Agatha Christie's Poirot Episode Guide - inaf iasf bologna

Agatha Christie’s Poirot Episode Guide
These are all pieces of deliberate misdirection on the
part of the family. They know in fact that Gerda is indeed
the murderess, and are attempting to avoid her
imprisonment. As it happens, the murder, with a motive
of jealousy, was planned, in that she had taken with
her two pistols, planning to be discovered with a pistol
in her hands that would later be discovered to be the
wrong weapon. Henrietta, who says that John asked her
to help Gerda when he said her name, destroys the evidence
of the first weapon instinctively, and later goes
back and retrieves the second weapon. She hides it in a
clay sculpture of a horse in her workshop, then gets it
handled by a blind match-seller, and places it in Poirot’s
hedge.
There is a romantic subplot in the novel. Midge is
in love with Edward, but Edward has always been in
love with Henrietta and Henrietta had refused several
times his marriage proposals. Besides, she is now deeply
in love with John Christow. During the course of the
novel, Edward realises that Henrietta is not anymore
the Henrietta he used to love and begins to stop seeing
Midge as ”little Midge”. Therefore, he asks her to marry
him. During a walk to an area where Edward has walked
with Henrietta, Midge believes that he is too deeply in love with Henrietta still, and she calls off
the wedding. Edward who does not know that she loves him, misunderstands her decision and
later that night, he attempts suicide by putting his head in a gas oven but he is saved by Midge.
With this rather dramatic proof of his need for her, she relents and the wedding is on again.
With all the evidence apparently destroyed, the family believe that they have saved Gerda, but
there is one final clue: the holster in which the murder weapon was kept. Gerda has cut this up
and placed it in her workbag. When Henrietta attempts to retrieve it in order to destroy the final
means of proving Gerda’s guilt, Poirot arrives and prevents her from drinking tea that Gerda has
poisoned. Gerda herself accidentally drinks the poisoned tea and escapes justice by this means.
Henrietta who, along with Lucy, has emerged as an attractive and well-characterised heroine
throughout the book, ends it by visiting in hospital one of John’s patients who now has little
hope of a cure but still shows a resilient spirit. Leaving the hospital, she reflects that there is no
happy end for her, but she resolves to embark on a sculpture of herself as Grief.
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