Poirot and Hastings are on vacation when they meet Nick Buckley (Polly Walker, she was good), a girl who lives nearby in a big house but not enough money to maintain it. Talking to Poirot she mentions that she has survived a few accidents already, and when she forgets her hat Poirot notices that there’s a hole in it and a bullet near it, and he becomes convinced that someone is trying to kill her. They go together to pay her a visit, and her friend Freddy tells Hastings that Nick is a terrible liar..
Poirot explains to Nick his concerns, excusing the fact that she doesn’t know him because of her young age, and asks her if there’s anyone she can really trust. She can only think of her cousin Maggie, so she asks Maggie to join her there. Maggie comes, and she gets shot dead while wearing Nick’s coat. Obviously they all think the murderer made a mistake, intending to kill Nick.
I didn’t fall for it because like Garak said once, coincidences happen all the time but I don’t trust coincidences, specially this kind of big coincidences...
Anyway, it appears like Nick’s life is still in danger. She goes to a hospital, in great shock. She says she doesn’t care anymore because she doesn’t want to live, and the reason is that her fiancèe Michael has died. Shortly after his rich uncle died, therefore leaving her a large fortune.
Poirot wants to protect her so she’s allowed no visits and can’t eat nothing that comes from outside, and yet she’s poisoned with chocolates. She ate them because she said that there was a card with Poirot’s name inside the box. It appears that there were two boxes of chocolates, and her friend Freddie had sent the other one. Freddie says that Nick asks her to get her some.
Poirot informs them all that she didn’t recover : “I failed, I failed, she died”...
Her will turns up six months after it was supposed to have been posted, and her cousin who is also her lawyer reads it to them, all assembled. Everything has been left to an old woman who somehow helped her father... but it was a fake will, and Nick comes out alive and well, saying that it was all Poirot’s plan, only a trick, and can unmask the old woman and her husband’s attempt at getting their hands on her money with a fake will. She also accuses them of murdering Maggie, but the old man denies it. He admits about the will, but says that they killed nobody.
Poirot knows the truth, he understands it all and now reveals what really happened.
He knows that Nick is not her real name, she told him that. She’s actually called Magdala or something, a family name. From a casual chat between Miss Lemon and Hastings, Poirot realizes that some names have a lot of different nicknames.
Her cousin Maggie’s real name was also Magdala, they were both Magdala Buckley. Michael was in love with Maggie, not with Nick, but he didn’t know about the fact that they had the same name so he wrote in his will that he left everything to Magdala Buckley, and with Maggie out of the way Nick would inherit everything.
Japp arrests Nick, and she takes a watch (I think it was Freddie’s watch, not sure) and Poirot knows that those wristwatches are what a guy uses to smuggle cocaine, Freddie uses it, and Nick will probably use it to kill herself, at least this is what is implied at the end of this episode.
In perfect Christie-style, Poirot understands her intentions, but he thinks that it might be a better solution compared to being hanged.
There’s only one little thing that is not too clear to me. Michael died more or less when Maggie died, not long before, so what about all the fake accidents, why was Nick making people believing that her life was in danger? Probably Michael had been missing for some time now and I missed that bit. He was a pilot.
I love the ending with Miss Lemon and Hastings coming with four ice-cream cones: one for Japp, one for her, nothing for Poirot because she read that ice-cream is bad for the little grey-cells :lol: and two for Hastings because he says that his grey-cells are already dead, this remark made because Poirot had previously said something on that line. Poirot jokes about leaving the two of them behind and they give him one :-p
Such small ice-cream cones! I’ve never seen any so small!
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