Katherine Martindale is the secondary antagonist in the Poirot mystery The Clocks and the subsequent film adaptation in Agatha Christie's Poirot. Martindale is the chief of the Cavendish Secretarial Bureau and secretly the Canadian sister of Hilde Martindale, who's married to Josiah Bland. All three conspired to inherit a fortune from Josiah's first wife now deceased, Martindale and Josiah resorting to murder when the fraud was starting to unravel.
In the film adaptation, she was portrayed by Lesley Sharp.
Biography[]
Katherine Martindale owns a stenography business with an array of secretaries employed in her business. She's a Canadian native and has a sister named Hilde Martindale, who's married to Josiah Bland. Josiah was married to a Valerie Bland who was the last relative to inherit a vast fortune. They divorced and lost touch, but when she died of natural causes in the movie and was killed overseas during World War 2 in the book, he set up a plan to inherit her fortune with his current wife and his sister-in-law. Hilde took on Valerie's identity to claim the inheritance, which went successful amongst the three of them. It wasn't difficult because Valerie's family hates Josiah and refused to communicate, never finding out she died. But an old friend of Valerie's, Quentin Duguesclin, tracked her to Hilde's false identity and wanted to reconnect, the three panicked over losing the wealth and planned to murder the friend.
Being unoriginal in ideas but needing a convoluted plan, Katherine found an old story from a mystery writer client of various unrelated red herrings, which the trio planned to use. Choosing secretary Sheila as a fall patsy, named Rosemary Sheila in the book and Sheila Webb in the movie, they break into blind schoolteacher and high traitor Millicent Pebmarsh's home and smuggle Duguesclin, drugged with chloral hydrate in his tea, into using a private laundry service. A girl with a broken leg, Geraldine Brown, sees this with her opera glasses in the book, two kids in a treehouse seeing it in the movie.
Rushing an unconscious Duguesclin into the house, Josiah stabs him to death with a kitchen knife, leaving a fake business card as another red herring. They then arrange four clocks in Pebmarsh's parlour study set to 4:13, referencing a room 413 where Sheila's having an affair with a professor. Katherine also appropriated her own clock (with "Rosemary", her first name on it, in the book, and her birth mother's heirloom clock which is her gift from when Sheila was adopted) as one of the clocks at the scene to further incriminate her. To seal the setup, Martindale called Sheila over to Pebmarsh's home on a "job", leaving Sheila and an arriving Pebmarsh to find the scene. In the meantime, Josiah traveled to Boulogne with Duguesclin's passport to dispose of it and leave the three of them with "alibis". Sheila runs out screaming into agent Colin, who's looking into Pebmarsh's espionage after one of the agents he was working with was killed.
Sheila stole the clock belonging to her for fear of not being incriminated. All the laid out circumstances leaves Sheila as the prime circumstantial suspect, but Colin is smitten with her and finds her innocent. Sheila nevertheless is put on a court inquest. Her friend and colleague, named Edna in the book and Nora in the movie, hears Katherine's testimony of when she made the call, but knows it was a different time because she saw what Katherine was doing due to stopping in front of her office when breaking her heel. Edna/Nora can't tell the police outright, so she tries to phone then in a phone booth. Because Katherine heard this, she strangles Edna/Nora with her own scarf, pretending to find her in horror and demands "who's targeting my girls".
In an additional ruse, an actress named Flossie Gapp, who's really named Merlina Rival, is hired by the trio to pose as the "estranged wife" of Duguesclin as yet another ruse. Yet she gets wrong how long Duguesciln has had a scar behind his left ear, so she starts to panic, calls her employers, and demands more information on her job as well as money for her services. The police try to follow her, but they're too late. They hear her screams, and in the movie a shot, and they rush to find Josiah and Katherine have killed her and fled, stabbing her in the book and shooting her in the movie.
Poirot investigates the entire case in a chair in the book and more actively in the film. In both instances, casual conversation revealed much: the laundry service, Hilde having a Canadian sister, and Josiah mentioning Boulogne to Colin. The revealing details in simple conversations, along with Poirot's deductions, are all the missing pieces, and in the movie, the suspects are gathered by Poirot and he reveals the three murderers. Hilde is the one who confesses to all it, frantically and rapidly, even when Katherine screams at her to stop and Josiah backhands her off the chair she's sitting on. Hilde cries over how how the plan was carried into more crimes down the line, while Katherine and Josiah just grumble out of hateful frustration and defeat. The three are then arrested and imprisoned for their crimes. The story in both versions also points out how the note "16 Wilbraham Crest Street", written as "1-6-W" and a crescent moon, led to the Blands at 61 Wilbraham Crest Street. But the real address was Pebmarsh's, and the crossing of the two criminal conspiracies only further clinched them being exposed. All it took was read the note forwards and upside down.
