Mr Paynter

In the short story The Yellow Jasmine Mystery (later, chapters 9 and 10 of The Big Four), Mr Paynter is a globe-trotter and writer who is murdered because he had been writing a book which threatened to reveal details of the Big Four. Said to be a rich and cultured man of fifty-five, Paynter had travelled extensively and was seldom in England for the last twelve years of his life. Some seven months before his death, he had settled down at Croftlands, a house near Market Handford in Worcesterhire. There he was writing a book "The Hidden Hand in China" and had just finished it when he was murdered and the manuscript stolen. Suspicion fell at first on his manservant Ah Ling and his nephew Gerald Paynter but Poirot later showed that he had died at the hands of Dr Quentin who had injected him with a deadly dose of yellow jasmine.