“Standing by Patrick and Frances Ive’s desecrated grave, Catchpool said to me, ‘What if Jennie Hobbs lied about Patrick Ive not to hurt him but to help him?’ Catchpool had realized the significance of something that I had taken for granted—a fact that had never been in dispute, and so I had failed to examine it: Harriet Sippel’s passionate love for her late husband, George, who died tragically young. Had Poirot not been told how much Harriet had loved George? Or how the death of George had turned Harriet from a happy, warm-hearted woman into a bitter, spiteful monster? One can hardly imagine a loss so terrible, so devastating, that it extinguishes all joy and destroys all that is good in a person. Oui, bien sûr, I knew that Harriet Sippel had suffered such a loss. I knew it so surely that I thought no further about it!

“I knew, also, that Jennie Hobbs loved Patrick Ive enough to abandon Samuel Kidd, her fiancé, in order to remain in the service of Reverend Ive and his wife. This is a very self-sacrificing love: content to serve, and receive little in return. Yet the story told to us by both Jennie and Nancy offered Jennie’s jealousy as her reason for telling the terrible lie that she told—jealousy of Patrick’s love for Nancy. But this cannot be true! It is not consistent! We must think not only of the physical facts but of the psychological. Jennie did nothing to punish Patrick Ive for his marriage to Frances. She accepted with good grace that he belonged to another woman. She continued as his loyal servant and was a great help to him and his wife at the vicarage, and they, in turn, were devoted to her. Why then all of a sudden, after many years of self-sacrificing love and service, would Patrick Ive’s love for Nancy Ducane inspire Jennie to slander him, and to set in motion a chain of events that would destroy him? The answer is that it would not, and did not.

“It was not the eruption of envy and longing locked inside for so long that prompted Jennie to tell her lie. It was something altogether different. You were trying—were you not, Miss Hobbs?—to help the man you loved. To save him, even. As soon as I heard the theory of my clever friend Catchpool, I knew it was the truth. It was so obvious, and Poirot, he had been imbécile not to see!”

Jennie looked at me. “What theory?” she asked.