Closed Casket

by Sophie Hannah

  “You are correct, Lady Playford. You—the protector and defender of Joseph Scotcher, who speaks up for him when no one else will.”

  Athie Playford sighed. “You’re such a tricky customer, Poirot. A deceiver, really. I see what your game is. You are going to talk at length about everything I did for Joseph—how I adored him beyond reason, and how I’m bereft now that he’s dead—and you’re going to do it in a tone of voice precisely designed to make everyone think there’s an enormous ‘but’ coming. ‘But she killed him because . . .’ There is not, though, is there? You know perfectly well that I am not the killer. At least, I hope you do.”

  She looked doubtful for a moment. “I invited you here—and Catchpool too—because I had read of how brilliantly you solved the Bloxham Hotel murders in London. I was told you were the best. As you know, I feared an attempt might be made upon my life—”

  “Your life?” Dorro pounced on her words. “But Scotcher was the one—”

  “You do not need to tell me, Dorro, that Joseph was murdered and I was not. I am acutely aware of it.” Lady Playford took a deep breath. To Poirot and me, she said, “I hoped that, given the choice, Joseph would confide in me fully rather than risk trying to kill me on a night when two of England’s finest detectives were staying at Lillieoak. Michael behind the curtain was not my only safety measure; you two were every bit as important.”

  “Athie, I demand that you explain yourself!” Dorro cried. “What curtain? Which Michael? Mr. Gathercole?”

  “Oh, do shut up, Dorro,” said her mother-in-law. With a small smile, Lady Playford added, “With or without a drawer—whichever you prefer.”

  “Lady Playford, you worshipped Joseph Scotcher,” said Poirot. “I believe you would have given your life for him. You loved him more than you loved either of your two children, and more than you loved your faithful friend and lawyer, Mr. Gathercole.”

  I struggled to contain my annoyance. Scotcher was dead, and therefore beyond flattery and encouragement; did Poirot care nothing for the prospects of the living, for the harmoniousness or otherwise of relations between them in the future? Solving murders was all very well, but there was no need to explain to the members of an already troubled family how little they cared for one another.

  “Lady Playford, if you were to be banished for eternity to a remote place and could take only one person with you, Joseph Scotcher would have been your choice of companion,” he continued. “And yet you are an intelligent woman. You could see that he lied to you every single day and took advantage of your generosity. Would a woman like you, proud and powerful, accustomed to writing books in which every blackguard and villain gets punished most harshly . . . would such a woman allow Scotcher’s enduring dishonesty to go unpunished?”

  Athie Playford waved her hand in a vaguely dismissive gesture. “Get on with it, Poirot,” she said. “I’m sure I don’t need to tell you that real life is not so neat and tidy as fiction. In real life, the proud woman who, on paper, throws the baddies in prison cells and leaves them to rot—twice a year without fail!—loved a brilliant, beautiful young man who baldly lied to her every single day, and she raised not a murmur of protest! One could not put a story like that in a book. It would be most unsatisfactory.”

  “You say that life is not as neat and tidy as fiction. In general it is not,” Poirot agreed. “But the murder of Joseph Scotcher, at least in its conception, was neater and tidier than any of you, apart from the killer, could possibly imagine.”

  36

  The Experiment

  “Bon. I will tell you now, so that you can all marvel, as I have been, at the tidiness of the murder of Joseph Scotcher.

  “Scotcher committed a murder: that of Iris Gillow. What was his motive? Why, it is obvious: she suspected him of having invented his illness. Do not tell me, Dr. Kimpton, that I cannot prove Scotcher killed Iris, or that his motive was as I describe it. I have not yet said all that I have to say on the matter. You must wait for the evidence, circumstantial though you will undoubtedly claim it is when you hear it.

  “For a long time, Scotcher got away with murder. No one was able to prove he pushed Iris Gillow under a train. But his crime caught up with him, and in a satisfyingly tidy way. You see, the motive for the murder of Joseph Scotcher was exactly the same as the motive for Iris Gillow’s murder. Again I will say it: Iris was killed because she suspected Scotcher was not really dying. And Joseph Scotcher was killed for the very same reason: because his killer suspected that he was not really dying. It could not be tidier or more fitting! Scotcher was killed for the same reason that, some years earlier, had led him to kill. It is simply that he was at a different end of the motive in each instance—the first time, he was the subject of the murder, and the second time, he was its object.”

  “No, no, no,” Kimpton objected. “You are displaying shoddy reasoning, Poirot. First of all, how is suspecting that Scotcher was not really dying a motive for killing him? Many of us suspected it who did not kill him.”

  Poirot smiled, but said nothing.

  “And as for him killing Iris because she didn’t believe he was dying . . . again, many of us did not. Scotcher killed Iris and not me, for instance.”

  “That is an interesting observation, Doctor,” Poirot conceded. “I cannot be certain, but I believe that Scotcher must have feared a greater threat from Iris Gillow than from you. You have said yourself that you could not persuade anybody in Oxford to believe you, and that you eventually ceased to try. Imagine, then, if Iris came forward in support of your theory . . .”

  “All right. Fair point,” said Kimpton. “If it was good-natured Iris and not ruthless Randall saying it, doubtless many more would have sat up and paid attention. But, listen, what you said before about the motive for the murder of Scotcher—”

  “I will now explain the experiment to which Sophie Bourlet referred,” said Poirot. “You have all heard her talk about the problem of time—an impossible conundrum, it seems! From her point of view, assuming she is telling the truth, this is what happened: she saw Claudia Playford, wearing the same green dress she wore to dinner that night, set about Joseph Scotcher’s head with the club. Sophie started to scream, at which point Claudia dropped the club and ran away, through the door that leads to the library. A very short time later, people started to come downstairs to see what all the shrieking was about. One of those people was Claudia, in a nightdress and white dressing gown!

  “When I first heard that this was the supposed sequence of events, I had the same feeling as Sophie Bourlet: ‘Surely this is impossible.’ Think, my friends, of how long it would take to go through the library and get as far even as the bottom of the stairs, in order to ascend to the next floor.

  “Catchpool and I were talking upstairs when Sophie Bourlet began to scream. You can all see that Catchpool, he has the long legs. Alas, I do not move so quickly, but he does, and he moved as soon as the screaming started. He did not, on his way down the stairs, meet Claudia Playford, in a blood-spattered green dress, on her way up. Yet if my nicely developing theory was correct—and I felt certain it was!—that is what must have happened! This problem, this riddle, it was one of great magnitude. And then, finally, I saw that there could be only one explanation, so I arranged an experiment to prove it.

  “Sophie Bourlet had originally told us that she had first heard an argument between Claudia Playford and Scotcher—one in which a woman named Iris was mentioned—then seen Claudia start to beat Scotcher with the club, at which point Sophie had started to scream. Based on what I had deduced—the only possible solution to the riddle—I suspected that Sophie’s memory of the incident had been distorted by her shock and grief. It simply could not have been as she described. But how to shock her memory, again, into correcting itself?”

  “May I ask,” Kimpton cut in, “when you say ‘shock her memory into correcting itself,’ do you in fact mean ‘give a liar the chance to tell the truth without losing face’?”

  Poirot ignored hi
m. He said, “The experiment went as follows. Sophie stood outside the parlor. At my request, she put on her hat and coat, for a more perfect re-creation of the event. Catchpool and I then performed the same argument had by Claudia and Scotcher on the night of the murder. Catchpool was Scotcher and I was Claudia.”

  “You should have cast me,” said Claudia. “I play the part of Claudia Playford like no other, let me tell you—heaps better than an old man with a ridiculous mustache. The impertinence of it!”

  “I held the club in my hand,” Poirot continued. “Catchpool begged for his life—‘Stop, stop! Please, Claudia! You don’t have to . . .’—and I said, ‘This is what Iris should have done—but she was too weak. She let you live and so you killed her.’ Exactly the words that Sophie told us she heard. Then I held the club aloft and brought it down with great force—stopping only inches short of Catchpool’s head. At that point, I turned to look at Sophie. As I had hoped, she was vigorously shaking her head. ‘No,’ she tells me. ‘No, it did not happen like that.’ Mademoiselle, perhaps you could tell us all how it did happen. Ladies and gentlemen: what you are about to hear is the truth. Please pay attention.”

  Sophie said, “It was all wrong. Suddenly everything fell into place, and it was quite different from what I had told the police and myself and . . . what I had believed. The argument did not happen first, and then the clubbing. I said it was in that order—I thought it was—but I was wrong! As a naturally neat person, I made it neater and more orderly in my memory. The truth was that Claudia was smashing Joseph’s head with that . . . thing from the first moment. It was already happening! I arrived when it was nearly over. And it was happening—the vicious attack, I mean—at the same time that the argument was taking place. And Joseph’s head was almost completely destroyed! Which meant . . .” Sophie looked helplessly at Poirot.

  He took over. “What it means is that the man apparently begging for his life—the one who cried ‘Stop, stop! Please, Claudia! You don’t have to . . .’—could not have been Joseph Scotcher. He, as we know, was already dead from strychnine poisoning, and nobody could be quite so eloquent with a smashed skull. Therefore . . . the voice Sophie heard belonged to another man, a man who was urging Claudia to desist. This man did not want her to continue to reduce to a pulp the head of the already dead Joseph Scotcher.”

  “Another man?” Kimpton sounded angry at the suggestion. “Which other man? Are you trying to say that Claudia is in love with somebody else?”

  “I did not mention love,” said Poirot.

  “Don’t be absurd, Randall,” Claudia told him. “In love with? Darling, I would not quicken my pace to prevent a dangerously heavy object from falling on anybody in this world apart from you. You know that.”

  “Sophie Bourlet made another mistake,” Poirot said.

  “Yes, she put strychnine in Scotcher’s blue pretend-medicine bottle.” Kimpton chuckled, apparently happy again now that Claudia had reassured him. “And she’s going to hang for it. Right, Poirot?”

  “Wrong. As I have made clear already, Sophie Bourlet did not kill Joseph Scotcher.”

  “Yes, but you’ve said that about all of us, and someone must have done it,” Kimpton pointed out.

  “He has not yet said it about me,” said Lady Playford in a mournful tone. “I didn’t do it, of course. And I fear it might irreparably break my heart if anyone were to suggest that I did.”

  “You, Lady Playford, are innocent,” Poirot told her.

  “Thank you, Poirot. Yes, I am.”

  “Poirot, this is too much!” said Kimpton.

  “We demand to know immediately,” said Dorro Playford.

  “And I am trying to tell you. May I continue? Merci. Sophie Bourlet’s other mistake was to imagine that she first screamed when Claudia Playford began to beat Scotcher with the club. This was not so! Remember, we have established that Claudia was already bludgeoning Scotcher when Sophie appeared and looked into the parlor, and that the argument with another man was taking place simultaneously. This man, incidentally, was not seen by Sophie. He was, I believe, standing in the darkness of the library. Sophie does not recall whether the door between the library and the parlor was closed or open. I think it must have been open.

  “I hope you can all see that if Sophie had started to scream when first she witnessed the clubbing, as she initially told us, she would not have been able to hear the argument over the noise she was making—which was loud enough to raise legions of the dead, if I might be permitted to say.

  “Here, then, is what happened: Sophie watched, struck dumb with shock, as Claudia Playford battered Scotcher’s head with the club. At the same time, Sophie listened to the argument between Claudia and the man who was concealed in the library but able to see into the parlor. Then Claudia spotted Sophie and ran, and we must assume the man ran away too. For as long as it took the two of them to get to the bottom of the stairs, Sophie stared in horror at the destroyed head and horribly contorted body of her beloved. Some minutes passed; it is impossible to measure time accurately when one is in extreme shock. Claudia and the man with whom she had argued ran up the stairs and were able to conceal themselves before anyone spotted them. Then, at that moment, Sophie came to, as if from a nightmare—except for her the nightmare had only just begun. She realized that what lay before her was no apparition, not a dream, but horribly, tragically real. That is when she started to scream. Meanwhile, Claudia was swapping her green dress for her white nightdress and dressing gown.

  “When Sergeant O’Dwyer arrived at Lillieoak today, I asked him if any of the gardaí who searched the house and grounds found a green dress with bloodstains on it. They did not. The whereabouts of the dress Claudia Playford wore to attack Scotcher remains a mystery.”

  “I can recall it all now, so clearly,” said Sophie tearfully. “I don’t know why I didn’t straightaway. I was cold—terribly cold in spite of my coat and hat, and being inside. I felt as if I had fallen into a long, dark tunnel, except it was going down and not along, so it couldn’t have been a real tunnel. And it was dark and silent and I was quite alone—alone with thoughts of Joseph and how he had been telling the truth all along because he had said he was going to die and now he was dead, except he couldn’t be, because it couldn’t be real. I wouldn’t let it be real! When I was thinking all of that, I wasn’t screaming. I started to scream because the silence was too frightening after a while.”

  “Oh, do stop going on, will you?” Claudia said impatiently. “None of this tells us who killed Joseph or why he was killed. Will it speed things up if I admit that it’s all true? Yes, I was in the parlor and yes, I was the one who came down rather hard on Joseph’s poor old head. Satisfied?”

  “What?” Kimpton looked aghast. “Dearest one, what do you mean?”

  “I did not kill Joseph, though. Did I, Poirot?”

  “Non. You did not, mademoiselle.”

  “Then who did?” Kimpton leapt to his feet, angry now. “In the name of all that is holy—”

  “You did, Dr. Kimpton—as well you know. You murdered Joseph Scotcher.”

  “Me? Ha! Balderdash, old boy. You said not thirty minutes ago that I didn’t do it—don’t you remember? Is your memory as flawed as Sophie’s?”

  “All of us have imperfect memories, monsieur—Hercule Poirot less so than most. What you say is not accurate. I said that you had many motives to choose from, and that a different man in your position might have succumbed to a vengeful passion and committed murder. I then said that you did not—that you never did. It is true: you did not succumb to a passion of any description. This crime—your murder of Joseph Scotcher—was planned many years ago. It was rational, meticulously planned, driven by logic. One might even say . . . scientific.”

  “All the good things, eh? What a clever killer I must be!”

  “It involved much hard work and discipline on your part,” said Poirot. “It was in fact—since we have been using the word—an experiment.”

  Kimpton sat d
own again. “I am not at all convinced,” he said. “Not yet. I am curious, however, and would like to hear more.”

  I was not sure that I could have managed to be quite so cavalier if I were accused of murder by a man known to be the world’s finest detective—not unless I somehow knew he was bluffing. Kimpton was not one to show weakness in public, however.

  “I have now read many times your favorite play: King John,” Poirot told him. “I found it fascinating. It helped to put me on the correct path and to shed on me the dawning light.”

  “I am glad you found it to be a rewarding experience,” said Kimpton.

  “You see, whichever way I looked at it, the argument about a funeral, overheard by Orville Rolfe, did not make any sense. According to what Mr. Rolfe heard, the point of contention was the open casket versus the closed casket.”

  “It was,” Orville Rolfe confirmed.

  “Bon. One day when I was thinking about Dr. Kimpton’s many motives for murder—he who had known Scotcher far longer than anyone else here—I remembered something to which I had not paid sufficient attention at the time. At dinner, when Scotcher appeared shaken and unsteady after receiving the shocking news of Lady Playford’s altered will, Kimpton handed his own water glass to Sophie Bourlet and instructed her to make Scotcher drink it. Ladies and gentlemen, whyever should he do this, when Scotcher had a water glass of his own that must still have been full, or almost full? All our water glasses were full when we sat down at the table. The entrée had only just been served when Lady Playford made her announcement, and the first course was soup. Soup is wet; nobody drinks a large amount of water while consuming it.”

  “Golly!” Harry Playford announced. It was as jarring as if a zebra had strolled gaily into the drawing room. Everybody ignored him, apart from Dorro, who told him to be quiet.

  Poirot went on: “Randall Kimpton is an extremely clever man. He is able to think and act with the speed of lightning. He had been planning the murder of Joseph Scotcher for years, and trying to arrange what he thought were the ideal conditions in which to commit it, and then suddenly he found himself—quite by chance!—surrounded by people who wished Scotcher dead. Kimpton had not known that Lady Playford would alter her will in Scotcher’s favor, but she had. She had left to him everything she owned. What policeman would have trouble believing, then, that Harry or Dorro Playford would think to murder Scotcher in order to become immensely wealthy? Or that Michael Gathercole might kill Scotcher out of pure jealousy, or to save Lady Playford from her own foolishness?