July 17th

July 17 is the pivotal date on which an intended poisoning timetable was disrupted and a new will complicated the inquiry into Emily Inglethorp’s death. The date also recurs in the defense of John Cavendish: it was the day the will was made, and the day John visited the dispensary at the Red Cross Hospital in Tadminster.

The will and the inheritance

On the afternoon of July 17, after a quarrel with her stepson John Cavendish, Emily made a new will. At the inquest, evidence indicated that the document favored her husband, Alfred Inglethorp; servants later testified that Emily had called them in to sign beneath her own signature, while blotting paper covered the text. The new will was found destroyed in the grate of her bedroom the following morning, turning both its contents and its destruction into disputed evidence.

The document’s legal significance depended on an earlier will. Emily’s will from the previous August left her entire fortune to John, after smaller legacies to servants. John explained that his younger stepbrother, Lawrence, was already due to receive a considerable sum under their father’s will when Emily died, while John would have to maintain Styles. Poirot raised the rule that Emily’s remarriage automatically revoked the earlier will; the defense later stressed that John, formerly a barrister, knew the rule. Thus the apparent value of the destroyed document did not straightforwardly establish that John stood to benefit from destroying it.

The competing accounts

The prosecution presented July 17’s quarrel and new will as part of a case against John. It alleged that Emily had confronted him over his conduct and that he later destroyed a will favoring Alfred, believing this would restore the older will in his own favor. The defense countered that John knew the earlier will had already been revoked by Emily’s remarriage, and promised to identify who had actually destroyed the new document.

The date also figures in the prosecution’s account of the poison. It alleged that John had bought strychnine while disguised as Alfred on July 16, then administered Emily’s coffee on the night she died. The defense said John had been at Marston’s Spinney on July 16, summoned there by an anonymous blackmailing note, and argued that the evidence implicated other people, including Lawrence. These were rival claims advanced in court, not facts established merely by their appearance in the prosecution’s case.

On July 17, John also went with another guest to visit the dispensary at the Red Cross Hospital in Tadminster. Sir Ernest Heavywether questioned him about whether he had been alone long enough to unlock the poison cupboard and examine its bottles. The visit placed John in a setting relevant to the poisoning inquiry, but the question itself did not establish that he had handled poison.

The delayed poisoning

Poirot’s final explanation made the date crucial to the murder’s intended schedule. The bell wire to Emily’s room had been cut on Monday, and Cynthia was expected to spend that night away. In the murderer’s plan, Emily would have been isolated in the right wing, with little chance of timely help. But she forgot to take her medicine before going to a village entertainment; the next day she lunched away from home. The fatal dose was therefore taken twenty-four hours later than intended, on July 17.

The delayed dose completed the chain of evidence against the actual plot. Strychnine in Emily’s medicine had settled as an insoluble deposit after bromide powders were introduced; because the bottle was not shaken, most of the poison collected at the bottom and was swallowed with the last dose. Poirot connected this mechanism to a letter in the murderer’s handwriting, which he presented as the final proof. July 17 consequently marks not only the date of a will and a hospital visit, but the unintended postponement that allowed the scheme to be exposed.