Alma Sarrazin

In Pourquoi pas Martin?, the French adaptation of Why Didn't They Ask Evans?, Alma Sarrazin is the young wife of Dr Philippe Sarrazin, and an acquaintance of the Delavallée family. She is the parallel of Moira Nicholson in the original story. The character of Alma Sarrazin is portrayed by Arly Jover.

Alma's portrayal is fairly faithful to that of her parallel in the original novel. Alice Avril found her photo in the pocket of the dying man Alain Langevin, a photo which subsequently disappears. The only difference is that Alma is identified far more quickly. By going back to the foot of the cliff, commissaire Laurence finds scraps of card picture, fragments of a torn up photo. He pieces them together. Then when he calls in Dr Sarrazin for questioning, he spots Alma waiting for her husband in the car park outside.

In parallel with the original, she teamed up with Roland Delavallée on an elaborate plan to defraud money from Jean Savage. Posing as "Mrs Destrange" (it is not clear if this is her real name or just a fake one for the decpetion), she attracted the interest of the millionaire. As the millionaire did not plan to leave anything to her in her will, Alma and Roland had him killed off and then Roland posed as Savage and made a new will.

A second part of the plan was the running of a drug smuggling network. Here Alma uses her husband'c clinic as a cover for her drug operations. There are indications that Alma had been running the network for some time. Towards the end of the episode, when she does something hasty, commissaire Laurence chides Alma by saying that she is usually more calculative and more professional. Certainly, one of her accomplices, Paulette Tourbier, had a drug processing laboratory in her farmhouse. The difference with the original is that here, attracting and marrying Dr Sarrazin as a convenient way to "defuse" suspicion did not form part of the plan, or at least, did not form part of the plan made together with Roland, unlike the original. Here Alma and Roland only met six months before the events in the episode. If she calculated that marrying Dr Sarrazin was "convenient" for her operations, this was something she decided on much earlier, before she met Roland.

In this adaptation, there is no shootout in a cafe. After commissaire Laurence had arrested Roland, he set a trap for Alma. Like in the original between Moira and Bobby Jones, Alma exploited an attration Laurence had for her. She planted the idea that she was afraid for her life and that her husband wanted to kill her. Laurence invited Alma over for drinks and then told her she was out of danger and that he had arrested, not her husband, but Roland. Alma sensed that she was being exposed and so hastily poisoned Laurence's drink with cynaide. This was observed by Alice Avril and Laurence himself anticipated it and Alma is arrested.

Parts of the evidence against Alma, which in the original probably took place for Moira "off-stage" after her arrest, were dramatized in the episode. For example, the lawyer who made the will for Savage positively identifed her as "Mrs Destrange", the supposed sole beneficiary of the will.