Five Little Pigs

Fourteen years ago Amyas Crale was poisoned, and his wife Caroline was hanged for it. Their daughter Lucy has never believed the verdict, and she asks Poirot to reopen the case. But the past is the one crime scene he cannot visit in person, which makes this one of the strangest investigations of his career. There is no body to examine and no fresh evidence, only the memories of the people who were there. A retrial of an old verdict, conducted entirely in drawing rooms and gardens, is the kind of case only Poirot would take on.

The title comes from the nursery rhyme, and the five little pigs are the five witnesses Poirot tracks down, each of whom remembers the weekend differently. Philip Blake and Meredith Blake, Elsa Greer, Angela Warren, Miss Williams. Each account contradicts the others in some small way, and small contradictions are Poirot's native language. His method is simply to listen until the differences start to matter. The truth lives in the way people tell the same story wrong.

Rachael Stirling plays Caroline Crale and Aidan Gillen plays Amyas, with Toby Stephens as Philip Blake, Marc Warren as Meredith Blake, Aimee Mullins as Lucy, Julie Cox as Elsa Greer, Gemma Jones as Miss Williams, Sophie Winkleman as Angela Warren and Talulah Riley as the young Angela. Agatha Christie wrote it with Kevin Elyot, and Paul Unwin directed. David Suchet is Poirot, older and quieter and exactly right for a story about the long half-life of guilt.

The mystery only works if you believe the past can be rebuilt from memory, and the episode commits to it completely. Watching Poirot assemble five different versions of the same weekend is the whole pleasure of the thing. The period dressing and the autumnal light do half the storytelling. The ending is sad the way a verdict is sad. It earns every minute of its two hours.