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By Root 550 0

nobody’s business. Her parents and near relatives had been killed. A firm of French lawyers in Paris acted as instructed by lawyers in San Miguel. On her marriage, she assumed control of her own fortune. She was, as you have told me, docile, affectionate, suggestible. Everything her husband asked her to sign, she signed. Securities were probably changed and re-sold many times, but in the end the desired financial result was reached. Sir George Stubbs, the new personality assumed by your son, became a rich man and his wife became a pauper. It is no legal offence to call yourself “sir” unless it is done to obtain money under false pretences. A title creates confidence – it suggests, if not birth, then certainly riches. So the rich Sir George Stubbs, older and changed in appearance and having grown a beard, bought Nasse House and came to live where he belonged, though he had not been there since he was a boy. There was nobody left after the devastation of war who was likely to have recognized him. But old Merdell did. He kept the knowledge to himself, but when he said to me slyly that there would always be Folliats at Nasse House, that was his own private joke.

‘So all had turned out well, or so you thought. Your plan, I fully believe, stopped there. Your son had wealth, his ancestral home, and though his wife was subnormal she was a beautiful and docile girl, and you hoped he would be kind to her and that she would be happy.’

Mrs Folliat said in a low voice:

‘That’s how I thought it would be – I would look after Hattie and care for her. I never dreamed –’

‘You never dreamed – and your son carefully did not tell you, that at the time of the marriage he was already married. Oh, yes – we have searched the records for what we knew must exist. Your son had married a girl in Trieste, a girl of the underground criminal world with whom he concealed himself after his desertion. She had no mind to be parted from him, nor for that matter had he any intention of being parted from her. He accepted the marriage with Hattie as a means to wealth, but in his own mind he knew from the beginning what he intended to do.’

‘No, no, I do not believe that! I cannot believe it…It was that woman – that wicked creature.’

Poirot went on inexorably:

‘He meant murder. Hattie had no relations, few friends. Immediately on their return to England, he brought her here. The servants hardly saw her that first evening, and the woman they saw the next morning was not Hattie, but his Italian wife made up as Hattie and behaving roughly much as Hattie behaved. And there again it might have ended. The false Hattie would have lived out her life as the real Hattie though doubtless her mental powers would have unexpectedly improved owing to what would vaguely be called “new treatment.” The secretary, Miss Brewis, already realized that there was very little wrong with Lady Stubbs’ mental processes.

‘But then a totally unforeseen thing happened. A cousin of Hattie’s wrote that he was coming to England on a yachting trip, and although that cousin had not seen her for many years, he would not be likely to be deceived by an impostor.

‘It is odd,’ said Poirot, breaking off his narrative, ‘that though the thought did cross my mind that De Sousa might not be De Sousa, it never occurred to me that the truth lay the other way round – that is to say, that Hattie was not Hattie.’

He went on:

‘There might have been several different ways of meeting that situation. Lady Stubbs could have avoided a meeting with a plea of illness, but if De Sousa remained long in England she could hardly have continued to avoid meeting him. And there was already another complication. Old Merdell, garrulous in his old age, used to chatter to his granddaughter. She was probably the only person who bothered to listen to him, and even she dismissed most of what he said because she thought him “batty.” Nevertheless, some of the things he said about having seen “a woman’s body in the woods,” and “Sir George Stubbs being really Mr James” made sufficient impression on her to make her hint about them