Read more: the differences between BBC One’s adaptation and the Agatha Christie book. Until the women noticed that the people whose fortunes they told kept ending up dead, they had no idea they were being used in this way. Osborne used them as a cover for his money-making murder scheme, anonymously sending his clients instructions to visit The Pale Horse and ask for the fortune to be told of the person they wanted dead.

If you mean did those three women actually curse any of the list victims to death (possibly Mark aside), then no, that was all Osborne’s doing. If the three women really do have supernatural powers, perhaps they ‘saw’ that memory too, and got rid of him themselves or also told Hermia that Mark was responsible for Delphine’s death. After Mark pays the witches to curse Hermia and Lejeune, they tell him to close his eyes, and we’re shown his memory of having jealously killed Delphine and covered it up.

There’s an extra possibility too, depending on what you believe. When the ‘witches’ came to visit her in hospital, off-screen they told her that Mark had hired them to kill her (giving her “I just woke up” comment to the nurse a double meaning as she’d literally awoken from her coma and also from her illusions about Mark, the man she’d loved for years.) The Mark we saw at the end was therefore in the afterlife and trapped in a kind of hell or purgatory where he was being punished for his guilt.

Either the Thallium poisoning killed him (though Osborne told him that he’d be fine as he hadn’t intended to murder him with it, just fuel his paranoia), or the witches were real and actually did curse him to death, or (the preferred choice) he was killed by Hermia. Much better is the suggestion that Mark really did die in his apartment, as reported in the paper.

The Pale Horse by Agatha Christie