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By Root 473 0

a gorse bush, we might have accepted the remark. General Ravenscroft went out and I went after him. He kept saying as he walked, “Something has happened to Margaret. I’m sure something has happened to Molly.” We found her on a ledge a little way down the cliff. She had been battered with a rock and stones. She was not dead but she had bled heavily. For a moment we hardly knew what we could do. We dared not move her. We must get a doctor, we felt, at once, but before we could do that she clung to her husband. She said, gasping for breath, “Yes, it was Dolly. She didn’t know what she was doing. She didn’t know, Alistair. You mustn’t let her suffer for it. She’s never known the things she does or why. She can’t help it. She’s never been able to help it. You must promise me, Alistair. I think I’m dying now. No – no, we won’t have time to get a doctor and a doctor couldn’t do anything. I’ve been lying here bleeding to death – and I’m very close to death. I know that, but promise me. Promise me you’ll save her. Promise me you won’t let the police arrest her. Promise me that she’ll not be tried for killing me, not shut up for life as a criminal. Hide me somewhere so that my body won’t be found. Please, please, it’s the last thing I ask you. You whom I love more than anything in the world. If I could live for you I would, but I’m not going to live. I can feel that. I crawled a little way but that was all I could do. Promise me. And you, Zélie, you love me too. I know. You’ve loved me and been good to me and looked after me always. And you loved the children, so you must save Dolly. You must save poor Dolly. Please, please. For all the love we have for each other, Dolly must be saved.”’

‘And then,’ said Poirot. ‘What did you do? It seems to me that you must in some way between you –’

‘Yes. She died, you know. She died within about ten minutes of those last words, and I helped him. I helped him to hide her body. It was a place a little further along the cliff. We carried her there and there were rocks and boulders and stones, and we covered her body as best we could. There was no path to it really, or no way. You had to scramble. We put her there. All Alistair said again and again was – “I promised her. I must keep my word. I don’t know how to do it, I don’t know howanyone can save her. I don’t know. But –” Well, we did do it. Dolly was in the house. She was frightened, desperate with fright – but at the same time she showed a horrible kind of satisfaction. She said, “I always knew, I’ve known for years that Molly was really evil. She took you away from me, Alistair. You belonged to me – but she took you away from me and made you marry her and I always knew. Now I’m frightened. What’ll they do to me – what’ll they say? I can’t be shut up again. I can’t, I can’t. I shall go mad. You won’t let me be shut up. They’ll take me away and they’ll say I’m guilty of murder. It wasn’t murder. I just had to do it. Sometimes I do have to do things. I wanted to see the blood, you know. I couldn’t wait to see Molly die, though. I ran away. But I knew she would die. I just hoped you wouldn’t find her. She just fell over the cliff. People would say it was an accident.”’

‘It’s a horrible story,’ said Desmond. ‘Yes,’ said Celia, ‘it’s a horrible story, but it’s better to know. It’s better to know, isn’t it? I can’t even feel sorry for her. I mean for my mother. I know she was sweet. I know there was never any trace of evil in her – she was good all through – and I know, I can understand, why my father didn’t want to marry Dolly. He wanted to marry my mother because he loved her and he had found out by then that there was something wrong with Dolly. Something bad and twisted. But how – how did you do it all?’

‘We told a good many lies,’ said Zélie. ‘We hoped the body would not be found so that later perhaps it might be removed in the night or something like that to somewhere where it could look as though she’d fallen down into the sea. But then we thought of the sleep-walking story. What we had to do was really quite simple. Alistair said, “It’s