hands. She said in a low dull voice:

"Ifs true — it's all true . . . I killed her.

And all for nothing — nothing . . . I was

mad"

VII

Jean MoncriefFe said:

"I must ask you to forgive me, M.

Poirot. I have been so angry with you —

so terribly angry with you. It seemed to

me that you were making everything so

much worse."

Poirot said with a smile:

"So I was to begin with. It is like in the

old legend of the Lemean Hydra. Every

time a head was cut off, two heads grew

in its place. So, to begin with, the rumours

grew and multiplied. But you see my task,

like that of my namesake Hercules, was

to reach the first—the original head.

Who had started this rumour? It did not

take me long to discover that the originator

of the story was Nurse Harrison. I went to

96

see her. She appeared to be a very nice

woman --intelligent and sympathetic. But

almost at once she made a bad mistake - she repeated to me a conversation which she had overheard taking place between

you and the doctor, and that conversation, you see, was all wrong. It was psychologically most unlikely. If you and the

doctor had planned together to kill Mrs.

Oldfield, you are both of you far too

intelligent and level-headed to hold such a

conversation in a room with an open door, easily overheard by someone on the stairs or someone in the kitchen. Moreover, the

words attributed to you did not fit in at all

with your mental make-up. They were the

words of a much older woman and of one

of a quite different type. They were words

such as would be imagined by Nurse

Harrison as being used by herself in like

circumstances.

"I had, up to then, regarded the whole

matter as fairly simple. Nurse Harrison, I

realised, was a fairly young and still

handsome woman --she had been thrown

closely with Doctor Oldfield for nearly

three years--the doctor had been very

fond of her and grateful to her for her tact

97

and sympathy. She had formed the impression

that if Mrs. Oldfield died, the

doctor would probably ask her to marry

him. Instead of that, after Mrs. Oldfield's

death, she learns that Doctor Oldfield is in

love with you. Straightaway, driven by

anger and jealousy, she starts spreading the

rumour that Doctor Oldfield has poisoned

his wife.

"That, as I say, was how I had visualised

the position at first. It was a case of a

jealous woman and a lying rumour. But

the old trite phrase 'no smoke without

fire' recurred to me significantly. I wondered

if Nurse Harrison had done more than spread a rumour. Certain things she said rang strangely. She told me that Mrs.

Oldfield's illness was largely imaginary - that she did not really suffer much pain. But the doctor himself had been in no

doubt about the reality of his wife's suffering.