First Published: 1936
RATING: VERY GOOD
SPOILERS!!!
Japp calls Poirot to help him in the investigation of a suicide. It is the day after Guy Fawkes’ Day, so with all the fireworks going off nobody heard the shot that killed Mrs Barbara Allen. The woman’s body was locked in her room, and when her housemate Miss Jane Plenderleith returned home, she got worried when Barbara didn’t answer to her knocks. So she called the police and discovered that Mrs Grant was dead. It seems suicide, but Japp tells Poirot that there is reason to believe that her death could be murder. Even though the gun was found in her hand, her fingers were not holding it, and there were no fingerprints on the gun.
Japp and Poirot question Jane Plenderletih, who explains that she met Barbara when she was on her way to England after studying in India. Barbara had been living in India, and Jane says that her husband hadn’t been good to her and had died, and her little girl had also died. On board the ship they became friends and decided to live together. Jane also says that Barbara was engaged to a MP, Charles Laverton, and she can’t find any reason why her friend would want to kill herself.
Poirot thinks that Jane is keeping something. The inspector gets the testimony of a few witnesses who claims that around 10.30 a car stopped and an elegant man of around 45 went into the house. When he left, a witness heard him tell Barbara to think something over and let him know. When Poirot asks Jane, she says that it must be Major Eustace, an acquaintance of Barbara’s, and Jane has the impression that Barbara didn’t like him. Poirot notices that in the ashtray there are stubs of Turkish cigarettes, and in the room there is a piece of a man’s cufflink. The strange thing is that even though the ashtray was found in the room where Barbara died, there was no smell.
Poirot and Japp talk to the fiancé, who is totally shocked. Japp and Poirot suspect that Major Eustace was blackmailing Barbara because she had withdrawn large quantities of money several days. When they talk to the man, Japp notices that he smokes Turkish cigarettes and he has a cufflink similar to the one found in Barbara’s room. So he is arrested for murder.
Poirot is not satisfied and thinks that Jane Plenderleith is hiding something. When he and Japp searched the house and checked the cupboard under the stairs, she was nervous and uneasy, and the next day she went to play golf, and someone saw her throw the attaché case which Japp found in the cupboard. Poirot reveals the truth. Barbara Grant actually committed suicide because she couldn’t see another way out. Major Eustace was blackmailing her because she had had a child by a married man in India, adn that information could harm her fiancé, the MP. When Jane found her friend dead, she made it look as if it couldn’t be suicide so that Eustace could pay for her death, which he was indirectly responsible for. When Jane went to the golf course, she wanted to change the golf clubs that were in the cupboard because they were for a right-handed person when Barbara was left handed, which showed perfectly where she was wearing her wrist-watch. Those clubs were in the cupboard, and the attaché case was just a red herring.
That was a good story, and I didn’t really guess the solution to the story until the end.
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