Louise Lambert

In Pension Vanilos, the French Télévisions film adaptation of Agatha Christie's Hickory Dickory Dock, for the Les Petits Meurtres d'Agatha Christie TV series, Louise Lambert is a resident of the "Pension Vanilos". She is the parallel character of Celia Austin in the original novel. The character of Louise Lambert is played by Charlotte Talpaert.

Like Celia, Louise is also a pharmacist and her hospital is also St Catherine's. In this adaptation there is no parallel of Colin McNabb, so Louise is secretly in love with Jean-Baptiste Millet, who is the parallel of Nigel Chapman. Louise died of cyanide in her coffee in the presence of most of the other lodgers in the hostel as they were gathered in the lounge to listen to a radio programme. In the original, the poison used is morphine and not cyanide. How the cyanide was obtained by the killer is not explained. There is no subplot about a bet to steal a poison from a hospital pharmacy.

Alice Avril, who had gone into the hostel undercover as a trainee typist suspected that Louise was secretly in love with Jean-Baptiste, and this was confirmed by commissaire Laurence who studied a journal which Louise kept. In it, Louise revealed that she sometimes went secretly into Jean-Baptiste's room to touch his things. Mysteriously, the last two pages of her journal had been torn out. Earlier, Louise had also told Alice that someone in the hostel had two passports.

Laurence believed that Louise had been killed because she had seen something related to a drug smuggling operation that he suspected was being managed from the hostel. Unlike the original novel, Louise never had the chance to confess to the spate of senseless thefts in the hostel. Under the floorboards of Louise's room, Laurence found a number of items which had been stolen. However as Jean-Baptiste is not a psychology student, the motive for her thefts was not explained. Solange Vanilos told Laurence that Louise had always been unbalanced and was a kleptomaniac but whether she told the truth or was just venting her frustration was never confirmed.