Cartes sur table (Les Petits Meurtres d'Agatha Christie)

Cartes sur table (Cards on the Table) is the 6th episode of season 2 of the French TV series Les Petits Meurtres d'Agatha Christie. It was produced by Escazal Films and France Télévisions, directed by Eric Woreth and first aired on France 2 on 3 October 2014. It is an adaptation of the Agatha Christie novel Cards on the Table.

Synopsis
Like the rest of the episodes of season 2 of this series, the original Christie detective characters have been replaced. The lead roles are taken by a French detective Commissaire Swan Laurence assisted by a journalist Alice Avril and Laurence's secretary Marlene. The action is set in Lille in the 1950s. In this episode, Laurence and Alice are invited to a strange party. Their host wants to introduce his guests to four people whom he believes have committed murder but have evaded detection. The host is murdered during the course of the event and all the guests, including Laurence and Alice, become suspects.

Plot Summary
(may contain spoilers - click on expand to read) Massud Shaïtana, an art collector, meets commissaire Laurence at an exhibition and tells him he is tired of collecting mere objects. He now collects "dark souls"--murderers who have gotten away with it. He has four of them he wants to introduce to Laurence.

Soon, four people turn up at Laurence's office. He is surprised to see them and does not know what it's about but he surmises that Shaïtana sent them. After taking down details, he lets them go and then arrests Shaïtana for breaching the peace. Shaïtana offers to expose the suspected criminals but asks to be allowed to set the scene by staging a dinner. Laurence agrees.

Laurence and Marlene go for the dinner and meet Alice who has also been invited. Along with them is one Ferdinand Jouve, formerly of the French secret service. The four are introduced to Shaïtana's four suspects, a safari expedition guide Paul Coupet, a rich widow Hélène Nevers, a doctor Emile Barillon and a young girl who used to work as a lady's companion, Elise Schlumberger. Over dinner Shaïtana drops various hints about how murders can be done, all this as part of his plan to rattle his guests. The four suspects settle down to play bridge. Laurence, Marlene, Jouve and Alice go to the adjourning room to play charades. Shaïtana relaxes in an armchair.

After a while, Laurence comes back into the room where the four suspects are playing bridge and discover that Shaïtana has been stabbed dead.

Laurence embarks on his investigation. Jouve enthusiastically offers his help but Laurence rejects it. But with Alice he is more open. He would interview the four suspects but he expects they would be reluctant to open up to him. Alice might be able to elicit more from them in casual conversation. Meanwhile Laurence and Marlene would dig into their backgrounds.

Laurence suggests that Alice start with Elise. This proves easy because Alice, finding that Elise had nowhere to stay, had invited her to share her apartment. Over time Alice learns the names of her previous employers, including one Madame Morel who had died. More significantly, Alice compares it with a list of employers Elise declared to Laurence and Morel is not there.

Hélène Nevers's husband Marcel Nevers had a thoroughly bad reputation as a profiteer during the war. He beat his workers and Laurence suspects he beat his wife as well. Marcel died of a shot in the head, thought at the time to be a suicide. Paul Coupet had guided a botanist and his wife on an expedition up the Limpopo River. The botanist died there under unexplained circumstances. And the wife's name, Jacqueline Louvier, now running a marriage agency shows up in a list of Shaïtana's contacts. Jacqueline gives Laurence an account of how her husband had died. Her husband and Coupet had an argument. Her husband had a machete and when she intervened, he turned on her as if to attack her. Coupet had to shoot him to save her.

Also, Barillon had left his notecase in Laurence's office. There was a photo of Barillon with his secretary inside which he has since returned to the doctor. Laurence tells Alice to work on the secretary because he suspects the doctor has been sleeping with her.

Alice discovers from the secretary that the person in the photo with her is in fact Emile Barillon's late twin brother Jean. She had been engaged to the doctor and then broke it off to marry Jean. But Jean had fallen ill and despite Emile's treatment, he had weakened gradually and died.

Meanwhile Jouve, the nosey former Secret Service employee has been conducting his own investigation. He comes into Laurence's office to read his files without permission and Laurence has to throw him out. Jouve also breaks into Alice's apartment to search Elise's bags and then into Coupet's apartment to steal his travel journals. He probably stole something from Madame Nevers as well. Coming back on night, Laurence discovers Jouve dead on his carpet, shot with his police pistol which he keeps in the house. Tricard suspends Laurence from the case as he has been implicated. Laurence persuades Alice to improvise an alibi so that the suspension can be lifted.

The pieces are coming together. Laurence lifts Jean Barillon's file from the doctor's office to examine how he died. He challenges Coupet with Jacqueline Louvier's story. Coupet insists she is fantasising. The botanist had a fever and in a delirium had wandered by the Limpopo River and would have drowned if he fell in. Coupet tried to shoot him in the leg to stop him but just as he pulled the trigger, Jacqualine grabbed him, throwing his aim off. The bullet him the botanist in the heart and killed him. Then while Laurence is telling Alice that Elise is a thief because she has kept certain valuable jewels which Shaïtana had lent her. Alice had discovered from newspaper archives that Madame Morel died years back after confusing hat dye for a bottle of cough syrup. Alice surmises that Elise might have killed Madame Morel, for example if she caught Elise stealing. The mention of Madame Morel causes Laurence to slam his brakes--Elise had never mentioned Morel as her employer to him.

Meanwhile, Madame Nevers asks to see Laurence.

Comparison with the original story
(may contain spoilers - click on expand to read)
 * Shaitana has the same background as in the original. The four people he believed to be murderers and who were invited to dinner all have fairly close parallels to the characters in the original.
 * The four sleuths are slightly different. Laurence and Alice are invited, as is a French secret service agent Jouve. Marlene makes up the fourth. These four do not play bridge since Marlene doesn't know the game. At Marlene's suggestion they play charades.
 * Madame Nevers (Mrs Lorrimer) did kill her husband. But there is more background than in the original. He was a cruel man who beat her. She killed him with a gun.
 * Paul Coupet's backstory is quick similar to the original except that the exotic expedition is to the Limpopo river and not the Amazon. The circumstances of Robert Louvier's death are the same. Madame Louvier is portrayed as more love-crazed than Mrs Luxmore in the original.
 * Elise is a lady's companion and a thief like in the original. She did kill one employer Madame Morel who died by mistaking a bottle of hat dye for cough syrup. She then tried to kill Alice because she found out about it, making Alice a kind of Rhoda Dawes parallel. In this adaptation, Elise is killed in a car accident and not by drowning.
 * Madame Nevers does confess to killing Shaitana, and for the same reason as in the original--because she felt sympathy for the young Elise and she was dying of a terminal illness anyway. But Laurence, like Poirot, rejects the confession because the way Shaitana was killed did not fit her psychology.
 * The doctor Barillon is exposed as the killer of Shaitana but his motive is different. In this case, he was jealous of his brother Jean because he had taken away his girlfriend Jeannine Poussin. Barillon treated Jean by injecting small doses of poisons into Jean over a period of time. When Jean died, Barillon signed the burial permit and there wasn't much investigation. Barillon then gave a job to Jeannine as his secretary.
 * In this adaptation, Barillon also killed Jouve.
 * The bridge scores are one key to the solution. There is a grand slam and Laurence concludes that "dummy" is the murderer. In French "dummy" is "le mort" which also translates as "the dead one". This makes for some interesting confusion on Marlene's part.
 * In this adaptation, Laurence orders an autopsy on the dead Nevers and this uncovers the drug Barillon used to kill Madame Nevers. This is similar to the post-mortem by Sir Charles Imphery. Madame Nevers apparently sent confessions to many people. In this adaptation, he wrote them by hand and handwriting analysis showed that he had written them himself. In the book he had forged Nevers' handwriting.
 * Like in the original, Coupet pairs off with Alice at the end, although in this case Alice makes clear that this is only for a week of fun.

Cast

 * Samuel Labarthe as Commissaire Swan Laurence
 * Blandine Bellavoir as Alice Avril
 * Élodie Frenck as Marlène Leroy
 * Dominique Thomas as Ernest Tricard
 * Eric Beauchamp as Flic Martin
 * Saïd Amadis as Massud Shaïtana
 * Anne Canovas as Hélène Nevers
 * Quentin Baillot as Emile Barillon
 * Alban Lenoir as Paul Coupet
 * Ged Marlon as Ferdinand Jouve
 * Aurélia Poirier as Elise Schlumberger
 * François Godart as Robert Jourdeuil
 * Florence Masure as Jeannine Poussin
 * Sophie Bourdon as Jacqueline Louvier
 * Camille Dupond as Marie

Mentioned but not cast

 * Madame Morel
 * Jean Barillon
 * Robert Louvier
 * Marcel Nevers