Curtain: Poirot's Last Case (15 page)

Note by Captain Arthur Hastings:
The following manuscript came into my possession four months after the death of my friend Hercule Poirot. I received a communication from a firm of lawyers asking me to call at their office. There ‘in accordance with the instructions of their client, the late M. Hercule Poirot’, they handed me a sealed packet. I reproduce its contents here.

‘Mon cher ami,

‘I shall have been dead four months when you read these words. I have debated long whether or not to write down what is written here, and I have decided that it is necessary for someone to know the truth about the second “Affaire Styles”. Also I hazard a conjecture that by the time you read this you will have evolved the most preposterous theories – and possibly may be giving pain to yourself.

‘But let me say this: You should,
mon ami,
have easily been able to arrive at the truth. I saw to it that you had every indication. If you have not, it is because, as always, you have far too beautiful and trusting a nature.
A la fin comme au commencement.

‘But you
should
know, at least, who killed Norton – even if you are still in the dark as to who killed Barbara Franklin. The latter may be a shock to you.

‘To begin with, as you know, I sent for you. I told you that I needed you. That was true. I told you that I wanted you to be my ears and my eyes. That again was true, very true – if not in the sense that you understood it! You were to see what I wanted you to see and hear what I wanted you to hear.

‘You complained,
cher ami
, that I was “unfair” in my presentation of this case. I withheld from you knowledge that I had myself. That is to say, I refused to tell you the identity of X. That is quite true. I had to do so – though not for the reasons that I advanced. You will see the reason presently.

‘And now let us examine this matter of X. I showed you the résumé of the various cases. I pointed out to you that in each separate case it seemed quite clear that the person accused, or suspected, had actually committed the crimes in question, that there was no
alternate
solution. And I then proceeded to the second important fact – that in each case X had been either on the scene or closely involved. You then jumped to a deduction that was, paradoxically, both true and false. You said that X had committed all the murders.

‘But, my friend, the circumstances were such that in each case (or very nearly)
only
the accused person could have done the crime. On the other hand, if so, how account for X? Apart from a person connected with the police force or with, say, a firm of criminal lawyers, it is not reasonable for any man or woman to be involved in five murder cases. It does not, you comprehend, happen! Never, never does it occur that someone says confidentially: “Well, as a matter of fact, I’ve actually known five murderers!” No, no,
mon ami
, it is not possible, that. So we get the curious result that we have here a case of catalysis – a reaction between two substances that takes place only in the presence of a third substance, that third substance apparently taking no part in the reaction and remaining unchanged. That is the position. It means that where X was present, crimes took place – but X did not actively take part in these crimes.

‘An extraordinary, an abnormal situation! And I saw that I had come across at last, at the end of my career, the perfect criminal, the criminal who had invented such a technique that
he could never be convicted of crime.

‘It was amazing. But it was not new. There
were
parallels. And here comes in the first of the “clues” I left you. The play of
Othello
. For there, magnificently delineated, we have the original X. Iago is the perfect murderer. The deaths of Desdemona, of Cassio – indeed of Othello himself – are all Iago’s crimes, planned by him, carried out by him. And
he
remains outside the circle, untouched by suspicion – or could have done so. For your great Shakespeare, my friend, had to deal with the dilemma that his own art had brought about. To unmask Iago he had to resort to the clumsiest of devices – the handkerchief – a piece of work not at all in keeping with Iago’s general technique and a blunder of which one feels certain he would not have been guilty.

‘Yes, there is there the perfection of the art of murder. Not even a word of
direct
suggestion. He is always holding back others from violence, refuting with horror suspicions that have not been entertained until he mentions them!

‘And the same technique is seen in the brilliant third act of
John Fergueson
, where the “half-witted” Clutie John induces others to kill the man that he himself hates. It is a wonderful piece of psychological suggestion.

‘Now you must realize this, Hastings. Everyone is a potential murderer. In everyone there arises from time to time the
wish
to kill – though not the
will
to kill. How often have you not felt or heard others say: “She made me so furious I felt I could have killed her!” “I could have killed B. for saying so and so!” “I was so angry I could have murdered him!” And all those statements are literally true. Your mind at such moments is quite clear. You would like to kill so and so.
But you do not do it
. Your will has to assent to your desire. In young children, the brake is as yet acting imperfectly. I have known a child, annoyed by its kitten, say “Keep still or I’ll hit you on the head and kill you” and actually do so – to be stunned and horrified a moment later when it realizes that the kitten’s life will not return – because, you see, really the child loves that kitten dearly. So then, we are all potential murderers. And the art of X was this, not to suggest the
desire
, but to break down the normal decent resistance. It was an art perfected by long practice. X knew the exact word, the exact phrase, the intonation even to suggest and to bring cumulative pressure on a weak spot! It could be done. It was done without the victim ever suspecting. It was not hypnotism – hypnotism would not have been successful. It was something more insidious, more deadly. It was a marshalling of the forces of a human being to widen a breach instead of repairing it. It called on the best in a man and set it in alliance with the worst.

‘
You
should know, Hastings – for it happened to you . . .

‘So now, perhaps, you begin to see what some of my remarks, that annoyed and confused you, really meant. When I spoke of a crime to be committed, I was not always referring to the same crime. I told you that I was at Styles for a purpose. I was there, I said, because a crime was going to be committed. You were surprised at my certainty on that point. But I was able to be certain – for the crime, you see, was to be committed
by myself . . .

‘Yes, my friend – it is odd – and laughable – and terrible! I, who do not approve of murder – I, who value human life – have ended my career by committing murder. Perhaps it is because I have been too self-righteous, too conscious of rectitude, that this terrible dilemma had to come to me. For you see, Hastings, there are two sides to it. It is my work in life to save the innocent – to
prevent
murder – and this – this is the only way I can do it! Make no mistake, X could not be touched by the law. He was safe. By no ingenuity that I could think of could he be defeated any other way.

‘And yet, my friend, I was reluctant. I saw what had to be done – but I could not bring myself to do it. I was like Hamlet – eternally putting off the evil day . . . And then the next attempt happened – the attempt on Mrs Luttrell.

‘I had been curious, Hastings, to see if your well-known flair for the obvious would work. It did. Your very first reaction was a mild suspicion of Norton. And you were quite right. Norton was the man. You had no reason for your belief – except the perfectly sound if slightly half-hearted suggestion that he was insignificant. There, I think, you came very close to the truth.

‘I have considered his life history with some care. He was the only son of a masterful and bossy woman. He seems to have had at no time any gift for asserting himself or for impressing his personality on other people. He has always been slightly lame and was unable to take part in games at school.

‘One of the most significant things you told me was a remark about him having been laughed at at school for nearly being sick when seeing a dead rabbit. There, I think, was an incident that may have left a deep impression on him. He disliked blood and violence and his prestige suffered in consequence. Subconsciously, I should say, he has waited to redeem himself by being bold and ruthless.

‘I should imagine that he began to discover quite young his own power for influencing people. He was a good listener, he had a quiet sympathetic personality. People liked him without, at the same time, noticing him very much. He resented this – and then made use of it. He discovered how ridiculously easy it was, by using the correct words and supplying the correct stimuli, to influence his fellow creatures. The only thing necessary was to understand them – to penetrate their thoughts, their secret reactions and wishes.

‘Can you realize, Hastings, that such a discovery might feed a sense of power? Here was he, Stephen Norton whom everyone liked and despised, and he would make people do things they didn’t want to do – or (mark this) thought they did not want to do.

‘I can visualize him, developing this hobby of his . . . And little by little developing a morbid taste for violence at second-hand. The violence for which he lacked physical stamina and for the lack of which he had been derided.

‘Yes, his hobby grows and grows until it comes to be a passion, a necessity! It was a drug, Hastings – a drug that induced craving as surely as opium or cocaine might have done.

‘Norton, the gentle-hearted, loving man, was a secret sadist. He was an addict of pain, of mental torture. There has been an epidemic of that in the world of late years
– L’appétit vient en mangeant.

‘It fed two lusts, the lust of the sadist and the lust of power. He, Norton, had the keys of life and of death.

‘Like any other drug slave, he had to have his supply of the drug. He found victim after victim. I have no doubt there have been more cases than the five I actually tracked down. In each of those he played the same part. He knew Etherington, he stayed one summer in the village where Riggs lived and drank with Riggs in the local pub. On a cruise he met the girl Freda Clay and encouraged and played upon her half-formed conviction that if her old aunt died it would be really a good thing – a release for Auntie and a life of financial ease and pleasure for herself. He was a friend of the Litchfields, and when talking to him, Margaret Litchfield saw herself in the light of a heroine delivering her sisters from their life sentence of imprisonment. But I do not believe, Hastings, that
any of these people would have done what they did
– but for Norton’s influence.

‘And now we come to the events at Styles. I had been on Norton’s tracks for some time. He became acquainted with the Franklins and at once I scented danger. You must understand that even Norton has to have a nucleus on which to work. You can only develop a thing of which the seed is already present. In
Othello
, for instance, I have always been of the belief that already present in Othello’s mind was the conviction (possibly correct) that Desdemona’s love for him was the passionate unbalanced hero-worship of a young girl for a famous warrior and not the balanced love of a
woman
for Othello the
man
. He may have realized that Cassio was her true mate and that in time she would come to realize the fact.

‘The Franklins presented a most agreeable prospect to our Norton. All kinds of possibilities! You have doubtless realized by now, Hastings, (what anyone of sense could have seen perfectly plainly all along) that Franklin was in love with Judith and she with him. His brusqueness, his habit of never looking at her, of forsaking any attempt at courtesy, ought to have told you that the man was head over ears in love with her. But Franklin is a man of great strength of character and also of great rectitude. His speech is brutally unsentimental, but he is a man of very definite standards. In his code a man sticks to the wife he has chosen.

‘Judith, as I should have thought even you could have seen, was deeply and unhappily in love with him. She thought you had grasped the fact that day you found her in the rose garden. Hence her furious outburst. Characters like hers cannot stand any expression of pity or sympathy. It was like touching a raw wound.

‘Then she discovered that you thought it was Allerton she cared for. She let you think so, thereby shielding herself from clumsy sympathy and from a further probing of the wound. She flirted with Allerton as a kind of desperate solace. She knew exactly the type of man he was. He amused her and distracted her, but she never had the least feeling for him.

‘Norton, of course, knew exactly how the wind lay. He saw possibilities in the Franklin trio. I may say that he started first on Franklin, but drew a complete blank. Franklin is the one type of man who is quite immune from Norton’s type of insidious suggestion. Franklin has a clear-cut, black and white mind, with an exact knowledge of his own feeling – and a complete disregard for outside pressure. Moreover the great passion of his life is his work. His absorption in it makes him far less vulnerable.

‘With Judith, Norton was far more successful. He played very cleverly on the theme of useless lives. It was an article of faith with Judith – and the fact that her secret desires were in accordance with it was a fact that she ignored stridently whilst Norton knew it to be an ally. He was very clever about it – taking himself the opposite point of view, gently ridiculing the idea that she would ever have the nerve to do such a decisive action. “It is the kind of thing that all young people say – but never do!” Such an old cheap jibe – and how often it works, Hastings! So vulnerable they are, these children! So ready, though they do not recognize it that way, to take a
dare!

‘And with the useless Barbara out of the way, then the road is clear for Franklin and Judith. That was never said – that was never allowed to come into the open. It was stressed that the
personal
angle had nothing to do with it – nothing at all. For if Judith once recognized that it had, she would have reacted violently. But with a murder addict so far advanced as Norton, one iron in the fire is not enough. He sees opportunities for pleasure everywhere. He found one in the Luttrells.