De moord op Roger Ackroyd by Agatha Christie

The dead man changed his will just two weeks before, leaving almost everything to his wife and nothing to his son. The eldest 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 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. 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. They appear to have got in to the house through the open front door with no sign of forced entry. Madame Renauld was tied up and her husband taken away by the men wanting to know 'the secret'. He and his wife were attacked in their rooms at 2.00 in the night by two masked men. Asking for directions near the Villa Genevieve, they are watched by a young girl outside another smaller villa who has 'anxious eyes'.Īrriving at Renauld's house, they find they are too late: Renauld is dead.

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. Then he finds an extraordinary letter from the south of France: 'For God's sake, come!' writes Monsieur Paul Renauld.

But Poirot is busy sorting his mail, impatiently tossing aside bills and banal requests 'recovering lost lap dogs for fashionable ladies'. 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.

De moord op Roger Ackroyd by Agatha Christie