the least likely suspect, the precise opposite is more often true. That is why her solutions come as such a stunning surprise to her readers—and why she remains pre-eminent.
‘The Incident of the Dog’s Ball’ was first published in Agatha Christie’s Secret Notebooks (2009), the first of two volumes (subsequently combined in the revised Complete Secret Notebooks) in which the foremost authority on her work, John Curran, provides an essential study of the writer and her writings.
THE CASE OF THE UNLUCKY AIRMAN
Christopher St John Sprigg
Garnett climbed into his light aeroplane soon after the first rays of dawn lit Cape Town aerodrome. His flight had been announced, but it was not realised he would start so early. The only two people to see him off the tarmac were the aerodrome manager and a middle-aged man with one glass eye and a bilious, yellow complexion.
‘You’ve fixed everything, have you, George?’ asked Garnett of this person anxiously, as he leaned his elbow over the cockpit door.
‘Absolutely! Don’t get windy. You simply can’t go wrong.’
Garnett nodded, pulled down his goggles and snapped up the engine switch. A mechanic swung the propeller and five minutes afterwards the biplane was bucketing over the aerodrome.
The airman was a lean youth with dark brown eyes and a slight but perpetual frown. He was a sound pilot but had not yet succeeded in making an outstanding record flight. Discontent, or perhaps worry, was clearly visible on his face as, one hand caressing the ‘stick’, he pulled a map out of his thigh pocket and set his course across the bare stretches of Cape Province.