Three Act Tragedy (Hercule Poirot 11)

“Of course I’ve realized that—but do you realize what deduction one can draw from it?”

“I don’t quite follow you, Cartwright?”

“Dash it all, man, do you suppose that’s coincidence? No, it was meant. Why are all the people who were at the first death present at the second? Accident? Not on your life. It was plan—design—Tollie’s plan.”

“Oh!” said Mr. Satterthwaite. “Yes, it’s possible….”

“It’s certain. You didn’t know Tollie as well as I did, Satterthwaite. He was a man who kept his own counsel, and a very patient man. In all the years I’ve known him I’ve never known Tollie give utterance to a rash opinion or judgment.

“Look at it this way: Babbington’s murdered—yes, murdered—I’m not going to hedge, or mince terms—murdered one evening in my house. Tollie ridicules m

e gently for my suspicions in the matter, but all the time he’s got suspicions of his own. He doesn’t talk about them—that’s not his way. But quietly, in his own mind, he’s building up a case. I don’t know what he had to build upon. It can’t, I think, be a case against any one particular person. He believed that one of those people was responsible for the crime, and he made a plan, a test of some kind to find out which person it was.”

“What about the other guests, the Edens and the Campbells?”

“Camouflage. It made the whole thing less obvious.”

“What do you think the plan was?”

Sir Charles shrugged his shoulders—an exaggerated foreign gesture. He was Aristide Duval, that mastermind of the Secret Service. His left foot limped as he walked.

“How can we know? I am not a magician. I cannot guess. But there was a plan…It went wrong, because the murderer was just one degree cleverer than Tollie thought…He struck first….”

“He?”

“Or she. Poison is as much a woman’s weapon as a man’s—more so.”

Mr. Satterthwaite was silent. Sir Charles said:

“Come now, don’t you agree? Or are you on the side of public opinion? ‘The butler’s the man. He done it.’”

“What’s your explanation of the butler?”

“I haven’t thought about him. In my view he doesn’t matter…I could suggest an explanation.”

“Such as?”

“Well, say that the police are right so far—Ellis is a professional criminal, working in, shall we say, with a gang of burglars. Ellis obtains this post with false credentials. Then Tollie is murdered. What is Ellis’s position? A man is killed, and in the house is a man whose fingerprints are at Scotland Yard, and who is known to the police. Naturally he gets the wind up and bolts.”

“By the secret passage?”

“Secret passage be damned. He dodged out of the house while one of the fatheaded constables who were watching the house was taking forty winks.”

“It certainly seems more probable.”

“Well, Satterthwaite, what’s your view?”

“Mine?” said Mr. Satterthwaite. “Oh, it’s the same as yours. It has been all along. The butler seems to me a very clumsy red herring. I believe that Sir Bartholomew and poor old Babbington were killed by the same person.”

“One of the house party?”

“One of the house party.”

There was silence for a minute or two, and then Mr. Satterthwaite asked casually:

“Which of them do you think it was?”

“My God, Satterthwaite, how can I tell?”