Murder On The Links by Agatha Christie (Listen To The Book)
The Murder on the Links is a work of detective fiction by Agatha Christie and first published in the US by Dodd, Mead and Company in 1923
Agatha Mary Clarissa, Lady Mallowan, DBE (née Miller; 15 September 1890 – 12 January 1976), commonly known as Agatha Christie, was an English crime writer of novels, short stories and plays. She also wrote romances under the name Mary Westmacott, but is best remembered for her 80 detective novels and her successful West End theatre plays. Her works, particularly featuring detectives Hercule Poirot or Miss Jane Marple, have given her the title the 'Queen of Crime' and made her one of the most important and innovative writers in the development of the genre
Plot summary
Captain Hastings arrives in the flat that he now shares with Poirot
in London, eager to tell the Belgian detective about a woman with whom
he has fallen hopelessly in love on the train from Paris to Calais. But
Poirot is busy sorting his mail, impatiently tossing aside bills and
banal requests "recovering lost lap dogs for fashionable ladies". Then
he finds an extraordinary letter from the south of France: "For God's
sake, come!" writes Monsieur Paul Renauld. Poirot decides to investigate
and he takes Hastings to France and the Villa Genevieve in
Merlinville-sur-Mer on the northern French coast where Renauld wrote
from. Asking for directions near the Villa Genevieve, they are watched
by a young girl outside another smaller villa who has "anxious eyes".
Arriving at Renauld's house, they find they are too late – Renauld is
dead. He and his wife were attacked in their rooms at 2.00 in the night
by two masked men. Madame Renauld was tied up and her husband taken away
by the men wanting to know "the secret". They appear to have got in to
the house through the open front door with no sign of forced entry. His
body was found stabbed in a newly dug open grave on the edge of a nearby
golf course which is under construction and next to the placing of a
bunker which was due to be dug that day. The Renaulds' son, Jack, had
just been sent away on business to South America and Renauld also gave
the chauffeur an unexpected holiday leaving just three female servants
in the house who heard nothing. The elder of the three servants tells
Poirot and the police that quite often, after Madame Renauld has retired
to bed for the night, her husband has been visited by a neighbour,
Madame Daubreuil, who is the mother of the girl with the "anxious eyes"
- Marthe Daubreuil.
The dead man changed his will just two weeks before, leaving almost
everything to his wife and nothing to his son. There is a smashed watch
at the scene of the kidnap which is still running but has somehow gained
two hours. The widow inspects the body to identify it. She loses her
composure and collapses with grief at the sight of her dead husband.
Poirot is puzzled by some of these findings – why is the watch running
fast? Why did the servants hear nothing? Why was the body found
somewhere where it was bound to be quickly discovered? Why is there a
piece of lead piping near the body? Poirot is hampered in his
investigations by the attitude of Monsieur Giraud of the Surete who
plainly believes the elderly Belgian is too set in his old-fashioned
ways to solve the mystery. The local Examining Magistrate, Monsieur
Hautet, is more helpful and tells Poirot that he has found out that the
Renaulds' neighbour at the Villa Marguerite, Madame Daubreuil, has paid
two hundred thousand francs into her bank account in recent weeks – was
she Monsieur Renauld's mistress? They visit the lady who is furious when
the suggestion is put to her and throws them out. Having now met Madame
Daubreuil for the first time, Poirot tells Hastings that he recognises
her from before – and that the connection is a previous murder case
going back some twenty years.
Soon after, Jack Renauld arrives back – his trip to Santiago was delayed
enabling him to return when he heard of his father's murder. Jack admits
to rowing with his father over who he wanted to marry - hence the change
of will. Poirot suspects that Marthe Daubreuil is the girl in question
and feels that the answer to the problem lies in Paris. He goes there to
investigate. Whilst he is away another body is found in a shed on the
golf course. No one recognises the man who by his hands could be a tramp
but is dressed in finer clothes. The strangest thing is that the man has
been dead for forty-eight hours and thus died before Monsieur Renauld's
murder. No one recognises the new corpse.
Poirot returns from Paris and, without being told details beforehand,
staggers Hastings by correctly guessing the age of the man, place of
death, and manner of death! He examines the new corpse with the doctor.
Poirot sees foam on his lips and the doctor realises the man died of an
epileptic fit and was then stabbed after death.
When alone, Poirot tells Hastings that his investigations in Paris have
borne fruit and that Madame Daubreuil is in fact a Madame Beroldy who
was put on trial twenty years previously for the death of her elderly
husband. He too was murdered by, supposedly, two masked men who broke
into their house at night wanting to know "the secret". Madame Beroldy
had a young lover, Georges Conneau, who absconded from justice but wrote
a letter to the police admitting to the crime – there were no masked men
and he stabbed Monsieur Beroldy himself. Madame Beroldy managed a
tearfully-convincing performance in the witness box, convincing the jury
of her innocence, but leaving most people suspicious. She then
disappeared herself.
Poirot deduces that Paul Renauld was in fact Georges Conneau. He fled to
Canada and then South America where he made his fortune and gained a
wife and a son. When they returned to France, by great misfortune, the
immediate neighbour of the house he bought was Madame Beroldy, now
Daubreuil, who started to blackmail him. When a tramp died on his
grounds of an epileptic fit, Renauld saw a chance to duplicate the ruse
of twenty years earlier by faking his own death and escaping his
blackmailer with his wife's cooperation. His plan was to send his son
away on business, give his chauffeur a holiday, and stage a kidnap by
tying his wife up and then going to the golf course where he would dig a
grave where he knew it would be discovered and put the tramp into the
grave after destroying his features with the lead pipe. The plan was for
this to happen at midnight, giving Renauld the chance to get away from
the local station on the last train and use the smashed watch to gain an
alibi. Unfortunately, the smashing of the watch did not stop it working
so the deception failed – on Poirot at least. What then went wrong is
that Renauld was stabbed by someone else after he finished digging the
grave but before he could fetch the body of the tramp – hence his wife's
faint when she saw that the body actually was her husband.
Jack is proven innocent by another girl he was also in love with and as
far as Poirot is concerned that leaves only one suspect who had anything
to gain by Renauld dying – Marthe Daubreuil, who did not know of the
change of will disinheriting Jack and thought that by killing his father
she would gain his fortune when she married his son. She overheard the
Renaulds discussing using the dead tramp as a ruse and stabbed Renauld
on the golf course after he had dug the grave. Marthe dies when she
tries to kill Madame Renauld. Her mother disappears again. Jack and his
mother go to South America and Hastings ends up with Dulcie Duveen, the
sister of the girl who was able to prove Jack's innocence. She is also
the woman he met on the train at the beginning of the novel.