“I do wish you’d listen when I’m talking,” said Cherry.
“What did you say?”
“Arthur Badcock and Mary Bain.”
“For the Lord’s sake, Cherry, his wife’s only just dead! You women! I’ve heard he’s in a terrible state of nerves still—jumps if you speak to him.”
“I wonder why… I shouldn’t have thought he’d take it that way, would you?”
“Can you clear off this end of the table a bit?” said Jim, relinquishing even a passing interest in the affairs of his neighbours. “Just so that I can spread some of these pieces out a bit.”
Cherry heaved an exasperated sigh.
“To get any attention round here, you have to be a super jet, or a turbo prop,” she said bitterly. “You and your construction models!”
She piled the tray with the remains of supper and carried it over to the sink. She decided not to wash up, a necessity of daily life she always put off as long as possible. Instead, she piled everything into the sink, haphazard, slipped on a corduroy jacket and went out of the house, pausing to call over her shoulder:
“I’m just going to slip along to see Gladys Dixon. I want to borrow one of her Vogue patterns.”
“All right, old girl.” Jim bent over his model.
Casting a venomous look at her next-door neighbour’s front door as she passed, Cherry went round the corner into Blenheim Close and stopped at No. 16. The door was open and Cherry tapped on it and went into the hall calling out:
“Is Gladdy about?”
“Is that you, Cherry?” Mrs. Dixon looked out of the kitchen. “She’s upstairs in her room, dressmaking.”
“Right. I’ll go up.”
Cherry went upstairs to a small bedroom in which Gladys, a plump girl with a plain face, was kneeling on the floor, her cheeks flushed, and several pins in her mouth, tacking up a paper pattern.
“Hallo, Cherry. Look, I got a lovely bit of stuff at Harper’s sale at Much Benham. I’m going to do that crossover pattern with frills again, the one I did in Terylene before.”
“That’ll be nice,” said Cherry.
Gladys rose to her feet, panting a little.
“Got indigestion now,” she said.
“You oughtn’t to do dressmaking right after supper,” said Cherry, “bending over like that.”
“I suppose I ought to slim a bit,” said Gladys. She sat down on the bed.
“Any news from the studios?” asked Cherry, always avid for film news.
“Nothing much. There’s a lot of talk still. Marina Gregg came back on the set yesterday—and she created something frightful.”
“What about?”
“She didn’t like the taste of her coffee. You know, they have coffee in the middle of the morning. She took one sip and said there was something wrong with it. Which was nonsense, of course. There couldn’t have been. It comes in a jug straight from the canteen. Of course I always put hers in a special china cup, rather posh—different from the others—but it’s the same coffee. So there couldn’t have been anything wrong with it, could there?”
“Nerves, I suppose,” said Cherry. “What happened?”
“Oh, nothing. Mr. Rudd just calmed everyone down. He’s wonderful that way. He took the coffee from her and poured it down the sink.”
“That seems to be rather stupid,” said Cherry slowly.
“Why—what do you mean?”
“Well, if there was anything wrong with it—now nobody will ever know.”
“Do you think there really might have been?” asked Gladys looking alarmed.
“Well—” Cherry shrugged her shoulders, “—there was something wrong with her cocktail the day of the fête, wasn’t there, so why not the coffee? If at first you don’t succeed, try, try, try again.”
Gladys shivered.
“I don’t half like it, Cherry,” she said. “Somebody’s got it in for her all right. She’s had more letters, you know, threatening her—and there was that bust business the other day.”
“What bust business?”
“A marble bust. On the set. It’s a corner of a room in some Austrian palace or other. Funny name like Shotbrown. Pictures and china and marble busts. This one was up on a bracket—suppose it hadn’t been pushed back enough. Anway, a heavy lorry went past out in the road and jarred it off—right onto the chair where Marina sits for her big scene with Count Somebody-or-other. Smashed to smithereens! Lucky they weren’t shooting at the time. Mr. Rudd, he said not to say a word to her, and he put another chair there, and when she came yesterday and asked why the chair had been changed, he said the other chair was the wrong period, and this gave a better angle for the camera. But he didn’t half like it—I can tell you that.”
The two girls looked at each other.
“It’s exciting in a way,” said Cherry slowly. “And yet—it isn’t….”
“I think I’m going to give up working in the canteen at the studios,” said Gladys.
“Why? Nobody wants to poison you or drop marble busts on your head!”
“No. But it’s not always the person who’s meant to get done in who gets done in. It may be someone else. Like Heather Badcock that day.”
“True enough,” said Cherry.
“You know,” said Gladys, “I’ve been thinking. I was at the Hall that day, helping. I was quite close to them at the time.”
“When Heather died?”
“No, when she spilt the cocktail. All down her dress. A lovely dress it was, too, royal blue nylon taffeta. She’d got it quite new for the occasion. And it was funny.”
“What was funny?”
“I didn’t think anything of it at the time. But it does seem funny when I think it over.”
Cherry looked at her expectantly. She accepted the adjective “funny” in the sense that it was meant. It was not intended humorously.
“For goodness’ sake, what was funny?” she demanded.
“I’m almost sure she did it on purpose.”
“Spilt the cocktail on purpose?”
“Yes. And I do think that was funny, don’t you?”
“On a brand-new dress? I don’t believe it.”
“I wonder now,” said Gladys, “what Arthur Badcock will do with all Heather’s clothes. That dress would clean all right. Or I could take out half a breadth, it’s a lovely full skirt. Do you think Arthur Badcock would think it very awful of me if I wanted to buy it off him? It would need hardly any alteration—and it’s lovely stuff.”
“You wouldn’t—” Cherry hesitated “—mind?”
“Mind what?”
“Well—having a dress that a woman had died in—I mean died that way….”
Gladys stared at her.
“I hadn’t thought of that,” she admitted. She considered for a moment or two. Then she cheered up.
“I can’t see that it really matters,” she said. “After all, every time you buy something secondhand, somebody’s usually worn it who has died, haven’t they?”
“Yes. But it’s not quite the same.”
“I think you’re being fanciful,” said Gladys. “It’s a lovely bright shade of blue, and really expensive stuff. About that funny business,” she continued thoughtfully, “I think I’ll go up to the hall tomorrow morning on my way to work and have a word with Mr. Giuseppe about it.”
“Is he the Italian butler?”
“Yes. He’s awfully handsome. Flashing eyes. He’s got a terrible temper. When we go and help there, he chivvies us girls something terrible.” She giggled. “But none of us really mind. He can be awfully nice sometimes… Anyway, I might just tell him about it, and ask him what I ought to do.”
“I don’t see that you’ve got anything to tell,” said Cherry.
“Well, it was funny,” said Gladys, defiantly clinging to her favourite adjective.
“I think,” said Cherry, “that you just want an excuse to go and talk to Mr. Giuseppe—and you’d better be careful, my girl. You know what these wops are like!
Affiliation orders all over the place. Hot-blooded and passionate, that’s what these Italians are.”
Gladys sighed ecstatically.
Cherry looked at her friend’s fat slightly spotted face and decided that her warnings were unnecessary. Mr. Giuseppe, she thought, would have better fish to fry elsewhere.
II
“Aha!” said Dr. Haydock, “unravelling, I see.”
He looked from Miss Marple to a pile of fluffy white fleecy wool.
“You advised me to try unravelling if I couldn’t knit,” said Miss Marple.
“You seem to have been very thorough about it.”
“I made a mistake in the pattern right at the beginning. That made the whole thing go out of proportion, so I’ve had to unravel it all. It’s a very elaborate pattern, you see.”
“What are elaborate patterns to you? Nothing at all.”
“I ought really, I suppose, with my bad eyesight, to stick to plain knitting.”
“You’d find that very boring. Well, I’m flattered that you took my advice.”
“Don’t I always take your advice, Doctor Haydock?”
“You do when it suits you,” said Dr. Haydock.
“Tell me, Doctor, was it really knitting you had in mind when you gave me that advice?”
He met the twinkle in her eyes and twinkled back at her.
“How are you getting on with unravelling the murder?” he asked.
“I’m afraid my faculties aren’t quite what they were,” said Miss Marple, shaking her head with a sigh.
“Nonsense,” said Dr. Haydock. “Don’t tell me you haven’t formed some conclusions.”
“Of course I have formed conclusions. Very definite ones.”
“Such as?” asked Haydock inquiringly.
“If the cocktail glass was tampered with that day—and I don’t see quite how that could have been done—”
“Might have had the stuff ready in an eyedropper,” suggested Haydock.
“You are so professional,” said Miss Marple admiringly. “But even then it seems to me so very peculiar that nobody saw it happen.”
“Murder should not only be done, but be seen done! Is that it?”
“You know exactly what I mean,” said Miss Marple.
“That was a chance the murderer had to take,” said Haydock.
“Oh quite so. I’m not disputing that for a moment. But there were, I have found by inquiry and adding up the persons, at least eighteen to twenty people on the spot. It seems to me that amongst twenty people somebody must have seen that action occur.”
Haydock nodded. “One would think so, certainly. But obviously no one did.”
“I wonder,” said Miss Marple thoughtfully.
“What have you got in mind exactly?”
“Well, there are three possibilities. I’m assuming that at least one person would have seen something. One out of twenty. I think it’s only reasonable to assume that.”
“I think you’re begging the question,” said Haydock, “and I can see looming ahead one of those terrible exercises in probability where six men have white hats and six men have black and you have to work it out by mathematics how likely it is that the hats will get mixed-up and in what proportion. If you start thinking about things like that you would go round the bend. Let me assure you of that!”
“I wasn’t thinking of anything like that,” said Miss Marple. “I was just thinking of what is likely—”
“Yes,” said Haydock thoughtfully, “you’re very good at that. You always have been.”
“It is likely, you know,” said Miss Marple, “that out of twenty people one at least should be an observant one.”
“I give in,” said Haydock. “Let’s have the three possibilities.”
“I’m afraid I’ll have to put them in rather sketchily,” said Miss Marple. “I haven’t quite thought it out. Inspector Craddock, and probably Frank Cornish before him, will have questioned everybody who was there so the natural thing would be that whoever saw anything of the kind would have said so at once.”
“Is that one of the possibilities?”
“No, of course it isn’t,” said Miss Marple, “because it hasn’t happened. What you have to account for is if one person did see something why didn’t that person say so?”
“I’m listening.”
“Possibility One,” said Miss Marple, her cheeks going pink with animation. “The person who saw it didn’t realise what they had seen. That would mean, of course, that it would have to be rather a stupid person. Someone, let us say, who can use their eyes but not their brain. The sort of person who, if you asked them. ‘Did you see anyone put anything in Marina Gregg’s glass?’ would answer, ‘Oh, no,’ but if you said ‘Did you see anyone put their hand over the top of Marina Gregg’s glass?’ would say ‘Oh, yes, of course I did.’”
Haydock laughed. “I admit,” he said, “that one never quite allows for the moron in our midst. All right, I grant you Possibility One. The moron saw it, the moron didn’t grasp what the action meant. And the second possibility?”
“This one’s far-fetched, but I do think it is just a possibility. It might have been a person whose action in putting something in a glass was natural.”
“Wait, wait, explain that a little more clearly.”
“It seems to me nowadays,” said Miss Marple, “that people are always adding things to what they eat and drink. In my young days it was considered to be very bad manners to take medicines with one’s meals. It was on a par with blowing your nose at the dinner table. It just wasn’t done. If you had to take pills or capsules, or a spoonful of something, you went out of the room to do so. That’s not the case now. When staying with my nephew Raymond, I observed some of his guests seemed to arrive with quite a quantity of little bottles of pills and tablets. They take them with food, or before food, or after food. They keep aspirins and such things in their handbags and take them the whole time—with cups of tea or with their after-dinner coffee. You understand what I mean?”
“Oh, yes,” said Dr. Haydock, “I’ve got your meaning now and it’s interesting. You mean that someone—” He stopped. “Let’s have it in your own words.”
“I meant,” said Miss Marple, “that it would be quite possible, audacious but possible, for someone to pick up that glass which as soon as it was in his or her hand, of course, would be assumed to be his or her own drink and to add whatever was added quite openly. In that case, you see, people wouldn’t think twice of it.”
“He—or she—couldn’t be sure of that, though,” Haydock pointed out.
“No,” agreed Miss Marple, “it would be a gamble, a risk—but it could happen. And then,” she went on, “there’s the third possibility.”
“Possibility One, a moron,” said the doctor. “Possibility Two, a gambler—what’s Possibility Three?”
“Somebody saw what happened, and has held their tongue deliberately.”
Haydock frowned. “For what reason?” he asked. “Are you suggesting blackmail? If so—”
“If so,” said Miss Marple, “it’s a very dangerous thing to do.”
“Yes, indeed.” He looked sharply at the placid old lady with the white fleecy garment on her lap. “Is the third possibility the one you consider the most probable one?”
“No,” said Miss Marple, “I wouldn’t go so far as that. I have, at the moment, insufficient grounds. Unless,” she added carefully, “someone else gets killed.”
“Do you think someone else is going to get killed?”
“I hope not,” said Miss Marple. “I trust and pray not. But it so often happens, Doctor Haydock. That’s the sad and frightening thing. It so often happens.”
Seventeen
Ella put down the telephone receiver, smiled to herself and came out of the public telephone box. She was pleased with herself.
“Chief-Inspector God Almighty Craddock!” she said to herself. “I’m twice as good as he is at the job. Variations on the theme of: ‘Fly, all is discov
ered!’”
She pictured to herself with a good deal of pleasure the reactions recently suffered by the person at the other end of the line. That faint menacing whisper coming through the receiver. “I saw you….”
She laughed silently, the corners of her mouth curving up in a feline cruel line. A student of psychology might have watched her with some interest. Never until the last few days had she had this feeling of power. She was hardly aware herself of how much the heady intoxication of it affected her….
“Damn that old woman,” thought Ella. She could feel Mrs. Bantry’s eyes following her as she walked up the drive.
A phrase came into her head for no particular reason.
The pitcher goes to the well once too often….
Nonsense. Nobody could suspect that it was she who had whispered those menacing words….
She sneezed.
“Damn this hay fever,” said Ella Zielinsky.
When she came into her office, Jason Rudd was standing by the window.
He wheeled round.
“I couldn’t think where you were.”
“I had to go and speak to the gardener. There were—” she broke off as she caught sight of his face.
She asked sharply: “What is it?”
His eyes seemed set deeper in his face than ever. All the gaiety of the clown was gone. This was a man under strain. She had seen him under strain before but never looking like this.
She said again: “What is it?”
He held a sheet of paper out to her. “It’s the analysis of that coffee. The coffee that Marina complained about and wouldn’t drink.”
“You sent it to be analysed?” She was startled. “But you poured it away down the sink. I saw you.”
His wide mouth curled up in a smile. “I’m pretty good at sleight of hand, Ella,” he said. “You didn’t know that, did you? Yes, I poured most of it away but I kept a little and I took it along to be analysed.”
She looked down at the paper in her hand.
“Arsenic.” She sounded incredulous.
“Yes, arsenic.”
“So Marina was right about it tasting bitter?”
“She wasn’t right about that. Arsenic has no taste. But her instinct was quite right.”