Red Cross Hospital is the Tadminster institution whose dispensary becomes a significant source of evidence in the investigation of Emily Inglethorp’s death. Cynthia Murdoch works there, and a visit to its poison cupboard links the hospital to the case’s recurring strychnine clues. The fingerprints found on a small bottle initially appear to implicate Lawrence Cavendish, but the hospital evidence forms part of a misleading trail that Poirot must interpret in the context of the wider conspiracy.

The Hospital and Its Dispensary

Cynthia works at the hospital dispensary and has resumed her duties there after the events at Styles. Poirot expresses interest in seeing the dispensary, and Hastings says Cynthia would be glad to show it to him. The hospital thus enters the investigation not as a distant institution but through Cynthia’s everyday work and the household’s access to her workplace.

The dispensary’s poison cupboard provides the setting for a particular opportunity: during a visit on Tuesday, 17 July, Lawrence is asked whether he unlocked the cupboard and examined some of its bottles while alone for a few seconds. The question becomes important because Poirot later identifies one of the images he has prepared as a magnified view of a tiny bottle from the cupboard’s top shelf.

Fingerprints and the Strychnine Trail

Poirot’s third photograph shows the bottle’s highly magnified surface. The image reveals fingerprints associated with Lawrence, prompting Hastings to object that Lawrence had never gone near the poison cupboard on the day they visited. Poirot answers that he had, making the hospital visit and the brief opportunity at the cupboard central to the interpretation of the print.

The bottle adds to what Poirot calls an excess of strychnine clues: the poison in Emily’s tonic, strychnine sold over the counter by Albert Mace in Styles St. Mary, and further strychnine handled by someone in the household. The hospital bottle therefore does not stand alone as a straightforward answer. Its place among several appearances of the same poison increases the confusion Poirot is trying to resolve.

Evidence and Its Limits

The medical evidence establishes that Emily died from strychnine poisoning, with the post-mortem indicating that she had taken at least three-quarters of a grain and probably about a grain or slightly more. The reported timing of her symptoms makes her after-dinner coffee an unlikely explanation on its own: the specialist explains that strychnine usually acts within one to two hours, whereas the symptoms appeared in the early hours after the coffee was presumed to have been taken around eight. A sample of the remaining bedtime cocoa had tested negative for strychnine.

Those findings make the presence of further poison at the hospital appear significant, but Poirot’s final account shows why each clue must be read in relation to the method of poisoning and the plot to direct suspicion. He explains that the strychnine was in Emily’s tonic, where bromide powders caused much of it to settle as crystals; the final dose consequently contained nearly all the poison. The delayed fatal dose resulted from Emily’s failure to take her medicine on the intended evening. Against that mechanism, the hospital bottle belongs to the investigation’s wider web of strychnine appearances, not by itself to a complete explanation of the death.

Red Cross Hospital’s narrative importance lies in this tension between access and interpretation. Its dispensary gives the case a concrete location for the poison-cupboard inquiry and the fingerprint image, while the repeated strychnine clues warn against treating one incriminating object as conclusive. Poirot’s inquiry turns the hospital visit into a test of how physical evidence acquires meaning only when joined to timing, opportunity, and the other facts of the case.