Hastings writes about what happened in “the Styles case” after being asked to by Poirot and by the family too. Back from the front, he had a month’s sick leave. He’s 30 now, if this John Cavendish is 45 and “a good 15 years his senior”. As a boy Hasstings had spent a lot of time in Cavedish’s mother’s place in Essex: Styles. They meet now and Cavendish invites him at Styles. His mother is well and remarried. She’s actually his step-mother who inherited everything when his father died. He’s a barrister and his younger brother a doctor, but neither works now. She gives them an allowance. She married 20-years youngere Alfred and there is also Cynthia, the orphan daughter of an old friend of hers. Evie is her factotum, Mary is John’s wife.
During their first conversation, Hasting admits he’d always liked the idea of being a detective since he “came across a man in Belgium once, a very famous detective”. He says “he was a marvellous little fellow. He used to say that all good detective work was a mere matter of method. My system is based on his. Though of course I have progressed rather further. He was a funny little man, a great dandy, but wonderfully clever”.
When Evie Howard has words with Emily Inglethorpe about her husband being “a bad lot”, she decides to leave, but not before warning Hastings of watching after her dear Emily, because she says that not only Alfred, but everyone there is after her money. One day, outside the post office, Hastings meets Poirot again after years not seeing each other. Mrs Inglethorp, in her many charities, has given “hospitality to seven of my countrypeople”, refugees from the war. He’s got a bad limp, and lives in a house with the other Belgians.
At night they all wake up, knowing that Emily was ill but unable to help because her door was locked. Alfred is not there. Together they bring down the door and find her convulsing on the bed, until she stops, dead. Dr Bauerstein tries CPR but to no avail. Hastings writes that “I have a certain talent for deduction” …no comment there.
The doctor suspects poison, so Hastings runs to ask for Poirot’s help.
They all hated Alfred so when the housemaid speaks of a quarrel, she’s sure it was between Emily and Alfred, even if she never saw him or heard his voice. Someone else states for sure Alfred bought some strychnine the day before the murder, but he denies that, just as he denies having a quarrel with his wife. Hastings of course is all against him, he’s the common man, who sees what people want him to see and judges based on sympathies. Or beauty. For he can never think ill of a friend or a pretty girl and if she’s very very pretty than he can’t think at all.
Poirot proves that Alfred did not buy the poison, but it was someone with a big beard and big glasses like him. When John is arrested, Hastings is shocked, but the evidence will not be enough to convict him. Finally Poirot shares the solution: there was only a narcotic in her cocoa, put there by Mary thinking she’d find proof of her husband’s infidelity in her papers while she slept. There was no poison in the coffee, she didn’t even drin it. No, someone altered her own medicine, which contained strychnine, to make it lethal. It was Alfred with Evelyn’s help. He did not defend himself because he wanted to be arrested at once when he could have disproved all the false evidence against himself that he had planted, and once acquitted he could never be tried again for the same crime.
Alfred and Evie are cousins, that’s how Emily met him, and they planned it together, that’s why she was so vocal in her ‘hatred’ of him and insisted on him being arrested at once.
Lawrence was afraid Cynthia had something to do with it, that’s why he insisted on the natural causes. Now they are happily together, in love.
Poirot let John’s trial go on because it brought him back with his wife, whose true feelings showed in her fierce defense of him. Hastings is left all alone: two beautiful women “and neither of them is for you” as Poirot puts it. Give it time Hastings…
Once again, one of Christie’s tactics, her clues that I like so much how she does it because we see it all but don’t always notice. In the same room, Poirot straightened out some objects while lost in thought, as he often does, and later on he did it again, meaning that someone had moved those items in the meantime!
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