Curtain - Agatha Christie [76]
‘And you, my poor lonely Hastings? Ah, my heart bleeds for you, dear friend. Will you, for the last time, take the advice of your old Poirot?
‘After you have read this, take a train or a car or a series of buses and go to find Elizabeth Cole who is also Elizabeth Litchfield. Let her read this, or tell her what is in it. Tell her that you, too, might have done what her sister Margaret did – only for Margaret Litchfield there was no watchful Poirot at hand. Take the nightmare away from her, show her that her father was killed, not by his daughter, but by that kind sympathetic family friend, that “honest Iago” Stephen Norton.
‘For it is not right, my friend, that a woman like that, still young, still attractive, should refuse life because she believes herself to be tainted. No, it is not right. Tell her so, you, my friend, who are yourself still not unattractive to women . . .
‘Eh bien, I have no more now to say. I do not know, Hastings, if what I have done is justified or not justified. No – I do not know. I do not believe that a man should take the law into his own hands . . .
‘But on the other hand, I am the law! As a young man in the Belgian police force I shot down a desperate criminal who sat on a roof and fired at people below. In a state of emergency martial law is proclaimed.
‘By taking Norton’s life, I have saved other lives – innocent lives. But still I do not know . . . It is perhaps right that I should not know. I have always been so sure – too sure . . .
‘But now I am very humble and I say like a little child “I do not know . . .”
‘Goodbye, cher ami. I have moved the amyl nitrate ampoules away from beside my bed. I prefer to leave myself in the hands of the bon Dieu. May his punishment, or his mercy, be swift!
‘We shall not hunt together again, my friend. Our first hunt was here – and our last . . .
‘They were good days.
‘Yes, they have been good days . . .’
(End of Hercule Poirot’s manuscript.)
Final note by Captain Arthur Hastings: I have finished reading . . . I cannot believe it all yet . . . But he is right. I should have known. I should have known when I saw the bullet hole so symmetrically in the middle of the forehead.
Queer – it’s just come to me – the thought in the back of my mind that morning.
The mark on Norton’s forehead – it was like the brand of Cain . . .
E-Book Extras
The Poirots
Essay by Charles Osborne
The Poirots
The Mysterious Affair at Styles; The Murder on the Links; Poirot Investigates; The Murder of Roger Ackroyd; The Big Four; The Mystery of the Blue Train; Black Coffee; Peril at End House; Lord Edgware Dies; Murder on the Orient Express; Three-Act Tragedy; Death in the Clouds; The ABC Murders; Murder in Mesopotamia; Cards on the Table; Murder in the Mews; Dumb Witness; Death on the Nile; Appointment with Death; Hercule Poirot’s Christmas; Sad Cypress; One, Two, Buckle My Shoe; Evil Under the Sun; Five Little Pigs; The Hollow; The Labours of Hercules; Taken at the Flood; Mrs McGinty’s Dead; After the Funeral; Hickory Dickory Dock; Dead Man’s Folly; Cat Among the Pigeons; The Adventure of the Christmas Pudding; The Clocks; Third Girl; Hallowe’en Party; Elephants Can Remember; Poirot’s Early Cases; Curtain: Poirot’s Last Case
1. The Mysterious Affair at Styles (1920)
Captain Arthur Hastings, invalided in the Great War, is recuperating as a guest of John Cavendish at Styles Court, the ‘country-place’ of John’s autocratic old aunt, Emily Inglethorpe — she of a sizeable fortune, and so recently remarried to a man twenty years her junior. When Emily’s sudden heart attack is found to be attributable to strychnine, Hastings recruits an old friend, now retired, to aid in the local investigation. With impeccable timing, Hercule