Poirot soon turns his attention to the Burton-Cox family, and learns that Desmond was adopted and knows nothing about his birth mother.
Later Poirot learns the names of governesses who served the Ravenscroft family, one of whom, Zélie Meauhourat, travelled to Lausanne after the couple’s deaths. Poirot and Mrs Oliver proceed to meet elderly witnesses associated with the case, whom they dub “elephants”, and discover that Margaret Ravenscroft owned four wigs that the Ravenscrofts’ dog was devoted to the family, but bit Margaret a few days before her death that Margaret had an identical twin sister, Dorothea, who had spent time in a number of psychiatric nursing homes, and was believed to have been involved in two violent incidents in Asia, including the drowning of her infant son after the death of her husband and that a month before the couple died Dorothea had been sleepwalking and had died after falling off a cliff. After consulting Celia, Mrs Oliver invites her friend Hercule Poirot to resolve the issue. Their deaths left Celia and another child orphaned. The investigation into their deaths found it impossible to determine if it was a double suicide, or if one of them murdered the other and then committed suicide. Both had been shot with a revolver found between their bodies, which bore only their fingerprints. Twelve years before, Oliver’s close school friend Margaret Ravenscroft and her husband, General Alistair Ravenscroft, were found dead near their manor house in Overcliffe. Mrs Burton-Cox questions the truth regarding the deaths of Celia’s parents. At a literary luncheon Ariadne Oliver is approached by a woman named Mrs Burton-Cox, whose son Desmond is engaged to Oliver’s goddaughter Celia Ravenscroft.
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