Pension Vanilos (Les Petits Meurtres d'Agatha Christie)

Pension Vanilos (Pension Vanilos) is the 8th 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 28 August 2015. It is an adaptation of the Agatha Christie novel Hickory Dickory Dock. Note that the French translation of the original novel is also "Pension Vanilos".

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, Marlene wants Laurence to help investigate a series of mysterious thefts at a boarding house run by her sister Solange. Laurence is at first reluctant as he is busy with a drug smuggling case so Alice goes in undercover as a lodger there. Very soon, a fellow resident is poisoned and dies.

Plot Summary
(may contain spoilers - click on expand to read) Marlene asks Laurence for help. Her sister Solange runs a boarding house for students, the Pension Vanilos and lately there had been a spate of mysterious thefts of things of no particular value. Laurence is however not interested. He has just caught a drug mule Mary Patterson and is busy setting up a trap for her Lille contact. Marlene sees Alice next. She is also busy but perks up when she hears that Laurence is involved in a big international drug trafficking case. Quid pro qui. To get Marlene to feed her on what Laurence is up to, Alice agrees to help and so goes in undercover, posing as a trainee typist who takes up lodgings at the Pension Vanilos.

Laurence sets up a trap at Mary's rendezvous which is at a railway level crossing. However Mary attempts to escape across the track just as a train is approaching. Her contact is in a car on the other side. Whoever is in the car shoots her and then drives away. The police manage to get Mary to a hospital in time.

Meanwhile Alice settles down with her fellow lodgers. While helping Alice unpack, Louise asks why someone would need two passports but then stops halfway. Alice has the impression they were overheard. Later in the evening the lodgers are together in the lounge listening to the radio when suddenly Louise Lambert drops down dead. Laurence arrives on the scene and concludes that she has been poisoned by cyanide. Under the floorboards in Louise's room, Laurence finds some of the items which had been stolen. Louise;s journal reveals she is in love with Jean-Baptiste and she sometimes goes into his room without him knowing. However the last two pages of entries have been torn out.

Mary Patterson is coming out of coma and can soon be questioned but before that happens, someone sneaks into her hospital room and strangles her with a stethoscope. The policeman outside says the doctor who went in was one of the new ones whom he did not recognise.

Over at the Pension, Solange invites Marlene for tea, and then asks Marlene to peek inside Laurence's drug smuggling case file and take note of the names mentioned. Marlene hesitates to betray Laurence but Solange asks her to think about it. Later that night, Alice explores and finds a rucksack burning in a bin in the yard. Alice sneaks a search of the room of the two Turkish students but Pierre, the medical student, attacks her violently until she is stopped by the other lodgers.

At the Commissariat, Marlene sees Laurence pinning Mary Patterson's photo up. She tells him she has seen Mary before, leaving the Pension Vanilos. So maybe Laurence hasn't lost his link to the drug network yet. Kuang Jia, the maid at the Pension confirms seeing Mary but the rest deny any knowledge of her. Someone at the Pension is Mary's contact. And it also appears that Louise saw something and got suspicious and that was why she was killed. Alice contributes another link: Pierre had his stethoscope stolen. The same one used to kill Mary?

Meanwhile Laurence also learns that Jean-Baptiste Millet has two passports. The other is in his real name, Jean-Baptiste Moucadeau. He is the son of a famous scientist. But he tells Laurence he left home and cut off all ties because he hated his father who was hard on his mother. His treatment broke her and drove her into depression.

Next, following Laurence's instructions, Alice buys another rucksack of the same model as the burnt one she found. It's a common model, widely used by all the lodgers at the hostel. Laurence cuts it open and shows her a hidden compartment useful for smuggling things. The police find the stethoscope used to kill Mary. It's got Pierre's fingerprints on it, so Laurence has Pierre arrested.

Late in the night, Tricard and a few policemen at the commissariat see a strange thing: Marlene coming back to the office. She needs to fetch an urgent file for Laurence, she tells Tricard.

The next morning, the police ask Laurence to take a look at the body of a dead woman who has been found stabbed on the streets. Laurence has a shock. It's Marlene! Both Laurence and Alice are tremendously upset. Laurence forbids the pathologist to do an autopsy on Marlene and locks up the morgue. He then tenders his temporary resignation to Tricard--he wants to nail the person who killed Marlene first. They question Pierre and rough him up, but it is clear he isn't the culprit.

Laurence and Alice commisserate and exchange memories of Marlene over drinks. Alice makes a few casual remarks about Marlene always having perfect hair and fingernails. Laurence, as drunk as Alice is, has an epiphany. He rushes back to the morgue with Alice. The dead woman has short, unpainted fingernails! Can you imagine Marlene with unpainted fingernails? He pulls off a wig. It's Solange! But if the dead woman is Solange impersonating Marlene, where is the real thing?

Back to the Pension Vanilos. After a brief search, Laurence and Alice find Marlene gagged and bound. She tells them Solange must have drugged her and then tied her up. Solange impersonated Marlene to get at Laurence's file on his drug investigations.

Marlene goes back to work. Alice brings in two Turkish students who have just returned from a holiday in Brighton. Laurence cuts up their rucksacks and discovers bags of cocaine in the secret compartment. But he believes they are innocent--their common model rucksacks simply got switched at Brighton and they carried the ones with the drugs back to Lille. At least the British end of the network is found and he calls Inspector Japp at Scotland Yard andsuggestsa the he lay a trap at the hostel in Brighton.

Jean-Baptiste turns up at the commassariat. He is suspicious of Alice, he tells Laurence. He checked up and found that she never enrolled for the typing course she claimed. In the midst of this, a call comes through for Jean-Baptiste from Marguerite Richard. She sounds frightened and then the line goes dead. Laurence, Alice and Jean-Baptiste rush to the hostel but find that Marguerite has been murdered.

Marlene and Alice had made one observation earlier: Solange would never have the skills to make herself look like Marlene. She had to have help. The indications point to Rose, who ran a hair-salon. Armed with a search warrant Laurence searches the salon. He remembers how on an earlier visit, Rose kept reminding her assistants not to use a certain hair dryer because it was not working. He unscrews the top and finds bags of cocaine inside. Rose confesses her part in the drug network.

Armed with this, Laurence confronts Jean-Baptiste and reconstructs his crimes. He murdered Louise because she had been rummaging among his things and was suspicious about him having two passports. He had also shot Mary and then impersonated a doctor and strangled Mary in her hospital ward. When he saw Solange being dressed up as Marlene and going to the commissariat, he panicked and thought that Solange was going to rat on the whole drug network and so he killed her. Rose filled in what happened thereafter. He wanted to take over the network and wanted Rose to notify the British end of this. Then he forced Rose to make a call to Laurence's office, impersonating Marguerite. This is to give an alibi for him. In actual fact, he had killed Marguerite before going to the commissariat. He had killed her because she had also stumbled on the fact that he had two passports and had found a book with a secret compartment which he had used for smuggling.

Comparison with the original story
(may contain spoilers - click on expand to read)

Research notes

 * In the course of the investigation, Laurence shows that he can speak Chinese, Turkish and English.
 * As part of the drugs investigation, Laurence speaks to "Inspector Japp" of Scotland Yard.

Cast

 * Samuel Labarthe as commissaire Swan Laurence
 * Blandine Bellavoir as Alice Avril
 * Élodie Frenck as Marlène Leroy
 * Élodie Frenck as Solange Vanilos
 * Blanche Cluzet as Marguerite Richard
 * Édouard Giard as Jean-Baptiste Millet
 * Lucile Marquis as Rose
 * Sandrine Salyères as N'Daye Sissoco
 * Nancy Tate as Mary Patterson
 * Charles Templon as Pierre
 * Charlotte Talpaert as Louise Lambert
 * Li Jun Ying as Kuang Jia
 * Dominique Thomas as Tricard
 * Stéphane Ropa as Le légiste
 * Eric Beauchamp as Flic Martin
 * Benoît Teytaut as Inspector Legrand
 * Agnès de Tssandier d'Escous as double for Marlène-Solange

Mentioned but not cast

 * Eugène Moucadeau