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VII
Jean Moncrieffe said:
“I must ask you to forgive me, M. Poirot. I have been so angry with you—so terribly angry
with you. It seemed to me that you were making everything so much worse.”
Poirot said with a smile:
“So I was to begin with. It is like in the old legend of the Lernean Hydra. Every time a head
was cut off, two heads grew in its place. So, to begin with, the rumours grew and multiplied. But
you see my task, like that of my namesake Hercules, was to reach the first—the original head.
Who had started this rumour? It did not take me long to discover that the originator of the story
was Nurse Harrison. I went to see her. She appeared to be a very nice woman—intelligent and
sympathetic. But almost at once she made a bad mistake—she repeated to me a conversation
which she had overheard taking place between you and the doctor, and that conversation, you see,
was all wrong. It was psychologically most unlikely. If you and the doctor had planned together to
kill Mrs. Oldfield, you are both of you far too intelligent and level-headed to hold such a
conversation in a room with an open door, easily overheard by someone on the stairs or someone
in the kitchen. Moreover, the words attributed to you did not fit in at all with your mental makeup.
They were the words of a much older woman and of one of a quite different type. They were
words such as would be imagined by Nurse Harrison as being used by herself in like
circumstances.
“I had, up to then, regarded the whole matter as fairly simple. Nurse Harrison, I realized, was
a fairly young and still handsome woman—she had been thrown closely with Doctor Oldfield for
nearly three years—the doctor had been very fond of her and grateful to her for her tact and
sympathy. She had formed the impression that if Mrs. Oldfield died, the doctor would probably ask
her to marry him. Instead of that, after Mrs. Oldfield’s death, she learns that Doctor Oldfield is in
love with you. Straightaway, driven by anger and jealousy, she starts spreading the rumour that
Doctor Oldfield has poisoned his wife.
“That, as I say, was how I had visualized the position at first. It was a case of a jealous
woman and a lying rumour. But the old trite phrase ‘no smoke without fire’ recurred to me
significantly. I wondered if Nurse Harrison had done more than spread a rumour. Certain things
she said rang strangely. She told me that Mrs. Oldfield’s illness was largely imaginary—that she
did not really suffer much pain. But the doctor himself had been in no doubt about the reality of his
wife’s suffering. He had not been surprised by her death. He had called in another doctor shortly
before her death and the other doctor had realized the gravity of her condition. Tentatively I
brought forward the suggestion of exhumation . . . Nurse Harrison was at first frightened out of her
wits by the idea. Then, almost at once, her jealousy and hatred took command of her. Let them
find arsenic—no suspicion would attach to her. It would be the doctor and Jean Moncrieffe who
would
suffer.
“There was only one hope. To make Nurse Harrison overreach herself. If there were a chance
that Jean Moncrieffe would escape, I fancied that Nurse Harrison would strain every nerve to
involve her in the crime. I gave instructions to my faithful Georges—the most unobtrusive of men
whom she did not know by sight. He was to follow her closely. And so—all ended well.”
Jean Moncrieffe said:
“You’ve been wonderful.”
Dr. Oldfield chimed in. He said:
“Yes, indeed. I can never thank you enough. What a blind fool I was!”
Poirot asked curiously:
“Were you as blind, Mademoiselle?”
Jean Moncrieffe said slowly:
“I have been terribly worried. You see, the arsenic in the poison cupboard didn’t tally. . . .”
Oldfield cried:
“Jean—you didn’t think—?”
“No, no—not you. What I did think was that Mrs. Oldfield had somehow or other got hold of
it—and that she was taking it so as to make herself ill and get sympathy and that she had
inadvertently taken too much. But I was afraid that if there was an autopsy and arsenic was found,
they would never consider that theory and would leap to the conclusion that you’d done it. That’s
why I never said anything about the missing arsenic. I even cooked the poison book! But the last
person I would ever have suspected was Nurse Harrison.”
Oldfield said:
“I too. She was such a gentle womanly creature. Like a Madonna.”
Poirot said sadly:
“Yes, she would have made, probably, a good wife and mother . . . Her emotions were just a
little too strong for her.” He sighed and murmured once more under his breath:
“The pity of it.”
Then he smiled at the happy-looking middle-aged man and the eager-faced girl opposite him.
He said to himself:
“These two have come out of its shadow into the sun . . . and I—I have performed the second
Labor of Hercules.”
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