Poirot’s amyl nitrite ampoules

Poirot’s amyl nitrite ampoules are the emergency medicine he keeps for his heart condition. After Stephen Norton’s death, their absence from beside Poirot’s bed becomes a troubling detail in Arthur Hastings’s account of Poirot’s own death: Hastings refuses to accept that it was natural, though he cannot establish who caused it or how.

Medical Use

When asked whether anything could be done to treat Poirot’s condition, his companion explains that Poirot has ampoules of amyl nitrite to use when he feels an attack coming on. The remark presents them as a practical safeguard against a foreseeable cardiac crisis, not as a cure. It also gives the later report of their absence a concrete medical significance.

Absence After Norton’s Death

Poirot dies of a heart attack after the shock of Norton’s death, in the way Dr John Franklin had expected. Yet, by an apparent oversight, the ampoules are not beside his bed. Hastings immediately questions whether someone deliberately removed them, then recognizes the limit of that suspicion: no one could have relied on Poirot having a heart attack. The missing medicine is therefore suspicious without proving that Poirot’s death was engineered.

Final Deliberate Removal

In the manuscript left for Hastings, Poirot says that he has moved the ampoules away from his bedside and prefers to leave himself in the hands of God, asking that punishment or mercy come swiftly. This is a different absence from the earlier one: it is intentional, openly acknowledged, and made by Poirot himself. The ampoules that once stood ready against an attack are now deliberately withheld from immediate reach as he accepts the possibility of death.

Narrative Significance

The object links Poirot’s physical vulnerability to the unresolved deaths surrounding Norton. Hastings interprets the first absence through suspicion but cannot convert it into proof; Poirot’s later confession clarifies only the final removal, not what happened at the earlier moment. The ampoules thus carry a double significance: they are both ordinary emergency medicine and a measure of Poirot’s changing relation to survival, from preparing for an attack to relinquishing that protection.