Agatha Christie's Poirot Episode Guide - inaf iasf bologna

Agatha Christie’s Poirot Episode Guide
Sir Roderick also contacts Poirot seeking help. He
has lost letters written during the Second World War by
a third party, which would now cause embarrassment
should they be made public. Poirot’s attention attaches
itself to Sir Roderick’s personal assistant, Sonia, who
has apparently been passing secrets to a representative
of the Herzogovinian [sic] Embassy at Kew Gardens.
This is all a red herring, however: Poirot hints to Sonia
that he knows of her espionage activities, and she abandons
them in order to marry Sir Roderick instead at the
end of the novel.
Mrs. Oliver now provides Poirot with another key
clue: she has heard while at Borodene Mansions that
a woman, Louise Charpentier, has committed suicide
by throwing herself out of the window of Flat 76. This,
Poirot infers, must be the murder that Norma believed
herself to have committed. Investigating the dead
woman, he discovers that her real name was Louise
Carpenter: also the name of a woman with whom Andrew
Restarick had been in love many years earlier. Mrs.
Oliver later even provides Poirot with the draft of a letter
from Louise to Andrew in which she attempted to make
contact once more: an item that had providentially come
into her possession early in the novel when it fell from a
drawer.
Amongst other clues on which Poirot focuses, there are several that are only explained at the
end of the book. Mary Restarick wears a wig, to which the reader’s attention is repeatedly drawn
by the fact that Mrs. Oliver’s hairpieces are often mentioned as a plot device: indeed, Mrs. Oliver
alters her hair in order to be in disguise when she sees Norma and David in the café. Also, Poirot
notices that there is a pair of portraits of Andrew Restarick and of his first wife (Norma’s mother)
in their home; why is Mary Restarick apparently content to have a picture of her predecessor on
display, and why does Andrew later split the set in order to have his own portrait in his office?
Stillingfleet contacts Poirot to say that Norma has walked out on him unexpectedly. She has
seen a message in the personal column of a newspaper calling her to the flat, where she is
discovered by Frances Cary standing over the dead body of David Baker with a knife, the murder
weapon, in her hand. Norma immediately claims responsibility for the murder to a neighbour,
Miss Jacobs. Norma has, however, been subjected to a cocktail of drugs intended to disorient her
and make her susceptible to the suggestion that she is a murderer.
In the denouement Poirot reveals that the man posing as Andrew Restarick is an impostor,
Robert Orwell, who has taken his place after the real Restarick died in Africa. Orwell has persuaded
David Baker to paint a fake painting in style with the original one, which establishes to
anyone who questions it that the new ’Restarick’ had looked much the same fifteen years earlier
when the pair was painted. Mary Restarick, meanwhile, has been leading a double life, as both
Mary and as Frances Cary, whom she could become by changing wigs. Their imposture, however,
could be revealed by two people: by David Baker, who had taken to blackmailing Orwell over the
picture; and Louise Carpenter, who knew Restarick too well to be fooled by Orwell. The murder
plot involved killing both of them, and convincing Norma that she was the killer. Norma had
never in reality been in Louise’s flat: they simply switched the 7 and the 6 on the door of her own
flat. All along the ’third girl’ in the flat on whom attention should have been focused has been,
not Norma, but Frances.
At the end of the novel, Stillingfleet, who has staunchly defended Norma’s innocence even
when it was most in question, is rewarded by her agreeing to marry him. As Mrs. Oliver realises,
Poirot has planned this happy ending all along.
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