First Published: 1935
RATING: GOOD
SPOILERS!!!
Poirot gets a long letter from a woman called Amelia Barrowby, who is quite vague about the problem she wants to consult him about, but she doesn’t want to involve the police. Poirot writes to the lady, but gets no answer. Then Miss Lemon tells him that there was a notice in the newspaper about the woman’s death. Poirot decides to write, requesting to see the lady and pretending he doesn’t know about her demise. The lady’s niece, Mary DeLafontaine, writes back and says that her aunt is dead. Poirot decides to go to the house and pretend he hasn’t received the letter.
The maid tells him about the sudden death of Mrs Barrowby, and then a woman appears, saying that the money is hers as the lady wrote it. Mary, the niece, comes and tells him that her aunt died after she was taken sick that night. Poirot decides to go and see Inspector Sims, who tells him that the police surgeon was not convinced that Mrs Barrowby’s death was natural, and in the postmortem they found a great quantity of cyanide. The problem is that everybody in the family ate the same, and the only thing is that the lady took a digestive pill, which had come from Katrina, her companion, who she had left most of her money. The girl is arrested when she admits to only being her to have touched the pill, and then a sachet with cyanide is found under her pillow. When Poirot talks to Katrina, the girl insists she didn’t kill Mrs Barrowby and Poirot says he believes her.
Poirot realises that there is something which struck him strange in the garden. He sends Miss Lemon to talk to the fishmonger, and when she comes back with the information, Poirot goes to the house. He confronts Mary Lafontaine, and he tells her that he knows the truth. Even though all of them had the same for dinner that night, Mary and her husband bought some oysters for the woman, and that is what they poisoned. The shells are the ones they placed on the garden border as they couldn’t put them in the bin as that would have shown that there had been oysters that night. The lady admits the truth bitterly, and she also confesses that the reason her aunt contacted Poirot was because she and her husband had been stealing from her aunt.
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