Stop the Christie Murder: Murder on the Links

These posts are based on my fan-fiction approach to Agatha Christie's mystery novels: a group of murder prevention detectives enter each novel to stop the crime. 

See Mysterious Affair at Styles

*Spoilers*

Murder on the Links is a Christie murder whose solution lies in the past--Poirot recognizes that the current apparent crime resembles a murder from 22 years earlier.

22 years earlier, Madame Jeanne Beroldy arranged with her lover, Georges Conneau, to kill her husband. Conneau tied her up, then knifed her husband. Madame Beroldy told the investigators that thugs broke into her home and committed the deed. The investigators didn't buy it. For one, Conneau did not tie her wrists tightly: the lack of bruises was suspicious. The police arrested Madame Beroldy but couldn't arrest Conneau, who had already fled the country. By fully blaming Conneau, Madame Beroldy managed to achieve an acquittal.

 

Twenty-two years later, Conneau returns to France, married with a grown child. He encounters Madame Beroldy, now going by Madame Daubreuil and with a grown child of her own. She recognizes her erstwhile lover, who could still be arrested for his part in the prior murder, and she begins to blackmail him. 

 

Along with his current, strong-willed wife, Conneau determines to fake his death using the same method as before: he will tie up his wife, this time remembering to bind her wrists tightly; she will tell the police that thugs broke in; the body of a tramp with a disfigured face will be found on the adjoining golf links. People will believe Conneau is dead.

Conneau's plan goes wrong when he gets murdered instead.

It seems rather stupid of Conneau to (1) return to a place where people know him; (2) duplicate the same crime as before. But, as Golden Age mystery writers like Dorothy Sayers and profilers like John Douglas point out, criminals do in fact do this: they go back to what is familiar--not necessarily to the scene of the crime but to the surroundings and people and methods that worked for them in the past. They keep, for instance, drowning their brides in the bath--or poisoning their neighbors and children and everybody else within reach with strychnine.

The bike race is in the Poirot movie, not the book.

My investigators are primarily concerned with preventing the current crime--the original crime is a different matter--and the easiest prevention method is recognition. One of my investigators shouts out in the middle of town or the middle of a hotel (or a bike race), "By gum, you are Georges Conneau! I say, you're Madame Beroldy! Isn't one of you supposed to be in jail?"

Since my investigators are required to behave in realistic, organic ways, the question then becomes, How plausible is recognition after twenty-two years? (The Poirot movie uses a ten-year gap.)

The Beroldy case would have

equaled the Crippen case in coverage.

I suggest that even in 1923, recognition of an advertised criminal from 1913 or 1903 would be more than likely. The same urge that pushes Conneau back into his prior habits would send him into the same business circles. Even before social media, newspaper articles, especially for popular cases, were common currency. 

 

As a prior post about Monk points out, people have the capacity to suppose and assume and suggest and speculate any number of possibilities. If the public can suppose that Jack the Ripper was an aristocrat, public gossip about "that guy who moved into that villa last month" would eventually deliver the link to Conneau (as well as a dozen other possible links).

In any case, once Conneau is recognized, Daubreuil loses her power over him. He doesn't try to run away and nobody gets knifed in the back. 

 

Of course, Conneau ends up in jail! But eh, my investigators don't care about that, only in stopping the murder.

A different set of "sub-text" investigators would have to go back twenty-two years to stop the original murder from taking place.