Headscratchers / Peril at End House

• Is it possible that Maggie's full name never gets mentioned during the investigation of her murder? Not even in the coroner's court?
  • It wouldn't have matter whether or not Maggie's full name was mentioned in court because Nick had everyone fooled into thinking that she was the one engaged to Seton. Plus, she's known publicly as his friend while Maggie was only the tag-along, at least from an outsider's perspective.
    • It's also specifically mentioned that Poirot doesn't have to come to the inquest and Hastings is probably too thick to take special notice of Maggie's full name while he was there.
    • True, but if Poirot's absence at the sitting of the coroner's court was the only reason, one would think that someone else would have reacted to the reveal of the true Maggie's name at the Summation Gathering. At the very least it would have been described as the narrator's - Hastings' - inner thought: "God, I heard her full name at the coroner's inquest and didn't even pay attention!"
    • Actually, Hastings does spend part of the second half of the novel ill thanks to a recurrence of his malaria, at one point being confined to his bed, so it's possible that this causes him to miss a few details at the inquest.
• Hastings's description of Maggie as being a rather serious person is, on reflection, hardly surprising given that she must know that her aviator fiance is missing. Given the state of early 1930s communications and the fact that Nick is the only other person to know of Maggie and Seton's engagement, it's clear that Maggie doesn't find out that he's dead before her own murder.
• If Nick was never in danger, who shot her?
  • The answer is: nobody. She just made a hole in her own hat beforehand, pretended to dodge from the "bullet" (in fact, it was either a bee/wasp or, more probably, nothing at all) and threw or put a real bullet on the terrace with her own hands. This troper even thinks it might be a clue in itself: it seems like there was only one hole in the hat - and it's nigh impossible to make only one hole in the hat, which is being worn, with a gunshot - there should have been an "exit hole". Unless either the bullet went into the head of the hat-wearer (it obviously didn't), if the hole was through the brim of a broad-brimmed hat tilted at an angle, or... the hole wasn't made in the way we think it was.
• It seems as though Nick Buckley's perfect opportunity to commit the murder hinged on the moment when Maggie got cold, ran inside to get a coat, Freddie called "Oh, Maggie, get mine too", Maggie didn't hear her, and Nick offered to go and get Freddie's coat along with her own. What would have happened if this exchange had not gone exactly the way it did - with Maggie going into the house, and Nick having a perfect excuse to follow her?
  • It was Nick who said that Maggie didn't hear Freddie. Nick was waiting for an opportunity to be alone with Maggie and would have used some other excuse to go after Maggie if Freddie didn't ask for her coat. Maggie's coat was hidden to make sure she had to go back to the house to get it.
• At the Summation Gathering, Poirot says that "after hearing on the wireless that Seton's death is a fact, she starts to put her plan into action". Does it mean that if discovery of Seton's death happened a day later, Maggie would still have been alive? And why did Nick need to send that telegram to Maggie at all - couldn't she just wait for Maggie to come on Tuesday? (Remember, it was precisely this little mistake that proved to be the beginning of her undoing.)
  • For the question of the telegram, it was crucial that Maggie arrive a day earlier to be present for the festivities, so that the sound of Nick's gunshot as she killed Maggie would be concealed by the sounds of the fireworks.
    • True, but why did it have to be a gun in the first place?
    • Possibly just because the killer thought that would be the safest overall murder plan, as it would allow her to make herself look like the intended victim for whom Maggie was mistaken in the dark while the fireworks were going, and she didn't foresee that Maggie might telegram her mother in such a way as would make Poirot suspicious. The question about the wireless is a good one: it seems like, having set up the murder plot in every other way, the confirmation of Michael Seton's death was the final component needed to carry it out, meaning there was probably an element of Gambit Roulette. Possibly the killer had a Plan B for carrying out the murder later, just in case the confirmation didn't come that day.