“How was I to know that fool Julia, the real Julia, would go and have a row with the producer, and fling the whole thing up in a fit of temperament? She writes to Patrick and asks if she can come here, and instead of wiring her ‘Keep away’ he goes and forgets to do anything at all!” She cast an angry glance at Patrick. “Of all the utter idiots!”
She sighed.
“You don’t know the straits I’ve been put to in Milchester! Of course, I haven’t been to the hospital at all. But I had to go somewhere. Hours and hours I’ve spent in the pictures seeing the most frightful films over and over again.”
“Pip and Emma,” murmured Miss Blacklock. “I never believed, somehow, in spite of what the Inspector said, that they were real—”
She looked searchingly at Julia.
“You’re Emma,” she said. “Where’s Pip?”
Julia’s eyes, limpid and innocent, met hers.
“I don’t know,” she said. “I haven’t the least idea.”
“I think you’re lying, Julia. When did you see him last?”
Was there a momentary hesitation before Julia spoke?
She said clearly and deliberately:
“I haven’t seen him since we were both three years old—when my mother took him away. I haven’t seen either him or my mother. I don’t know where they are.”
“And that’s all you have to say?”
Julia sighed.
“I could say I was sorry. But it wouldn’t really be true; because actually I’d do the same thing again—though not if I’d known about this murder business, of course.”
“Julia,” said Miss Blacklock, “I call you that because I’m used to it. You were with the French Resistance, you say?”
“Yes. For eighteen months.”
“Then I suppose you learned to shoot?”
Again those cool blue eyes met hers.
“I can shoot all right. I’m a first-class shot. I didn’t shoot at you, Letitia Blacklock, though you’ve only got my word for that. But I can tell you this, that if I had shot at you, I wouldn’t have been likely to miss.”
II
The sound of a car driving up to the door broke through the tenseness of the moment.
“Who can that be?” asked Miss Blacklock.
Mitzi put a tousled head in. She was showing the whites of her eyes.
“It is the police come again,” she said. “This, it is persecution! Why will they not leave us alone? I will not bear it. I will write to the Prime Minister. I will write to your King.”
Craddock’s hand put her firmly and not too kindly aside. He came in with such a grim set to his lips that they all looked at him apprehensively. This was a new Inspector Craddock.
He said sternly:
“Miss Murgatroyd has been murdered. She was strangled—not more than an hour ago.” His eye singled out Julia. “You—Miss Simmons—where have you been all day?”
Julia said warily:
“In Milchester. I’ve just got in.”
“And you?” The eye went on to Patrick.
“Yes.”
“Did you both come back here together?”
“Yes—yes, we did,” said Patrick.
“No,” said Julia. “It’s no good, Patrick. That’s the kind of lie that will be found out at once. The bus people know us well. I came back on the earlier bus, Inspector—the one that gets here at four o’clock.”
“And what did you do then?”
“I went for a walk.”
“In the direction of Boulders?”
“No. I went across the fields.”
He stared at her. Julia, her face pale, her lips tense, stared back.
Before anyone could speak, the telephone rang.
Miss Blacklock, with an inquiring glance at Craddock, picked up the receiver.
“Yes. Who? Oh, Bunch. What? No. No, she hasn’t. I’ve no idea … Yes, he’s here now.”
She lowered the instrument and said:
“Mrs. Harmon would like to speak to you, Inspector. Miss Marple has not come back to the Vicarage and Mrs. Harmon is worried about her.”
Craddock took two strides forward and gripped the telephone.
“Craddock speaking.”
“I’m worried, Inspector.” Bunch’s voice came through with a childish tremor in it. “Aunt Jane’s out somewhere—and I don’t know where. And they say that Miss Murgatroyd’s been killed. Is it true?”
“Yes, it’s true, Mrs. Harmon. Miss Marple was there with Miss Hinchcliffe when they found the body.”
“Oh, so that’s where she is.” Bunch sounded relieved.
“No—no, I’m afraid she isn’t. Not now. She left there about—let me see—half an hour ago. She hasn’t got home?”
“No—she hasn’t. It’s only ten minutes’ walk. Where can she be?”
“Perhaps she’s called in on one of your neighbours?”
“I’ve rung them up—all of them. She’s not there. I’m frightened, Inspector.”
“So am I,” thought Craddock.
He said quickly:
“I’ll come round to you—at once.”
“Oh, do—there’s a piece of paper. She was writing on it before she went out. I don’t know if it means anything … It just seems gibberish to me.”
Craddock replaced the receiver.
Miss Blacklock said anxiously:
“Has something happened to Miss Marple? Oh, I hope not.”
“I hope not, too.” His mouth was grim.
“She’s so old—and frail.”
“I know.”
Miss Blacklock, standing with her hand pulling at the choker of pearls round her neck, said in a hoarse voice:
“It’s getting worse and worse. Whoever’s doing these things must be mad, Inspector—quite mad….”
“I wonder.”
The choker of pearls round Miss Blacklock’s neck broke under the clutch of her nervous fingers. The smooth white globules rolled all over the room.
Letitia cried out in an anguished tone.
“My pearls—my pearls—” The agony in her voice was so acute that they all looked at her in astonishment. She turned, her hand to her throat, and rushed sobbing out of the room.
Phillipa began picking up the pearls.
“I’ve never seen her so upset over anything,” she said. “Of course—she always wears them. Do you think, perhaps, that someone special gave them to her? Randall Goedler, perhaps?”
“It’s possible,” said the Inspector slowly.
“They’re not—they couldn’t be—real by any chance?” Phillipa asked from where, on her knees, she was still collecting the white shining globules.
Taking one in his hand, Craddock was just about to reply contemptuously, “Real? Of course not!” when he suddenly stifled the words.
After all, could the pearls be real?
They were so large, so even, so white that their falseness seemed palpable, but Craddock remembered suddenly a police case where a string of real pearls had been bought for a few shillings in a pawnbroker’s shop.
Letitia Blacklock had assured him that there was no jewellery of value in the house. If these pearls were, by any chance, genuine, they must be worth a fabulous sum. And if Randall Goedler had given them to her—then they might be worth any sum you cared to name.
They looked false—they must be false, but—if they were real?
Why not? She might herself be unaware of their value. Or she might choose to protect her treasure by treating it as though it were a cheap ornament worth a couple of guineas at most. What would they be worth if real? A fabulous sum … Worth doing murder for—if anybody knew about them.
With a start, the Inspector wrenched himself away from his speculations. Miss Marple was missing. He must go to the Vicarage.
III
He found Bunch and her husband waiting for him, their faces anxious and drawn.
“She hasn’t come back,” said Bunch.
“Did she say she was coming back
here when she left Boulders?” asked Julian.
“She didn’t actually say so,” said Craddock slowly, throwing his mind back to the last time he had seen Jane Marple.
He remembered the grimness of her lips and the severe frosty light in those usually gentle blue eyes.
Grimness, an inexorable determination … to do what? To go where?
“She was talking to Sergeant Fletcher when I last saw her,” he said. “Just by the gate. And then she went through it and out. I took it she was going straight home to the Vicarage. I would have sent her in the car—but there was so much to attend to, and she slipped away very quietly. Fletcher may know something! Where’s Fletcher?”
But Sergeant Fletcher, it seemed, as Craddock learned when he rang up Boulders, was neither to be found there nor had he left any message where he had gone. There was some idea that he had returned to Milchester for some reason.
The Inspector rang up headquarters in Milchester, but no news of Fletcher was to be found there.
Then Craddock turned to Bunch as he remembered what she had told him over the telephone.
“Where’s that paper? You said she’d been writing something on a bit of paper.”
Bunch brought it to him. He spread it out on the table and looked down on it. Bunch leant over his shoulder and spelled it out as he read. The writing was shaky and not easy to read:
Lamp.
Then came the word “Violets.”
Then after a space:
Where is bottle of aspirin?
The next item in this curious list was more difficult to make out. “Delicious death,” Bunch read. “That’s Mitzi’s cake.”
“Making enquiries,” read Craddock.
“Inquiries? What about, I wonder? What’s this? Severe affliction bravely borne … What on earth—!”
“Iodine,” read the Inspector. “Pearls. Ah, pearls.”
“And then Lotty—no, Letty. Her e’s look like o’s. And then Berne. And what’s this? Old Age Pension. …”
They looked at each other in bewilderment.
Craddock recapitulated swiftly:
“Lamp. Violets. Where is bottle of aspirin? Delicious Death. Making enquiries. Severe affliction bravely borne. Iodine. Pearls. Letty. Berne. Old Age Pension.”
Bunch asked: “Does it mean anything? Anything at all? I can’t see any connection.”
Craddock said slowly: “I’ve just a glimmer—but I don’t see. It’s odd that she should have put down that about pearls.”
“What about pearls? What does it mean?”
“Does Miss Blacklock always wear that three-tier choker of pearls?”
“Yes, she does. We laugh about it sometimes. They’re so dreadfully false-looking, aren’t they? But I suppose she thinks it’s fashionable.”
“There might be another reason,” said Craddock slowly.
“You don’t mean that they’re real. Oh! they couldn’t be!”
“How often have you had an opportunity of seeing real pearls of that size, Mrs. Harmon?”
“But they’re so glassy.”
Craddock shrugged his shoulders.
“Anyway, they don’t matter now. It’s Miss Marple that matters. We’ve got to find her.”
They’d got to find her before it was too late—but perhaps it was already too late? Those pencilled words showed that she was on the track … But that was dangerous—horribly dangerous. And where the hell was Fletcher?
Craddock strode out of the Vicarage to where he’d left his car. Search—that was all he could do—search.
A voice spoke to him out of the dripping laurels.
“Sir!” said Sergeant Fletcher urgently. “Sir. …”
Twenty-one
THREE WOMEN
Dinner was over at Little Paddocks. It had been a silent and uncomfortable meal.
Patrick, uneasily aware of having fallen from grace, only made spasmodic attempts at conversation—and such as he did make were not well received. Phillipa Haymes was sunk in abstraction. Miss Blacklock herself had abandoned the effort to behave with her normal cheerfulness. She had changed for dinner and had come down wearing her necklace of cameos but for the first time fear showed from her darkly circled eyes, and betrayed itself by her twitching hands.
Julia, alone, had maintained her air of cynical detachment throughout the evening.
“I’m sorry, Letty,” she said, “that I can’t pack my bag and go. But I presume the police wouldn’t allow it. I don’t suppose I’ll darken your roof—or whatever the expression is—for long. I should imagine that Inspector Craddock will be round with a warrant and the handcuffs any moment. In fact I can’t imagine why something of the kind hasn’t happened already.”
“He’s looking for the old lady—for Miss Marple,” said Miss Blacklock.
“Do you think she’s been murdered, too?” Patrick asked with scientific curiosity. “But why? What could she know?”
“I don’t know,” said Miss Blacklock dully. “Perhaps Miss Murgatroyd told her something.”
“If she’s been murdered too,” said Patrick, “there seems to be logically only one person who could have done it.”
“Who?”
“Hinchcliffe, of course,” said Patrick triumphantly. “That’s where she was last seen alive—at Boulders. My solution would be that she never left Boulders.”
“My head aches,” said Miss Blacklock in a dull voice. She pressed her fingers to her forehead. “Why should Hinch murder Miss Marple? It doesn’t make sense.”
“It would if Hinch had really murdered Murgatroyd,” said Patrick triumphantly.
Phillipa came out of her apathy to say:
“Hinch wouldn’t murder Murgatroyd.”
“She might have if Murgatroyd had blundered on something to show that she—Hinch—was the criminal.”
“Anyway, Hinch was at the station when Murgatroyd was killed.”
“She could have murdered Murgatroyd before she left.”
Startling them all, Letitia Blacklock suddenly screamed out:
“Murder, murder, murder—! Can’t you talk of anything else? I’m frightened, don’t you understand? I’m frightened. I wasn’t before. I thought I could take care of myself … But what can you do against a murderer who’s waiting—and watching—and biding his time! Oh, God!”
She dropped her head forward on her hands. A moment later she looked up and apologized stiffly.
“I’m sorry. I—I lost control.”
“That’s all right, Aunt Letty,” said Patrick affectionately. “I’ll look after you.”
“You?” was all Letitia Blacklock said, but the disillusionment behind the word was almost an accusation.
That had been shortly before dinner, and Mitzi had then created a diversion by coming and declaring that she was not going to cook the dinner.
“I do not do anything more in this house. I go to my room. I lock myself in. I stay there until it is daylight. I am afraid—people are being killed—that Miss Murgatroyd with her stupid English face—who would want to kill her? Only a maniac! Then it is a maniac that is about! And a maniac does not care who he kills. But me, I do not want to be killed. There are shadows in the kitchen—and I hear noises—I think there is someone out in the yard and then I think I see a shadow by the larder door and then it is footsteps I hear. So I go now to my room and I lock the door and perhaps even I put the chest of drawers against it. And in the morning I tell that cruel hard policeman that I go away from here. And if he will not let me I say: ‘I scream and I scream and I scream until you have to let me go!’”
Everybody, with a vivid recollection of what Mitzi could do in the screaming line, shuddered at the threat.
“So I go to my room,” said Mitzi, repeating the statement once more to make her intentions quite clear. With a symbolic action she cast off the cretonne apron she had been wearing. “Good night, Miss Blacklock. Perhaps in the morning, you may not be alive. So in case that is so, I say good-bye.”
She depa
rted abruptly and the door, with its usual gentle little whine, closed softly after her.
Julia got up.
“I’ll see to dinner,” she said in a matter-of-fact way. “Rather a good arrangement—less embarrassing for you all than having me sit down at table with you. Patrick (since he’s constituted himself your protector, Aunt Letty) had better taste every dish first. I don’t want to be accused of poisoning you on top of everything else.”
So Julia had cooked and served a really excellent meal.
Phillipa had come out to the kitchen with an offer of assistance but Julia had said firmly that she didn’t want any help.
“Julia, there’s something I want to say—”
“This is no time for girlish confidences,” said Julia firmly. “Go on back in the dining room, Phillipa.”
Now dinner was over and they were in the drawing room with coffee on the small table by the fire—and nobody seemed to have anything to say. They were waiting—that was all.
At 8:30 Inspector Craddock rang up.
“I shall be with you in about a quarter of an hour’s time,” he announced. “I’m bringing Colonel and Mrs. Easterbrook and Mrs. Swettenham and her son with me.”
“But really, Inspector … I can’t cope with people tonight—”
Miss Blacklock’s voice sounded as though she were at the end of her tether.
“I know how you feel, Miss Blacklock. I’m sorry. But this is urgent.”
“Have you—found Miss Marple?”
“No,” said the Inspector, and rang off.
Julia took the coffee tray out to the kitchen where, to her surprise, she found Mitzi contemplating the piled-up dishes and plates by the sink.
Mitzi burst into a torrent of words.
“See what you do in my so nice kitchen! That frying pan—only, only for omelettes do I use it! And you, what have you used it for?”
“Frying onions.”
“Ruined—ruined. It will have now to be washed and never—never—do I wash my omelette pan. I rub it carefully over with a greasy newspaper, that is all. And this saucepan here that you have used—that one, I use him only for milk—”