Poirot said:
"You will be interested to hear that both you and your wife Christine were easily recognized and picked out by the Surrey police from a group of people photographed here.
They identified you both at once as Edward Corrigan and Christine Deverill, the young woman who found the body."
Patrick Redfern had risen.
His handsome face was transformed, suffused with blood, blind with rage.
It was the face of a killer - of a tiger.
He yelled: "You damned interfering murdering lousy little worm!"
He hurled himself forward, his fingers stretching and curling, his voice raving curses, as he fastened his fingers round Hercule Poirot's throat...
Chapter 13
Poirot said reflectively: "It was on a morning when we were sitting out here that we talked of suntanned bodies lying like meat upon a slab and it was then that I reflected how little difference there was between one body and another.
If one looked closely and appraisingly - yes - but to the casual glance?
One moderately well-made young woman is very like another.
Two brown legs, two brown arms, a little piece of bathing suit in between - just a body lying out in the sun.
When a woman walks, when she speaks, laughs, turns her head, moves a hand - then, yes, then, there is personality - individuality.
But in the sun ritual - no.
"It was that day we spoke of evil - evil under the sun, as Mr Lane put it.
Mr Lane is a very sensitive person - evil affects him - he perceives its presence - but though he is a good recording instrument, he did not really know exactly where the evil was.
To him, evil was focussed in the person of Arlena Marshall and practically every one present agreed with him.
"But to my mind, though evil was present, it was not centralized in Arlena Marshall at all.
It was connected with her, yes - but in a totally different way.
I saw her, first, last and all the time, as an eternal and predestined victim.
Because she was beautiful, because she had glamour, because men turned their heads to look at her, it was assumed that she was the type of woman who wrecked lives and destroyed souls.
But I saw her very differently.
It was not she who fatally attracted men - it was men who fatally attracted her.
She was the type of woman whom men care for easily and of whom they as easily tire.
And everything that I was told or found out about her strengthened my conviction on this point.
The first thing that was mentioned about her was how the man in whose divorce case she had been cited refused to marry her.
It was then that Captain Marshall, one of those incurably chivalrous men, stepped in and asked her to marry him.
To a shy retiring man of Captain Marshall's type, a public ordeal of any kind would be the worst torture - hence his love and pity for his first wife who was publicly accused and tried for a murder she had not committed.
He married her and found himself amply justified in his estimate of her character.
After her death another beautiful woman, perhaps something of the same type (since Linda has red hair which she probably inherited from her mother) is held up to public ignominy.
Again Marshall performs a rescue act.
But this time he finds little to sustain his infatuation.
Arlena is stupid, unworthy of his sympathy and protection, mindless. Nevertheless I think he always had a fairly true vision of her.
Long after he ceased to love her and was irked by her presence, he remained sorry for her.
She was to him like a child who cannot get farther than a certain page in the book of life.
"I saw in Arlena Marshall with her passion for men, a predestined prey for an unscrupulous man of a certain type. In Patrick Redfern, with his good looks, his easy assurance, his undeniable charm for women, I recognized at once that type.
The adventurer who makes his living, one way or another, out of women.
Looking on from my place on the beach I was quite certain that Arlena was Patrick's victim, not the other way about.
And I associated that focus of evil with Patrick Redfern not with Arlena Marshall.
"Arlena had recently come into a large sum of money, left her by an elderly admirer who had not had time to grow tired of her.
She was the type of woman who is invariably defrauded of money by some man or other.
Miss Brewster mentioned a young man who had been 'ruined' by Arlena, but a letter from him which was found in her room, though it expressed a wish (which cost nothing) to cover her with jewels, in actual fact acknowledged a cheque from her by means of which he hoped to escape prosecution.
A clear case of a young waster sponging on her.
I have no doubt that Patrick Redfern found it easy to induce her to hand him large sums from time to time 'for investment.'
He probably dazzled her with stories of great opportunities - how he would make her fortune and his own.
Unprotected women, living alone, are easy preys to that type of man - and he usually escapes scot-free with the booty.
If, however, there is a husband, or a brother, or a father about, things are apt to take an unpleasant turn for the swindler. Once Captain Marshall was to find out what had happened to his wife's fortune, Patrick Redfern might expect short shrift.
That did not worry him, however, because he contemplated quite calmly doing away with her when he judged it necessary - encouraged by having already got away with one murder - that of a young woman whom he had married in the name of Corrigan and whom he had persuaded to insure her life for a large sum.
"In his plans he was aided and abetted by the young woman who down here passed as his wife and to whom he was genuinely attached.