Dead Man's Mirror

Poirot is outbid at auction, which does not happen often, and the man who outbids him is a thoroughly unpleasant art dealer. The dealer then asks Poirot to look into the dealings of his business associate, and shortly afterwards the dealer is dead. Poirot, who can hold a grudge as long as the next man, is professional about it. That may be the most frightening thing about him.

The dead man was hated enough that the suspects line up willingly. His household is a full set of people with reasons, and the art trade around him is full of money and envy, where objects are worth more than the people who own them. Poirot picks through the bad blood the way he picks through everything, slowly and with complete attention. And the antique mirror that started the whole business at auction keeps appearing in the story like a chaperone.

Anthony Horowitz and Agatha Christie wrote it, Brian Farnham directed. David Suchet is Poirot, Hugh Fraser is Hastings and Philip Jackson is Japp. Iain Cuthbertson plays the dead man, Gervase Chevenix, with Emma Fielding as his wife Ruth, Zena Walker as his sister Vanda, Fiona Walker as Miss Lingard, Richard Lintern as John Lake, Jeremy Northam as Hugo Trent and Tushka Bergen as Susan Cardwell. It is a full house for a single corpse, and the episode uses every seat.

It is a comfortable, well-made episode about the kind of man nobody mourns, and the fun is in watching Poirot take the case anyway. He was outbid by the victim once, and he has no intention of letting the man's killer get the better of him twice. The art trade runs on reputation, and reputation is a motive that leaves fingerprints everywhere. The cast is a roll call of faces the series used well.