Agatha Christie's Poirot Episode Guide - inaf iasf bologna

Agatha Christie’s Poirot Episode Guide
next to the placing of a bunker which was due to be dug that day. The Renaulds’ son, Jack,
had just been sent away on business to South America and Renauld also gave the chauffeur
an unexpected holiday leaving just three female servants in the house who heard nothing. The
eldest of the three servants tells Poirot and the police that quite often, after Madame Renauld has
retired to bed for the night, her husband has been visited by a neighbour, Madame Daubreuil,
who is the mother of the girl with the ”anxious eyes”, Marthe Daubreuil.
The dead man changed his will just two weeks before, leaving almost everything to his wife
and nothing to his son. There is a smashed watch at the scene of the kidnap which is still running
but has somehow gained two hours. The widow inspects the body to identify it. She loses her
composure and collapses with grief at the sight of her dead husband.
Poirot is puzzled by some of these findings... why is the watch running fast? Why did the
servants hear nothing? Why was the body found somewhere where it was bound to be quickly
discovered? Why is there a piece of lead piping near the body? Poirot is hampered in his investigations
by the attitude of Monsieur Giraud of the Sûreté who plainly believes the elderly Belgian is
too set in his old-fashioned ways to solve the mystery. The local Examining Magistrate, Monsieur
Hautet, is more helpful and tells Poirot that he has found out that the Renaulds’ neighbour at
the Villa Marguerite, Madame Daubreuil, has paid two hundred thousand francs into her bank
account in recent weeks: was she Monsieur Renauld’s mistress? They visit the lady who is furious
when the suggestion is put to her and throws them out. Having now met Madame Daubreuil
for the first time, Poirot tells Hastings that he recognises her from a murder case going back
some twenty years.
Soon after, Jack Renauld arrives back; his trip to Santiago was delayed enabling him to return
when he heard of his father’s murder. Jack admits to rowing with his father over who he wanted
to marry, hence the change of will. Poirot suspects that Marthe Daubreuil is the girl in question
and feels that the answer to the problem lies in Paris. He goes there to investigate. Whilst he
is away another body is found in a shed on the golf course. No one recognises the man who by
his hands could be a tramp but is dressed in finer clothes. The strangest thing is that the man
has been dead for forty-eight hours and thus died before Monsieur Renauld’s murder. No one
recognises the new corpse.
Poirot returns from Paris and, without being told details beforehand, staggers Hastings by
correctly guessing the age of the man, place of death, and manner of death, despite having ben
clearly shocked when Hastings originally told him of this new development. He examines the new
corpse with the doctor. Poirot sees foam on his lips and the doctor realises the man died of an
epileptic fit and was then stabbed after death.
When alone, Poirot tells Hastings that his investigations in Paris have borne fruit and that
Madame Daubreuil is in fact a Madame Beroldy who was put on trial twenty years previously
for the death of her elderly husband. He too was murdered by, supposedly, two masked men
who broke into their house at night wanting to know ”the secret”. Madame Beroldy had a young
lover, Georges Conneau, who absconded from justice but wrote a letter to the police admitting
to the crime; there were no masked men and he stabbed Monsieur Beroldy himself. Madame
Beroldy managed a tearfully-convincing performance in the witness box, convincing the jury of
her innocence, but leaving most people suspicious. She then disappeared herself.
Poirot deduces that Paul Renauld was in fact Georges Conneau. He fled to Canada and then
South America where he made his fortune and gained a wife and a son. When they returned
to France, by great misfortune, the immediate neighbour of the house he bought was Madame
Beroldy, now Daubreuil, who started to blackmail him. When a tramp died on his grounds of
an epileptic fit, Renauld saw a chance to duplicate the ruse of twenty years earlier by faking his
own death and escaping his blackmailer with his wife’s cooperation. His plan was to send his
son away on business, give his chauffeur a holiday, and stage a kidnapping by tying his wife up
and disappearing. After leaving the house he would go to the golf course and dig a grave where
he knew it would be discovered; he would then put the tramp into the grave after destroying
his features with the lead pipe. The plan was for this to happen at midnight, giving Renauld the
chance to get away from the local station on the last train and use the smashed watch to create
an alibi. Unfortunately, the smashing of the watch did not stop it, so the deception failed on
Poirot at least. What then went wrong was that Renauld was stabbed by someone else after he
finished digging the grave but before he could fetch the body of the tramp, hence his wife’s faint
when she saw that the body actually was her husband’s.
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