Miss Lawson

In the unpublished short story The Incident of the Dog's Ball, Miss Lawson is the companion of the wealthy old lady Matilda Wheeler. She lived with her employer at the Laburnums in the village of Little Hemel in Kent.

When Miss Wheeler died, she left the bulk of her estate to Miss Lawson. This was a surprise to Miss Lawson and others although the local doctor Dr Lawrence dismissed thoughts about undue influence and confirmed to Poirot that she was of sound mind and perfectly capable of drawing up the will. As Poirot would discover, the will was made only a few days before the old lady died. She had made the new will and disinherited her nephew James Graham and her niece Mollie Davidson. This was because Miss Wheeler suspected that James was trying to kill her and had pushed her down the stairs.

Agatha Christie's Notebook 66 contained brief sketches of the characters Christie was planning for the story. Here, she noted that Miss Lawson was to be a "twittery companion". Some of this is captured in Hasting's observations of her as "very much as I had pictured her. A middle-aged woman, rather stout, with an eager but somewhat foolish face. Her hair was untidy and she wore pince-nez. Her conversation consisted of gasps and was distinctly spasmodic."

When Agatha Christie later expanded into the short story into the full length novel Dumb Witness, she gave her a firstname and developed the character more fully as Wilhelmina Lawson. The two Lawsons are highly similar. Both dabbled in spiritualism (although in the short story this is only a marginal, undeveloped theme). In the novel, Hastings also made the same observation about Wilhelmina as he made in the short story as noted above.

In the short story Miss Lawson also moved to a flat in London after Miss Wheeler died--to the same address at Clanroyden Mansions, High Street Kensington. The one difference is that the picture of the dog with the caption "Out all night and no key" had been moved to the flat and was not at Miss Wheeler's house.