Free Closed Casket: The New Hercule Poirot Mystery (Hercule Poirot Mystery 2) by Sophie Hannah

Scotcher very much, perhaps …’
    I waited to see if he would say more. When it was clear he did not intend to, I said, ‘I think you were right the first time. If there’s one thing I know about Athelinda Playford from her books, it’s that she thinks of all kinds of peculiar motives and schemes that no one else would ever dream up. I think she was playing a game at the dinner table. She strikes me as the sort who would enjoy games.’
    ‘You think it is not real, this will that leaves her entire estate to Scotcher?’ We had started to move again.
    ‘No, I think it is,’ I said. What did I mean? I considered it carefully. ‘Making it real is part of her game. She’s serious, all right—but that doesn’t mean she isn’t toying with everybody.’
    ‘For what reason,
mon ami
? For revenge, perhaps? The desire to punish—though not so severely as she might? A most interesting allusion was made to the late Viscount Playford’s will. I wonder …’
    ‘Yes, I have been wondering about it too.’
    ‘I think I can guess what happened. Usually the family estate passes to the son, the new Viscount. Yet in this instance that evidently did not happen. Lady Playford, as we heard this evening, is the owner of the Lillieoak estate and of several houses in London. Therefore … an unusual arrangement must have been made by the late Viscount Playford. It is possible that he and Lady Playford did not believe the young Harry to be capable of taking on such a responsibility—’
    ‘If that was their worry, one could scarcely blame them,’ I interjected. ‘Harry does rather give the impression of having a suet pudding between his ears, doesn’t he?’
    Poirot murmured his agreement, then said, ‘Or perhaps the reluctance of Lady Playford and her late husband had more to do with their daughter-in-law, who has shown her vicious streak most clearly in the short time we have known her.’
    ‘What do you mean about Lady Playford wanting to punish, but not too severely?’
    ‘Let us say that she does not wish to disinherit her children—that would be too extreme. At the same time, it infuriates her that they take her for granted. Perhaps they are not as attentive as they might be. So she makes a new will leaving everything to Joseph Scotcher. She knows he will not outlive her—her new arrangements make no difference to him, apart from as a gesture. Now her children and her daughter-in-law will be nervous for the remainder of Scotcher’s life, in case she should happen to die before him—after all, accidents do happen. When Scotcher dies from his illness, they will all breathe a sigh of relief and never again take for granted that everything belonging to Lady Playford will one day be theirs. They might treat her more considerately thereafter.’
    ‘I don’t like that theory at all,’ I said. ‘Accidents
do
happen, and I cannot believe that Lady Playford would make so imprecise a plan. If she wanted her estate to go to her children, she would not take even the tiniest risk. As you say, she could fall down the stairs and break her neck tomorrow and everything would go to Scotcher.’
    I expected Poirot to argue the point, but he did not. We walked for a while in silence. My legs were starting to ache from the effort of adjusting my pace to match his. Someone ought to make a competitive sport out of trying to walk excessively slowly; it tests muscles of which one was previously unaware.
    ‘I have an outlandish hypothesis,’ I said. ‘Imagine that Lady Playford has reason to believe one of her children intends to kill her.’
    ‘Ah!’
    ‘You’ve already thought of this, I suppose.’
    ‘
Non, mon ami
. Continue.’
    ‘She is worried about her dying secretary, Joseph Scotcher. As a sort of mother figure to him, which is very likely how she sees herself—he is an orphan, and she lost a child—she doesn’t want to die while he is alive and needs her. She hopes to stay alive in order to be of help and comfort to