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Az.: 晚期作品. 和 顺水推舟 弄假成真 两部的犯罪动机与手法有相似之处. 身份的迷雾与巨额的遗产继承. 这一部的推理过程还是挺有意思的. 
◆  1
>> She breathed an enormous sigh, looked at Poirot, looked away, and suddenly blurted out, ‘You’re too old. Nobody told me you were so old. I really don’t want to be rude but — there it is. You’re too old. I’m really very sorry.’
She turned abruptly and blundered out of the room, rather like a desperate moth in lamplight.
Poirot, his mouth open, heard the bang of the front door.
He ejaculated: ‘Nom d’un nom d’un nom…’
◆  2
>> ‘She could have run over someone in her car and not stopped. She could have been assaulted by a man on a cliff and struggled with him and managed to push him over. She could have given someone the wrong medicine by mistake. She could have gone to one of those purple pill parties and had a fight with someone. She could have come to and found she had stabbed someone. She —
◆  4
>> ‘Mothers and fathers have much less control over daughters nowadays. It is not as it used to be in the old good-fashioned days.’
>> Poirot had the capacity to attract confidences. It was as though when people were talking to him they hardly realised who it was they were talking to. She gave a short laugh now.
◆  5
>> ‘How dreadfully dull,’ said Mrs Oliver.
‘No, I do not think it is really so dull. It is rather astonishing that I have not found out anything.’
‘Why is it so astonishing? I don’t understand.’
‘Because,’ said Poirot, ‘it means either there was nothing to find out, and that, let me tell you, does not accord with the facts; or else something was being very cleverly concealed. That, you see, would be interesting.
>> Where there is murder, anything can happen. 
◆  6
>> ‘I told you before,’ he said, ‘to be careful. I repeat that — Be very careful.’
‘Careful of what?’ said Mrs Oliver.
‘Of yourself. I think there might be danger. Danger to anyone who goes poking about where they are not wanted. There is murder in the air — I do not want it to be yours.’
◆  8
>> ‘They think I’m crazy,’ she said bluntly. ‘And — and I rather think I’m crazy, too. Mad.’
‘That is most interesting,’ said Hercule Poirot, cheerfully. ‘There are many different names for these things. Very grand names. Names rolled out happily by psychiatrists, psychologists and others. But when you say crazy, that describes very well what the general appearance may be to ordinary, everyday people. Eh bien, then, you are crazy, or you appear crazy or you think you are crazy, and possibly you may be crazy. But all the same that is not to say the condition is serious. It is a thing that people suffer from a good deal, and it is usually easily cured with the proper treatment. It comes about because people have had too much mental strain, too much worry, have studied too much for examinations, have dwelled too much perhaps on their emotions, have too much religion or have a lamentable lack of religion, or have good reasons for hating their fathers or their mothers! Or, of course, it can be as simple as having an unfortunate love affair.’
>> ‘people are never like what you remember them. You make them, as the years go by, more and more the way you wish them to be, and as you think you remember them. If you want to remember them as agreeable and gay and handsome, you make them far more so than they actually were.’
◆  10
>> The human being is equipped with a natural braking system and it applies the brakes for you just at the right moment.’
◆  11
>> Poirot did not disillusion him. It merely confirmed him in his long-held belief that you should never believe anything anyone said without first checking it. Suspect everybody, had been for many years, if not his whole life, one of his first axioms.
◆  13
>> ‘I’ll take whisky for choice. Not that I’m allowed it,’ he added, ‘but doctors are all fools, as we know. All they care for is stopping you having anything you’ve a fancy for.’
>> All platonic, mind you, too. Gentlemen seem to lose their sense that way when they get to that age. It’s the clinging ones they go for, not the bold type.
>> ‘What conclusions did you form, if I may ask?’
‘The same as you,’ said Poirot. ‘A gaudy creature,’ he added thoughtfully.
‘Appeals to women,’ said Mr Goby. ‘Trouble is nowadays they won’t look twice at a nice hard-working lad. They prefer the bad lots — the scroungers. They usually say “he hasn’t had a chance, poor boy”.’
‘Strutting about like peacocks,’ said Poirot.
>> Undesirable young men had been bought off in any time or age, so had undesirable young women. Sons had sworn and daughters had wept but money was money. 
◆  14
>> ‘You refuse to reflect,’ he said. ‘But to get anywhere we must reflect.’
>> Poirot paid no attention to this plea. ‘Have we got a murder at all? You say — the stepmother — but I reply that the stepmother is not dead — so as yet we have no murder. But there ought to have been a murder. So me, I inquire first of all, who is dead? Somebody comes to me and mentions a murder. A murder that has been committed somewhere and somehow. But I cannot find that murder, and what you are about to say once again, that the attempted murder of Mary Restarick will do very well, does not satisfy Hercule Poirot.’
>> ‘You always seem to think that husbands are the ones who kill their wives,’ said Mrs Oliver.
‘A husband is usually the most likely person,’ said Hercule Poirot, ‘so one considers him first.
>> ‘Really, Monsieur Poirot, you can’t suspect everybody.’
‘Mais oui, that is just what I can do. I suspect everybody. First I suspect, then I look for reasons.’
>> Poirot was quietly and methodically outlining what he called ‘the pattern’.
‘It interlocks. Yes, it interlocks and that is why it is difficult. One thing relates to another and then you find that it relates to something else that seems outside the pattern. But it is not outside the pattern.
>> ‘This then must be the one piece of knowledge that had not yet come to me. This ought to tie up the whole thing! Yes, yes, I do not see yet how, but it must be so. I must think. That is what I must do. I must go home and think until slowly the pieces fit together — because this will be the key piece that ties them all together…Yes. At last. At last I shall see my way.’
◆  21
>> He was considering now, from what exact angle to approach it. He was not one to trust in enthusiasm for some particular intuition. He was not an intuitive person — but he did have feelings. The important thing was not the feelings themselves — but what might have caused them. It was the cause that was interesting, the cause was so often not what you thought it was. You had very often to work it out by logic, by sense and by knowledge.
>> He knew evil. He had met it before. He knew the tang of it, the taste of it, the way it went. The trouble was that here he did not yet know exactly where it was. He had taken certain steps to combat evil. 
>> Rub a dub dub, three men in a tub
And who do you think they be?
A butcher, a baker, a candlestick maker…
>> Pat a cake, pat, three girls in a flat
And who do you think they be?
A Personal Aide and a girl from the Slade
And the Third is a —