Lord Westholme met his wife on a voyage back from America.
Lady Westholme, before her marriage, had been a criminal and had served a prison sentence."
"You see the terrible dilemma she was in?
Her career, her ambitions, her social position - all at stake!
What the crime was for which she served a sentence in prison we do not yet know (though we soon shall) but it must have been one that would effectually blast her political career if it was made public.
And remember this, Mrs. Boynton was not an ordinary blackmailer.
She did not want money.
She wanted the pleasure of torturing her victim for a while and then she would have enjoyed revealing the truth in the most spectacular fashion!
No; while Mrs. Boynton lived Lady Westholme was not safe.
She obeyed Mrs. Boynton's instructions to meet her at Petra (I thought it strange all along that a woman with such a sense of her own importance as Lady Westholme should have preferred to travel as a mere tourist), but in her own mind she was doubtless revolving ways and means of murder.
She saw her chance and carried it out boldly.
She only made two slips.
One was to say a little too much - the description of the torn breeches - which first drew my attention to her, and the other was when she mistook Dr. Gerard's tent and looked first into the one where Ginevra was lying half asleep.
Hence the girl's story - half make-believe, half true - of a Sheikh in disguise.
She put it the wrong way around, obeying her instinct to distort the truth by making it more dramatic, but the indication was quite significant enough for me."
He paused.
"But we shall soon know.
I obtained Lady Westholme's fingerprints today without her being aware of the fact.
If these are sent to the prison where Mrs. Boynton was once a wardress, we shall soon know the truth when they are compared with the files." He stopped.
In the momentary stillness a sharp sound was heard.
"What's that?" asked Dr. Gerard.
"Sounded like a shot to me," said Colonel Carbury, rising to his feet quickly. "In the next room.
Who's got that room, by the way?"
Poirot murmured: "I have a little idea - it is the room of Lady Westholme..."
Epilogue
Extract from the Evening Shout.
We regret to announce the death of Lady Westholme, M.P., the result of a tragic accident.
Lady Westholme, who was fond of traveling in out-of-the-way countries, always took a small revolver with her.
She was cleaning this when it went off accidentally and killed her.
Death was instantaneous.
The deepest sympathy will be felt for Lord Westholme, etc. etc.
On a warm June evening five years later Sarah Boynton and her husband sat in the stalls of a London theatre. The play was Hamlet.
Sarah gripped Raymond's arm as Ophelia's words came floating over the footlights:
How should I your true love know
From another one?
By his cockle hat and staff,
And his sandal shoon.
He is dead and gone, lady,
He is dead and gone;
At his head a grass-green turf;
At his heels a stone.
O, ho! A lump rose in Sarah's throat. That exquisite, witless beauty, that lovely, unearthly smile of one gone beyond trouble and grief to a region where only a floating mirage was truth...
Sarah said to herself: "She's lovely - lovely..."
That haunting, lilting voice, always beautiful in tone, but now disciplined and modulated to be the perfect instrument.
Sarah said with decision, as the curtain fell at the end of the act: "Jinny's a great actress - a great - great actress!"
Later, they sat around a supper table at the Savoy. Ginevra, smiling, remote, turned to the bearded man by her side.
"I was good, wasn't I, Theodore?"
"You were wonderful, cherie."
A happy smile floated on her lips.
She murmured: "You always believed in me - you always knew I could do great things - sway multitudes..."