While the Light Lasts - Agatha Christie [59]
‘Impossible! The man would cry out.’
‘Not if he were drugged first?’
‘Drugged?’
‘Yes. Who did Clayton have a drink with at seven-thirty? Ah! Now you see. Curtiss! Curtiss has inflamed Clayton’s mind with suspicions against his wife and Rich. Curtiss suggests this plan–the visit to Scotland, the concealment in the chest, the final touch of moving the screen. Not so that Clayton can raise the lid a little and get relief–no, so that he, Curtiss, can raise that lid unobserved. The plan is Curtiss’s, and observe the beauty of it, Hastings. If Rich had observed the screen was out of place and moved it back–well, no harm is done. He can make another plan. Clayton hides in the chest, the mild narcotic that Curtiss had administered takes effect. He sinks into unconsciousness. Curtiss lifts up the lid and strikes–and the phonograph goes on playing “Walking My Baby Back Home”.’
I found my voice. ‘Why? But why?’
Poirot shrugged his shoulders.
‘Why did a man shoot himself? Why did two Italians fight a duel? Curtiss is of a dark passionate temperament. He wanted Marguerita Clayton. With her husband and Rich out of the way, she would, or so he thought, turn to him.’
He added musingly:
‘These simple childlike women…they are very dangerous. But mon Dieu! what an artistic masterpiece! It goes to my heart to hang a man like that. I may be a genius myself, but I am capable of recognizing genius in other people. A perfect murder, mon ami. I, Hercule Poirot, say it to you. A perfect murder. E´ patant!’
Afterword
‘The Mystery of The Baghdad Chest’, first published in the Strand Magazine in January 1932, is the original version of ‘The Mystery of the Spanish Chest’, a novella included in the collection The Adventure of the Christmas Pudding (1960). The novella is told in the third person and Hastings does not appear.
Hercule Poirot’s debut was The Mysterious Affair at Styles (1920), written by Christie in response to a challenge from her sister while working in a poisons dispensary in Torquay. When Poirot died fifty-five years later in Curtain (1975), published shortly before Christie’s own death, one mystery remained unsolved: his age. Though the original text of Curtain was written some thirty years earlier, subsequent events mean we must assume the published novel to take place in the early 1970s, shortly after what was to be his ‘penultimate’ case, Elephants Can Remember (1972) was published. In Curtain, Poirot seems to be at least in his mid- to late-eighties, which would mean that he was in his early thirties in The Mysterious Affair at Styles. This novel is set in 1917 and in it Poirot is described as a ‘quaint dandified little man with a bad limp…as a detective his flair had been extraordinary, and he had achieved triumphs by unravelling some of the most baffling cases of the day.’ Moreover, in the short story in which Poirot first appeared, ‘The Adventure at the Victory Ball’, collected in Poirot’s Early Cases (1974), he is described as having been ‘formerly chief of the Belgian force’. Given his ‘bad limp’, it is possible that Poirot retired through ill health although it did not constitute much of a handicap in his many later cases. However, in Styles, Inspector James Japp, who appears in many later novels, recalled how he and Poirot had worked together in 1904–‘the Abercrombie forgery case’–when Poirot could only have been a teenager if he was in his eighties in Curtain!
In September 1975, the writer and critic H. R. F. Keating suggested a possible solution in a piece to mark the publication of Curtain–Poirot was in fact 117 years of age at his death, and Keating went on to suggest that there might be other skeletons in the detective’s closet!
Perhaps the last word should go to Poirot’s creator who, in an interview in 1948, commented prematurely that ‘He lived for such a long time. I really ought to have got rid of him. But I was never given the