Poirot said, “Pardon me, Doctor. You know who did this to Mrs. Ernst? The two bad pennies that you refer to . . . they confessed?”

“Proudly,” said Dr. Flowerday through gritted teeth.

“So they are arrested?”

“Oh, yes, the police have got them.”

“Who are they?” I asked.

“Frederick and Tobias Clutton, father and son. Drunken good-for-nothings, the pair of them.”

I wondered if the son was the ne’er-do-well I had seen drinking with Walter Stoakley in the King’s Head. (I later discovered that I was right: he was.)

“Margaret got in their way, they said. As for the Ives’ grave . . .” Dr. Flowerday turned to me. “Please understand that I am not blaming you for this, but your visit stirred things up. You were seen going to Margaret’s cottage. All the villagers know where she stands with regard to the Ives. They knew that the story you were hearing inside that house was one that painted Patrick Ive not as a promiscuous charlatan but as the victim of a sustained campaign of cruelty and slander—theirs. It made them want to punish Patrick all over again. He is dead and beyond their reach, so they desecrated his grave instead. Margaret has always said it would happen one day. She sits by her window day in and day out, hoping to catch them and stop them. Do you know she never met Patrick or Frances Ive? Did she tell you that? They were my friends. Their tragedy was my sorrow, the injustice of it my obsession. Yet, from the first, they mattered to Margaret. It horrified her to think that such a thing could happen in her husband’s new parish. She made sure that it mattered to him, too. It was the most incredible good fortune, that Margaret and Charles came to Great Holling. One couldn’t wish for a better ally. Allies,” Dr. Flowerday corrected himself.

“May we speak to Margaret?” I asked. If she was about to die—and I had the sense that she was, in spite of the doctor’s determination that she should not—then I wanted to hear what she had to say while there was still time.

“Of course,” said Ambrose Flowerday. “She would be furious with me for keeping you from her.”

Poirot, the nurse and I followed him up a flight of uncarpeted wooden stairs and into one of the bedrooms. I tried not to show my shock when I saw bandages, blood, and the purple and blue welts and lumps that covered Margaret Ernst’s face. Tears came to my eyes.

“Are they here, Ambrose?” she asked.

“Yes.”

“Bonjour, Madame Ernst. I am Hercule Poirot. Words cannot express how sorry I am—”

“Please call me Margaret. Is Mr. Catchpool with you?”

“Yes, I’m here,” I managed to say. How any man or men could inflict such injury upon a woman was quite beyond me. It was not the act of human beings but of beasts. Monsters.