Josiane Lallin

In Un meurtre est-il facile?, the France Télévisions film adaptation of Agatha Christie's Murder is Easy, for the Les Petits Meurtres d'Agatha Christie TV series, Josiane Lallin is the parallel of Lavinia Pinkerton in the original story.

Josiane comes to the commissariat of police in Lille and insists on seeing commissaire Laurence. Laurence is busy with another group so Marlene goes out to see her instead. At first Josiane refuses to speak to anyone except Laurence but then relents. She tells Marlene that she works as a caretaker at the textile works belonging to Émile Deboucke. In her view, the recent death of Michel Loisée there looked like an accident but was in fact murder. What's more, she knew who the murderer was and that she would be next.

Later when Laurence becomes available and Marlene remembered that Josiane is still waiting outside and wants to show her in, Josiane is gone. Days later, Marlene reads about Josiane dying in an accident at the factory and remembers what she had said.

As a parallel, Josiane had some unique features when compared with Lavinia Pinkerton. For one thing, she actually did succeed in getting to the police. She only failed to see Laurence because he was busy and Marlene forgot about her. Josiane believed she would be the next one to die and she was right. Lavinia never thought this--she believed John Humbleby would be next. Secondly, in the adaptation, all the deaths were of people the textile tycoon Émile Deboucke disliked or had offended him in some way. Deboucke told Laurence that he disliked Josiane. She had in fact told him her belief that Michel had been murdered. She always bothered Deboucke with all her stories and made all kinds of signed statements. Lord Whitfield did not dislike or feel annoyed with Lavinia in the same way. Their paths hardly crossed. Third, while Lavinia died after being run over by a car, Josiane died when she fell from a ladder while cleaning a window. This method of death was the one suffered by Tommy Pierce in the original novel. Nor was this accepted as accident for long. Laurence spots scratch marks made by the ladder on the floor and concludes almost immediately that it is murder.

Josiane Lallin is portrayed by Marcelle Fontaine.