Sad Cypress begins with a courtroom scene: Elinor Carlisle is accused of murdering Mary Gerrard. She had several reasons to dislike Mary: first and most hurtful, the man Elinor loves, Roddy, is in love with Mary instead. Then, shortly before her aunt, Mrs. Welman’s, death, Elinor receives an anonymous letter, warning her that Mary, the daughter of Mrs. Welman’s tenants, is after her aunt’s fortune.

Sure enough, one night when Mrs. Welman is seriously ill, she asks Elinor to call her solicitor; she wants to make provisions for Mary in her will. Unfortunately, she dies before the solicitor can be called, and it turns out she never made a will at all. Having died intestate, her entire fortune goes to Elinor, who then honours her aunt’s wishes by giving Mary a generous sum from the estate.

Some weeks later, Elinor is cleaning out her aunt’s estate. She invites Mary and Mary’s friend, Nurse Hopkins, to join her for lunch. And Mary ends up dead, killed by morphine while Elinor and Nurse Hopkins were washing dishes. Elinor is arrested for the death, but fortunately, her aunt’s doctor, Peter Lord, is convinced of her innocence, and enlists the help of Hercule Poirot to prove it.

I loved reading this mystery! I had great fun parsing through the clues, and adding my little kitty sticky notes to pages with clues, ideas, or comments I wanted to mark. Whodunnit feels pretty straightforward; I had a bad guy in mind from the start, and now a few pages from the big reveal, I still think that person’s the most likely culprit.

I admit I was also tempted to let my mind spin out into wild alternative theories. Certainly, there are enough gossipy tidbits and long-ago scandals to throw suspicion on other individuals. But at my last attempt at solving an Agatha Christie mystery, the solution turned out to be simpler than I expected, so I’m going to go against the grain here, and stick with the simplest reveal. I’ll type it below, and then lock it in.

Did I Solve It?

Nope. My other strong suspect turned out to be the killer, but I ultimately ended up accusing someone else. To my credit, I did pick up on a lot of the important clues; I just figured there must have been another reason behind them. Bah, Dame Agatha, you’ve fooled me again!

***SPOILERS BELOW***

My Verdict

Roddy Welman killed Mrs. Laura Welman and Mary Gerrard. His motive was money: he wanted Mrs. Welman’s fortune.

He killed Mrs. Welman because he assumed he’d be in her will, as her nephew by marriage. He and Elinor also had a long-standing arrangement that it didn’t matter which of them Mrs. Welman left her fortune to, since they planned to marry each other anyway.

I think it’s possible Elinor was his target with the fish paste morphine. As Poirot says, anyone watching Elinor make the fish paste sandwiches may assume she was the only one eating them, so he could have poisoned them to kill her. Roddy was in the room with Elinor’s letter to the solicitor when she left to get a stamp, so he would have known she’d asked the solicitor to write her a will leaving everything to Roddy when she dies.

I don’t know if Roddy knew Mary Gerrard was secretly Mrs. Welman’s daughter or not. I think it’s possible that he did, and that this was why he professed to fall in love with her instead. Poirot observed that Elinor feels passionately while Roddy does not, so I think he’s always been motivated by money. I think it’s also possible he wanted to kill both Mary and Elinor with the fish paste sandwiches or the tea, and didn’t care if Nurse Hopkins died as well.

The clue about Dr. Peter Lord’s car being at the Welman estate on the day of Mary’s death is because Roddy came back from his travels early and needed a car.

I don’t know why the scratches on Nurse Hopkins’ hands are significant; she says they were from rose thorns, but Poirot seems to think they’re from something else.

Nurse Hopkins was my other major suspect, and the one I wanted to accuse for convoluted reasons. I found it suspicious that she convinced Mary to make a will when Mary had no intention to. There’s also a weird thing about her and another nurse’s letters getting crossed in the mail, where they each share that they learned that Mary wasn’t actually her parents’ child (which later revealed she was really Mrs. Welman’s child with a married lover). Her morphine bottle went missing shortly before Mrs. Welman’s death, and a morphine label was later found in the kitchen after Mary’s death. And finally, she served Mary tea the day of her death; the morphine could very easily have been in the tea rather than the fish paste sandwiches Elinor prepared.

But ultimately, I decided to go with the more obvious suspect, Roddy, instead. Trying to figure out Nurse Hopkins’ motive was just very convoluted, and with Christie mysteries, I often trip myself up trying to be cleverer than necessary. First, like Poirot said, if Nurse Hopkins killed Mrs. Welman, why would she even bring up that her morphine had gone missing. Then, why kill Mary at all? The will that she convinced Mary to make left everything to Mary’s aunt, meaning the sister of the mother Mary grew up with. That aunt was listed by name in the will, so unless Nurse Hopkins was the aunt (unlikely, since Mary knew her aunt personally), Nurse Hopkins would have nothing to gain.

I even considered that Nurse Hopkins was also in love with Roddy, and that he’d manipulated her into becoming his accomplice to murder. That would explain why she looked so flush when she joined Elinor in the kitchen to wash dishes, and why she was so flustered about the scratches on her hands; possibly she and Roddy had secretly met up by the rose bushes. Or she’d thrown her morphine bottle out into the rose bushes, and got scratched up. But again, that’s a bit too complicated than I think Christie intended for this book. More likely, she found her old morphine bottle in the rose bushes, and, worried that it would be evidence used against her, pulled it out to hide and that’s how she got scratched.

I also briefly suspected Dr. Peter Lord, because of his car and because he was quick to rule Mrs. Welman’s death as being from natural causes even though he suspected the morphine poisoning. (He told Poirot he assumed it was suicide.) But that makes no sense, because why would he have enlisted Poirot’s help in the first place?

And then of course, I also briefly suspected Elinor herself, because that would be the biggest twist of all. But too much of the evidence pointed to her; if she were the killer, surely, she would have taken care to frame someone else.

The Actual Reveal

Nurse Hopkins did it. She put the morphine in the tea, and took another drug antopomorphine (the label found in the kitchen) to throw up the morphine she’d taken herself. It turns out that Nurse Hopkins is actually Mary Gerrard’s aunt, Mary Riley, who’d changed her name to hide her identity. I was wrong that Mary Gerrard knew her aunt personally; her aunt was away in New Zealand all or most of Mary Gerrard’s life, so she never realized Nurse Hopkins was actually her.

The big clue was Nurse Hopkins’ excuse about the rose bush scratching her; it turns out that the type of rose on the estate had no thorns. The type of rose was mentioned earlier, so I suppose a plant lover would have picked up on that clue.

I was right that the crossing of the letters was suspicious. Nurse Hopkins was clearly eager to have the news come out that Mary Gerrard was really Mrs. Welman’s daughter, because then that would leave the money to her.

There was also a big clue from the letter Nurse Hopkin showed Poirot from Mary Gerrard’s adoptive mother. Addressed “To Mary, to be sent after my death,” it outlined the truth about Mary’s heritage. Nurse Hopkins pretended that Mary’s father kept the letter from her, and so Nurse Hopkins only found it while helping Mary clean out their home after her father’s death. But Poirot realized that the letter was never for Mary Gerrard at all, but rather for her aunt, Mary Riley. He also figured out that the Mary Riley actually received the letter in time, and then when she was tired of living in New Zealand, decided to come and try to collect the Welman fortune.

The clue about Dr. Lord’s car was planted by Dr. Lord himself, because he wanted to throw suspicion on an imaginary suspect he made up from Mary’s time in Germany. I did think he planted the German cigarette that he pointed out to Poirot as a clue; I just didn’t realize that even his car being in the estate would turn out to be irrelevant.

And Roddy was innocent. He lied about coming back to England early, because he’d used his early return to propose marriage to Mary and was turned down. His bruised ego from the rejection made him pretend it never happened. There was a clue I’d missed about a nurse telling Poirot about him proposing marriage.