The Adventure of the Clapham Cook (Poirot short) by Agatha Christie -- BBC Radio

The Adventure of the Clapham Cook
by Agatha Christie
BBC Radio
First broadcast 1974
(Not fully dramatized, but excellently read by Nigel Stock)

Adapted from Poirot's Early Cases
Narrated by Nigel Stock
Produced by Barbara Craver

Story Plot (Stopped before giving it away)
Poirot is not interested in investigating some of the cases which appear in the newspapers and which Hastings tries to bring to his attention. These include a bank clerk (Mr. Davis) who disappears with fifty thousand pounds of securities, a suicidal man, and a missing typist. He is put on the spot though when visited by a Mrs. Todd who is determined that he investigate her missing cook. Challenged, he decides, with some humour and to avoid an argument, to take the seemingly trivial case. Eliza Dunn, a middle-aged woman, has walked out of her job and the Todds' house in Clapham two days ago without giving her notice and has not communicated with her employer since, except for sending for her trunk that day.

Interviewing the maid in the house, Poirot finds out that the trunk was already packed, meaning that Eliza had planned to leave even though her departure was swift. The other occupants of the house are Mr Todd, who works in the city, and their lodger, Mr Simpson, who works in the same bank at which Mr Davis worked. Struck by this coincidence as he is, Poirot cannot see a connection between an absconding bank clerk and a missing cook. Poirot places advertisements in the newspaper enquiring as to the whereabouts of Eliza and several days later he is successful in locating her when she visits Poirot's rooms. She tells him a story of having come into a legacy of a house in Carlisle and an income of three hundred pounds a year, dependent upon her taking up the offer and immediately leaving domestic service. This legacy was communicated to her by a man who approached her in the street as she was returning to the Todds' house one night, the man supposedly having come from there to see her. The money came from a friend of her late grandmother who had settled in Australia and married a wealthy settler. Eliza had immediately taken the train north and a couple of days later received her belongings from Clapham, although wrapped in paper parcels and not in her old trunk, which she supposes had been kept behind by Mrs Todd in a fit of pique.

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