conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Do you know a plot for a book about Mrs, Ravenscroft, Dolly entitled Elephants Can Remember?
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: Elephants Can Remember: At a literary luncheon, Mrs Burton-Cox, to whose son Celia Ravenscroft is engaged, approaches Mrs Ariadne Oliver, a school friend of the late Margaret Ravenscroft and godmother to her daughter.\nMrs Burton-Cox asks Mrs Oliver what she believes is an important question: which of Celia\'s parents was the murderer, and which was murdered.\nTen years earlier, the bodies of General Alistair Ravenscroft and his wife Margaret were found near their manor house in Overcliffe.\nBoth had bullet wounds, and a revolver with only their fingerprints left between them.\nIn the original investigation, no one was able to prove whether the case was a double suicide or murder/suicide and, if the latter, who killed whom.\nLeft behind are the couple\'s two children, including daughter Celia.\nMrs Ariadne Oliver is initially put off by Mrs Burton-Cox\'s attitude; but, after consulting with Celia, Oliver agrees to try to resolve the issue.\nShe invites her friend Hercule Poirot to solve the disquieting puzzle.\nTogether, they conduct interviews with several elderly witnesses whom they term "elephants", based on the assumption that, like the proverbial elephants, they may have long memories.\nEach "elephant" remembers (or mis-remembers) a very different set of circumstances, but Poirot notes two items of significance: Margaret Ravenscroft owned four wigs at the time of her death; and, a few days before her death, she was seriously bitten by the otherwise devoted family dog.\nPoirot decides to investigate more deeply into the past.\nHe and Mrs Oliver learn that Dolly (Dorothea) and Molly (Margaret) Preston-Grey were identical twin sisters, both of whom died within the space of a few weeks.\nWhile Molly led an ordinary life, Dolly had previously been connected with two violent incidents and had spent protracted periods of her life in psychiatric nursing homes.\nDolly had married a Major Jarrow and, shortly after his death in India, was strongly suspected of drowning her infant son, which she blamed on his Indian ayah.\nA second murder was committed in Malaya while Dolly was staying with the Ravenscrofts; it was an attack on the child of a neighbour.\nWhile staying with the Ravenscrofts, this time at Overcliffe, Dolly apparently sleep-walked off a cliff and died on the evening of 15 September 1960.\nMolly and her husband died less than a month later, on 3 October.\nDesmond Burton-Cox, Celia\'s fiancé, gives Poirot the names of two governesses who had served the Ravenscroft family.\nTurning an investigative light on the Burton-Cox family, Poirot\'s agent, Mr Goby, discovers that Desmond (who knows that he is adopted, but has no details about the adoption or his origins) is the illegitimate son of a now-deceased actress, Kathleen Fenn, with whom Mrs Burton-Cox\'s husband had conducted an affair.\nFenn had bequeathed Desmond a considerable personal fortune, which would, under the terms of his will, be left to his adoptive mother were he to die.\nMrs Burton-Cox\'s attempt to prevent Desmond\'s marriage to Celia Ravenscroft is thus an attempt to obtain the use of his money, although there is no suggestion that she plans to kill him for the money.\nPoirot suspects the truth but can substantiate it only after contacting Zélie Meauhourat, the governess employed by the Ravenscrofts at the time of their death.\nShe returns with him from Lausanne to England, where she explains the truth to Desmond and Celia.\nDolly had fatally injured Molly as part of a psychotic episode; but, such was Molly\'s love for her sister that she made her husband promise to protect Dolly from arrest.\nAccordingly, Zélie and Alistair made it appear that Dolly\'s was the corpse found at the foot of the cliff.\nDolly took her sister\'s place, playing the role of Molly to the servants.\nOnly the Ravenscrofts\' dog knew the difference, and this is why it bit her.\nAlistair committed suicide after killing Dolly to prevent her from injuring anyone else.\nDesmond and Celia recognise the sadness of the true events, but now knowing the facts are able to face a future together.