“Harriet Sippel arrived at the vicarage one day, trailing a mob of ten or twenty behind her, and announced that the people of Great Holling intended to dig up the bodies of Patrick and Frances Ive. As suicides, she said, they had no right to be buried in consecrated ground—it was God’s law. Margaret came to the door and told her that she was speaking nonsense: it used to be the law of the Christian Church, but it wasn’t any longer. It had not been since the 1880s, and this was 1913. Once dead, a person’s soul is entrusted to the mercy of God, and that person is beyond earthly judgement. Harriet’s pious little helper Ida Gransbury insisted that if it was wrong for a suicide to be buried in a churchyard before 1880, then it must still be wrong. God does not change his mind about what constitutes acceptable behavior, she said. When he heard about this unconscionable outburst from his fiancée, Richard Negus ended his engagement to the pitiless harridan and left for Devon. It was the best decision he ever made.”

“Where did Frances and Patrick Ive find the abrin that they used to kill themselves?” Poirot asked.

Ambrose Flowerday looked surprised. “That’s a question I wasn’t expecting. Why do you ask?”

“Because I wonder if it originated with you?”

“It did.” The doctor flinched, as if in pain. “Frances stole it from my house. I spent some years working in the tropics and I brought two vials of the poison back with me. I was a young man then, but I planned to use it later in life if I needed to—in the event of a painful illness from which I would not recover. Having observed the agonies endured by some of my patients, I wanted to be able to spare myself that sort of ordeal. I didn’t know that Frances knew I had two vials of lethal poison in my cupboard, but she must have searched it one day, looking for something that would serve her purpose. As I said before, perhaps I do deserve to be punished. Whatever Margaret says, I have always felt that Frances’s killer was not Frances but me.”

“Non. You must not blame yourself,” said Poirot. “If she was determined to take her own life, she would have found a way to do so with or without your vial of abrin.”

I waited for Poirot to move on to a question about cyanide, since a doctor with access to one poison might well have access to two, but instead he said, “Dr. Flowerday, I do not intend to tell anybody that the deaths of Patrick and Frances Ive were not accidental. You will remain at liberty and able to continue in your medical practice.”