Poirot's death

Hercule Poirot’s death ends his life and his long partnership with Arthur Hastings, but its circumstances remain unresolved in Hastings’s account. Though Poirot is said to have died of a heart attack, Hastings refuses to believe that his death was natural; the final note Poirot leaves behind turns that uncertainty into a deliberate surrender to whatever judgment awaits him.

Circumstances and Immediate Aftermath

When Curtiss comes to attend to his master, he finds Poirot dead. The reported cause is a heart attack, which John Franklin says he had expected would eventually kill him. The shock of Stephen Norton’s death may have brought on the attack, Hastings is told, but the amyl nitrite ampoules that should have been beside Poirot’s bed are missing.

The absence of the ampoules raises the possibility that someone deliberately removed them. Hastings rejects this as an explanation for a planned killing: whoever might have acted could not have counted on Poirot suffering a heart attack. He nevertheless refuses to accept the verdict of natural death, placing Poirot’s death alongside those of Stephen Norton and Barbara Franklin as deaths he believes were murders, while admitting that he does not know who killed them or why.

Poirot’s Final Decision

In the manuscript he leaves for Hastings, Poirot states that he has moved the amyl nitrite ampoules away from his bed. He prefers to leave himself in the hands of God, asking that punishment or mercy come swiftly. The action makes the missing medicine more than an unexplained detail: Poirot knowingly removes a safeguard against the heart attack he expects may kill him.

Poirot’s decision follows the killing of Norton. He believes that taking Norton’s life has saved other, innocent lives, yet he remains unsure whether he was right. His final words of moral uncertainty stand in sharp contrast to the confidence with which he once pursued justice. The manuscript ends not with a claim to certainty, but with a plea to be judged.

Hastings’s Bereavement and the Unresolved Death

Hastings presents Poirot’s death through grief and incomplete knowledge. He says he wants to think about it as little as possible and can bear to provide only the bare facts. Poirot’s death, he writes, takes a substantial part of himself with it; the loss is therefore both personal bereavement and the end of their shared work as investigators.

The account does not establish whether Poirot’s heart attack was entirely natural, whether the absent ampoules were deliberately removed by someone else, or whether Hastings’s suspicion of murder is correct. Instead, the paired accounts leave a consequential gap: Hastings believes Poirot was killed, while Poirot’s own final act shows that he chose not to protect himself from death. The uncertainty preserves the emotional force of their last parting without resolving the mystery Hastings cannot bear to solve.