Closed Casket

by Sophie Hannah

  “Did you recognize the voice of the woman?” Poirot asked.

  “No, I’m afraid not.”

  “When did you hear this conversation?”

  Rolfe looked a touch afraid to offer yet another disappointing answer. “I couldn’t tell you. Sometime this afternoon. They were talking in the parlor, in lowered voices. They did not know I was in the library at the time, reading the newspaper.”

  “Is the library close to the parlor?” asked Poirot.

  “Adjoining. There’s a door between the two rooms. It was ever so slightly ajar. And it was not a conversation, it was a passionate disagreement. The woman disagreed about the need for an open casket. She was angry, and then he got angry too, and she said, ‘Would you be so severe with her, or do you love her too much?’ And then he said . . . oh dear!”

  “Why ‘oh dear,’ monsieur?”

  “No, blast it, I shall carry on,” said Rolfe. “He assured her that nothing could be further from the truth, that she was his one and only true love.”

  My mind filled with names—possible pairings. I’m sure Poirot’s did too. Harry and Dorro, Claudia and Randall, Joseph Scotcher and Sophie Bourlet. My fourth pair was more of a stretch: Michael Gathercole and Sophie Bourlet. I had no reason to assume there was any kind of romantic bond between them; it was only that they were the two people missing.

  “I remember that phrase distinctly: ‘my one and only true love,’” Rolfe said. “But I do wonder . . . The more I think about it, the more I wonder if I might have imagined it all.”

  I feared Poirot might slap him again, and harder this time.

  “Imagined?” he said ominously.

  “Yes. You see, I remember hearing all that, but not thinking about having heard it. I don’t recall saying to myself, ‘Who might that be? I wonder if I could take a peek and see who it is.’ Surely I would have been keen to know, after all that talk of murder. Though all the overblown romantic rubbish sounded so silly, I might have dismissed the rest on its account, I suppose.” Rolfe looked perplexed. “What if I was so delirious from the pain that I imagined the whole thing?”

  “Do you think you imagined it?” I asked him.

  “Well? I don’t know! I rather suspect something might have distracted me. I wonder if . . . Yes, I do now recall that I had some terrible pain in my right foot earlier in the day. It set me thinking that the chaps who make shoes nowadays are really criminally remiss . . . I remember the days when a shoe would give a man’s foot some support. Not anymore!”

  Poirot looked dissatisfied. “You did not, I suppose, tell anybody about what you overheard?”

  “No.”

  “How did you know that the man and the woman were talking about you when they spoke of the open casket funeral?” Poirot asked. “Did either of them say, ‘Mr. Orville Rolfe’?”

  The lawyer’s eyes widened as he considered this.

  “I don’t believe they did, no. I simply assumed it was me they were talking about because I was the one who had been poisoned—or so I thought. No, they definitely said ‘he’ and ‘him,’ with no name mentioned. I suppose they might have meant anyone. Any man, at least.” Rolfe yawned. “I am about ready to drop, gentlemen—not from poison, but from fatigue. Might I . . . do you think?”

  “We will leave you in peace,” said Poirot. “Two final questions, if I may: apart from the pain in your stomach, did you have any reason to think someone might want to poison you?”

  “No. Why? Do you think somebody wants to poison me?”

  “I do not know. All in this house are strangers to me, and I to them.”

  “I suppose someone might want to kill me,” Rolfe said phlegmatically.

  “Why?”

  “No reason I can think of. But one never knows if one is popular. People are generally polite, especially if one is a person of some influence, as I am.”

  Poirot nodded. “Mr. Rolfe, I would like to ask you about the late Viscount Playford’s will. Dorro Playford referred to it at dinner.”

  “She did, and not for the first time—oh, not by any means for the first time. It’s a rather long and involved story. Might you ask Gathercole? I cannot remember feeling as tired as I do now . . .”

  His eyes had closed again. “We should let him sleep,” I said.

  Poirot and I left the room and closed the door behind us. I suggested that I might go outside and help Harry look for Gathercole and Sophie Bourlet.

  “First bring me a chair—one with arms and a back that is comfortable,” said Poirot. “I will sit here until you return, directly in front of the door of Mr. Rolfe. Then you will take my place so that I can go to bed. I shall, no doubt, fall asleep—but it does not matter. If anybody wishes to enter, they will first have to move me!”

  “Enter Rolfe’s room? So you have changed your mind about the intended murder victim, then? You think it is Orville Rolfe and not Lady Playford?”

  “You heard what Mr. Rolfe said, Catchpool. ‘He.’ The person who needs to be disposed of is a man. And why the talk of poisoning if no poisoning has occurred? It is possible that Orville Rolfe might be in danger, but I do not know. I know considerably less than I need to know in order to act effectively. It is extremely frustrating.”

  Tentatively, I said, “I suppose there is an outside chance that Kimpton is right and no one at Lillieoak intends to harm anyone else. Rolfe might have dreamed up the open casket memory while unwell—delirious, as he said himself. And Lady Playford might have invited us here for another, entirely innocent, reason. For all we know, she will tell us tomorrow that she wishes to consult us about an idea for a book.”

  “It is possible, yes, that the situation might be less dangerous than I imagine,” Poirot conceded. “Tomorrow I shall insist that Lady Playford reveals her true purpose in bringing us here. But remember, it is also possible that the danger is not to one person but to two.”

  I liked the way he said, “Remember . . . ,” as if this were something I had once known.

  Poirot explained: “If Orville Rolfe was the victim of a botched poisoning—a possibility I do not yet rule out—then he is in danger on account of what he heard when he was in the library. And if the ‘he’ of the open casket disagreement was not Mr. Rolfe, then that is somebody else who is in danger.”

  I knew what two potential murder victims meant: no sleep for me for the foreseeable future. The prospect made my eyelids feel twice as heavy as I made my way to the garden to look for Michael Gathercole and Sophie Bourlet.

  12

  Sophie Points a Finger

  I failed to find a single soul anywhere on the grounds, and would have called my search a waste of time were it not for the fact that the bracing wind and sheeting rain had between them driven away my drowsiness.

  If Harry was still out here, I had seen no sign of him. I had shouted his name, and Gathercole’s, and Sophie’s, until my voice was hoarse. No luck.

  Eventually I gave up and returned to the house. I headed upstairs and saw that Poirot had predicted the future with a good deal of accuracy: he had fallen asleep in the chair I had put there for him. He seemed at first to be snoring twice—a deep booming bass alternating with a light buzzing sound. It was an illusion: the louder, lower noises were coming from behind Orville Rolfe’s bedroom door.

  I took some pleasure in shaking Poirot until he opened his eyes. His hand went automatically to his mustache. “Well?” he demanded.

  “I’m afraid I found neither Gathercole nor Sophie Bourlet,” I said. “I didn’t see Viscount Harry out there either. Did he come back inside, do you happen to know?”

  “I could not say,” said Poirot vaguely, and I decided he must have fallen asleep moments after I left him.

  He turned around and looked at the closed door behind him. “What is that terrible noise Mr. Rolfe makes? It is like something from a nightmare.”

  “I’d say that din means nobody needs to guard his door. If he were to stop breathing—and snoring—we would know in seconds. We cou
ld dash over here and catch his killer red-handed.”

  Poirot stood up and pushed the chair out of the way. He opened the door and walked into Rolfe’s bedroom.

  “What are you doing?” I whispered loudly. “Come out of there!”

  “You come in,” he said.

  “We cannot walk into the bedroom of a sleeping—”

  “I am in already. Do not complain. Come in.”

  Reluctantly, I followed him. Once I was in, he closed the door. “Out there, someone could hear us,” he said. “Mr. Rolfe will not mind us talking next to his bed. I do not think he will be easy to wake.”

  “Poirot, we simply can’t—”

  “So the lawyer, Gathercole, and the nurse, Sophie, are both vanished. Interesting. They might be lovers, I suppose. Sometimes, lovers make plots together . . .”

  “No, I doubt that very much,” I said, more firmly than I had intended to.

  “Why? You know nothing about either of them.”

  “They might be plotting murders together for all I know. I meant that, in my opinion, they are not lovers. I cannot exactly tell you why, but . . . don’t you sometimes get a feeling about people? Anyway, Sophie can hardly tear herself away from Joseph Scotcher.”

  “Why should it matter so much, the open casket funeral? What difference could it make, open or closed?”

  “I can think of only one reason: so that someone attending the funeral could see the body and check that the person was really dead, or that the right person was in the coffin. With a closed casket, that would not be possible.”

  “Maybe someone has said, ‘I will give you this or that amount of money if you kill him—but I need to see him with my own eyes, to know that he is dead,’” said Poirot.

  “I’m sure all will become much clearer when you speak to Lady Playford in the—”

  I was interrupted by a piercing howl that seemed to come from below my feet. It soon turned into a full-blooded scream. The voice belonged to a woman.

  I hurried to the door and threw it open.

  “Downstairs!” Poirot said, behind me. “Quickly! Do not wait for me—you are faster.”

  I ran without thinking, once nearly tripping. The screaming stopped for a few moments, then started up again. It was an unbearable noise—like an animal having its heart ripped out. In the gap—the small silence—I had heard exclamations of shock from upstairs, and doors opening.

  Once downstairs, I ran to the drawing room and found it empty. Then I realized that the screaming sounded more distant now than it had from the landing; it had to be coming from the other side of the house.

  I dashed back to the hall and saw Poirot and Dorro Playford hurrying down the stairs. I heard Poirot murmur, “The parlor,” as they hared off towards the dining room. I followed, and soon located the source of the screams. It was Sophie Bourlet. She had her hat and coat on. She was not facing the dining room, but the room opposite. I assumed this was the parlor—in which the contentious conversation about an open casket had taken place between a man and a woman, if Orville Rolfe was to be believed.

  Tears poured from Sophie’s eyes as she wailed and shrieked, as if staring at a horror that could scarcely be imagined. She was standing outside the room, looking in. I could not see what she was looking at, but from her expression and the noise she was making, it must have been some sort of hellish vision.

  Soon Poirot was at her side. “Mon Dieu,” he muttered, trying to move the screaming nurse away from the doorway. “Do not look, mademoiselle. Do not look.”

  “But . . . that is horrible! I cannot understand why . . . and I mean, who . . . ?” Dorro looked around. “Harry! Harry! Where are you? Something unspeakable has happened in the parlor!”

  I too was at the parlor door by now, and looked in, unable to imagine what I might see there. I shall spare the reader of this account a full and gruesome description. Suffice to say that Joseph Scotcher lay on the carpet beside his wheelchair, his body strangely twisted. He was dead; of that there could be no doubt—murdered, in a most appalling way. A club made of dark wood lay next to his body. It had his blood and brains all over its wider end. There was blood on the carpet, and very little left of poor Scotcher’s head, only his lower jaw, which revealed a mouth twisted in agony.

  Harry appeared behind me. He said to Dorro, “I’m here, old girl. What the devil is all the shouting about?”

  “The devil,” said Poirot quietly. “You are quite right, Viscount Playford. This is his work.”

  I had a sense, by now, of everybody having joined us. Many people were standing around me—in front or behind, or by my side. Claudia and Harry, and Lady Playford in a yellow silk dressing gown. Behind her, Randall Kimpton and Orville Rolfe stood side by side. Kimpton looked as if he was trying to say something—perhaps to take charge of the situation—but whatever instructions he was attempting to issue were inaudible in the chaos. Brigid and Hatton and Phyllis hovered behind Lady Playford. At the very back was Michael Gathercole. He too had on a coat, I noticed. Had he and Sophie been in the garden together all this time? Were they lovers?

  Lady Playford covered her mouth with her hand, but nobody screamed apart from Sophie.

  “Joseph!” she wailed. “Oh, no, no, my darling Joseph!” She broke free of Poirot’s hold on her, ran to Scotcher’s body and lay down beside it. “No, no, this cannot be, this cannot be!”

  Lady Playford laid a hand on Poirot’s arm. “Is it him, Poirot?” she asked. “Is it definitely him? His head . . . I mean, how can one be sure?”

  “It is Mr. Scotcher, madame,” said Poirot. “He is recognizable from his face—what is left of it—and from the thinness of his frame. No one else at Lillieoak is quite so thin.”

  “Damn you!” Lady Playford growled. A moment later she said, “I am so sorry, Poirot. This is not your fault.”

  Randall Kimpton murmured something, of which I missed the beginning: “. . . the jewel of life, by some damn’d hand, was robb’d and ta’en away.” From Shakespeare’s King John, no doubt.

  I looked for Gathercole. He appeared serious but composed, and almost peaceful. Not in a state of extreme distress, I thought.

  “She killed him! I saw her!”

  Hearing these unlikely words, I turned back to the parlor. Sophie, who had made the accusation, was on her knees beside Scotcher’s body, staring wildly at the rest of us.

  Poirot took a step forward. “Mademoiselle, be very careful how you answer this question,” he said. “You are understandably distraught, but you must tell the truth, and concentrate for a moment on the facts. Are you saying that you saw who killed Mr. Scotcher?”

  “I saw her do it! She had the club in her hands and she . . . she beat him over the head with it. She wouldn’t stop! He begged, but she wouldn’t stop. She murdered him!”

  “Who did, mademoiselle? Whom do you accuse of murder?”

  Slowly, Sophie Bourlet rose to her feet. With a shaking arm, she pointed.

  Part II

  13

  Enter the Gardaí

  The following morning, the real murder detectives arrived. By “real,” I mean the ones who were authorized to make arrests in County Cork, not the ones from England—and, if one wanted to be pedantic, from Belgium—who happened be lurking in the vicinity of the murder disguised as houseguests.

  In the Irish Free State the police are known as “garda.” This is an abbreviation of “Garda Síochána,” of which a literal translation is “the guardian of the peace.” One of the two policemen sent by the commissioner in Dublin to investigate the suspicious death of Joseph Scotcher fitted that description perfectly. Sergeant Daniel O’Dwyer—with a face as round as any clock’s and spectacles that sat slightly askew on the bridge of his nose—contributed to harmonious relations by agreeing with whatever was suggested to him. He seemed to have nothing in his repertoire but unconditional assent.

  He was the junior officer, however. The man in charge, Inspector Arthur Conree, was a trickier customer. In his middle
fifties, with hair that did not move but loomed over his forehead like a large gray outcrop of rock, he had the peculiar habit of pressing the underside of his chin against the top of his chest when he listened, and raising it only slightly when speaking.

  The first thing Conree did upon arrival at Lillieoak was deliver a small lecture that I think he intended as an introduction of sorts, but which came across more as a stern ticking-off. “I did not ask to be sent here,” he told us. “All of the asking that took place was on the other side. ‘It has to be you, Arthur,’ they said. ‘No one else would be quite suitable. This is an important case—none more so.’ So I spoke to my wife. I can tell you that she did not want me to come all the way to Clonakilty any more than I wanted to take on the journey or the responsibility myself, at my age, and holding in consideration the various other burdens placed upon me.”

  “Strange, then, that you have ended up here, Inspector,” Poirot remarked mildly.

  Sergeant O’Dwyer nodded at this and said, “It is strange—you’re right there, Mr. Poirot.”

  The inspector was not finished. “But my wife said, ‘Arthur, they want it to be you, and if that’s what they want, well, they must have their reasons. And let’s face facts, now—who would do a better job? Why, there’s not a man who could!’ I have never made any such claim upon my own account, you understand, being a modest man; I am merely relating my wife’s opinion. So we put it to our three lads—grown-up as they all are now . . .”

  The story of what happened after Inspector Conree’s sons joined the fray was conveyed at length and with a solemnity befitting a speech at a king’s funeral. In summary: the junior Conrees, like Mrs. Conree, were worried that the esteemed head of their family might collapse under the strain of having to do his job, but all were agreed that without his expert leadership, there could be no resolution or justice.