I saw at once that my jealousy had led me to do a terrible, heinous thing. I witnessed Patrick’s suffering and desperately wanted to help him, and Frances—but I didn’t see how I could! Harriet had seen Nancy enter and leave the vicarage at night. So had Richard Negus. If I had admitted to lying, I would have had to offer another explanation for Nancy’s nocturnal visits to Patrick. And it would not have taken Harriet long to arrive at the correct explanation by her own deductions.

The shameful truth is that I am a dreadful coward. People like Richard Negus and Ida Gransbury—they don’t mind what other people think of them if they believe that right is on their side, but I do mind. I have always cared about making a good impression. If I had confessed to my lie, I would have been hated by everybody in the village, and rightly so. I’m not a strong person, Monsieur Poirot. I did nothing, said nothing, because I was scared. Then Nancy, horrified by the lie and by people’s believing it, came forward and told the truth: that she and Patrick were in love and had been meeting in secret, though nothing of a carnal nature had taken place between them.

Nancy’s efforts on Patrick’s behalf only made things worse for him. “Not only a charlatan who defrauds parishioners and makes a mockery of his Church, but also an adulterer”—that was what they started to say. It became too much for Frances, who took her own life. When Patrick found her, he knew he would not be able to live with the guilt—after all, it was his love for Nancy that had started the trouble. He had failed in his duty to Frances. He, too, took his own life.

The village doctor said that the two deaths were accidents, but that was not true. They were both suicide—another sin in the eyes of those as saintly as Ida Gransbury, and those with an appetite for punishing, like Harriet Sippel. Patrick and Frances both left notes, you see. I found them and passed them on to the doctor, Ambrose Flowerday. I think he must have burned them. He said that he would not give anybody further cause to condemn Patrick and Frances. Dr. Flowerday was sickened by the way the whole village had turned on them.

Patrick’s death broke my heart, and it has remained broken since that day, Monsieur Poirot. I wanted to die, but with Patrick gone, I felt that I needed to stay alive, loving him and thinking well of him—as if my doing so could ever make up for everybody else in Great Holling believing him to be some sort of devil!