“I’ve seen you before,” said Miss Marple. “In the Development. You asked me the way to Blenheim Close.”
Hailey Preston smiled good-naturedly. “I guess you did your best, but you misdirected me badly.”
“Dear me, did I?” said Miss Marple. “So many Closes, aren’t there? Can I see Mr. Rudd?”
“Why, now, that’s too bad,” said Hailey Preston. “Mr. Rudd’s a busy man and he’s—er—fully occupied this morning and really can’t be disturbed.”
“I’m sure he’s very busy,” said Miss Marple. “I came here quite prepared to wait.”
“Why, I’d suggest now,” said Hailey Preston, “that you should tell me what it is you want. I deal with all these things for Mr. Rudd, you see. Everyone has to see me first.”
“I’m afraid,” said Miss Marple, “that I want to see Mr. Rudd himself. And,” she added, “I shall wait here until I do.”
She settled herself more firmly in the large oak chair.
Hailey Preston hesitated, started to speak, finally turned away and went upstairs.
He returned with a large man in tweeds.
“This is Dr. Gilchrist. Miss—er—”
“Miss Marple.”
“So you’re Miss Marple,” said Dr. Gilchrist. He looked at her with a good deal of interest.
Hailey Preston slipped away with celerity.
“I’ve heard about you,” said Dr. Gilchrist. “From Dr. Haydock.”
“Dr. Haydock is a very old friend of mine.”
“He certainly is. Now you want to see Mr. Jason Rudd? Why?”
“It is necessary that I should,” said Miss Marple.
Dr. Gilchrist’s eyes appraised her.
“And you’re camping here until you do?” he asked.
“Exactly.”
“You would, too,” said Dr. Gilchrist. “In that case I will give you a perfectly good reason why you cannot see Mr. Rudd. His wife died last night in her sleep.”
“Dead!” exclaimed Miss Marple. “How?”
“An overdose of sleeping stuff. We don’t want the news to leak out to the Press for a few hours. So I’ll ask you to keep this knowledge to yourself for the moment.”
“Of course. Was it an accident?”
“That is definitely my view,” said Gilchrist.
“But it could be suicide.”
“It could—but most unlikely.”
“Or someone could have given it to her?”
Gilchrist shrugged his shoulders.
“A most remote contingency. And a thing,” he added firmly, “that would be quite impossible to prove.”
“I see,” said Miss Marple. She took a deep breath. “I’m sorry, but it’s more necessary than ever that I should see Mr. Rudd.”
Gilchrist looked at her.
“Wait here,” he said.
Twenty-three
Jason Rudd looked up as Gilchrist entered.
“There’s an old dame downstairs,” said the doctor; “looks about a hundred. Wants to see you. Won’t take no and says she’ll wait. She’ll wait till this afternoon, I gather, or she’ll wait till this evening and she’s quite capable, I should say, of spending the night here. She’s got something she badly wants to say to you. I’d see her if I were you.”
Jason Rudd looked up from his desk. His face was white and strained.
“Is she mad?”
“No. Not in the least.”
“I don’t see why I—Oh, all right—send her up. What does it matter?”
Gilchrist nodded, went out of the room and called to Hailey Preston.
“Mr. Rudd can spare you a few minutes now, Miss Marple,” said Hailey Preston, appearing again by her side.
“Thank you. That’s very kind of him,” said Miss Marple as she rose to her feet. “Have you been with Mr. Rudd long?” she asked.
“Why, I’ve worked with Mr. Rudd for the last two and a half years. My job is public relations generally.”
“I see.” Miss Marple looked at him thoughtfully. “You remind me very much,” she said, “of someone I knew called Gerald French.”
“Indeed? What did Gerald French do?”
“Not very much,” said Miss Marple, “but he was a very good talker.” She sighed. “He had had an unfortunate past.”
“You don’t say,” said Hailey Preston, slightly ill at ease. “What kind of a past?”
“I won’t repeat it,” said Miss Marple. “He didn’t like it talked about.”
Jason Rudd rose from his desk and looked with some surprise at the slender elderly lady who was advancing towards him.
“You wanted to see me?” he said. “What can I do for you?”
“I am very sorry about your wife’s death,” said Miss Marple. “I can see it has been a great grief to you and I want you to believe that I should not intrude upon you now or offer you sympathy unless it was absolutely necessary. But there are things that need badly to be cleared up unless an innocent man is going to suffer.”
“An innocent man? I don’t understand you.”
“Arthur Badcock,” said Miss Marple. “He is with the police now, being questioned.”
“Questioned in connection with my wife’s death? But that’s absurd, absolutely absurd. He’s never been near the place. He didn’t even know her.”
“I think he knew her,” said Miss Marple. “He was married to her once.”
“Arthur Badcock? But—he was—he was Heather Badcock’s husband. Aren’t you perhaps—” he spoke kindly and apologetically— “Making a little mistake?”
“He was married to both of them,” said Miss Marple. “He was married to your wife when she was very young, before she went into pictures.”
Jason Rudd shook his head.
“My wife was first married to a man called Alfred Beadle. He was in real estate. They were not suited and they parted almost immediately.”
“Then Alfred Beadle changed his name to Badcock,” said Miss Marple. “He’s in a real estate firm here. It’s odd how some people never seem to like to change their job and want to go on doing the same thing. I expect really that’s why Marina Gregg felt that he was no use to her. He couldn’t have kept up with her.”
“What you’ve told me is most surprising.”
“I can assure you that I am not romancing or imagining things. What I am telling you is sober fact. These things get round very quickly in a village, you know, though they take a little longer,” she added, “in reaching the Hall.”
“Well,” Jason Rudd stalled, uncertain what to say, then he accepted the position, “and what do you want me to do for you, Miss Marple?” he asked.
“I want, if I may, to stand on the stairs at the spot where you and your wife received guests on the day of the fête.”
He shot a quick doubtful glance at her. Was this, after all, just another sensation-seeker? But Miss Marple’s face was grave and composed.
“Why certainly,” he said, “if you want to do so. Come with me.”
He led her to the staircase head and paused in the hollowed-out bay at the top of it.
“You’ve made a good many changes in the house since the Bantrys were here,” said Miss Marple. “I like this. Now, let me see. The tables would be about here, I suppose, and you and your wife would be standing—”
“My wife stood here.” Jason showed her the place. “People came up the stairs, she shook hands with them and passed them on to me.”
“She stood here,” said Miss Marple.
She moved over and took her place where Marina Gregg had stood. She remained there quite quietly without moving. Jason Rudd watched her. He was perplexed but interested. She raised her right hand slightly as though shaking, looked down the stairs as though to see people coming up it. Then she looked straight ahead of her. On the wall halfway up the stairs was a large picture, a copy of an Italian Old Master. On either side of it were narrow windows, one giving out on the garden and the other giving on to the end of the stables and the weathercock. But Miss
Marple looked at neither of these. Her eyes were fixed on the picture itself.
“Of course you always hear a thing right the first time,” she said. “Mrs. Bantry told me that your wife stared at the picture and her face ‘froze,’ as she put it.” She looked at the rich red and blue robes of the Madonna, a Madonna with her head slightly back, laughing up at the Holy Child that she was holding up in her arms. “Giacomo Bellini’s ‘Laughing Madonna,’” she said. “A religious picture, but also a painting of a happy mother with her child. Isn’t that so Mr. Rudd?”
“I would say so, yes.”
“I understand now,” said Miss Marple. “I understand quite well. The whole thing is really very simple, isn’t it?” She looked at Jason Rudd.
“Simple?”
“I think you know how simple it is,” said Miss Marple. There was a peal on the bell below.
“I don’t think,” said Jason Rudd, “I quite understand.” He looked down the stairway. There was a sound of voices.
“I know that voice,” said Miss Marple. “It’s Inspector Craddock’s voice, isn’t it?”
“Yes, it seems to be Inspector Craddock.”
“He wants to see you, too. Would you mind very much if he joined us?”
“Not at all as far as I am concerned. Whether he will agree—”
“I think he will agree,” said Miss Marple. “There’s really not much time now to be lost is there? We’ve got to the moment when we’ve got to understand just how everything happened.”
“I thought you said it was simple,” said Jason Rudd.
“It was so simple,” said Miss Marple, “that one just couldn’t see it.”
The decayed butler arrived at this moment up the stairs.
“Inspector Craddock is here, sir,” he said.
“Ask him to join us here, please,” said Jason Rudd.
The butler disappeared again and a moment or two later Dermot Craddock came up the stairs.
“You!” he said to Miss Marple, “how did you get here?”
“I came in Inch,” said Miss Marple, producing the usual confused effect that that remark always caused.
From slightly behind her Jason Rudd rapped his forehead interrogatively. Dermot Craddock shook his head.
“I was saying to Mr. Rudd,” said Miss Marple, “—has the butler gone away—”
Dermot Craddock cast a look down the stairs.
“Oh, yes,” he said, “he’s not listening. Sergeant Tiddler will see to that.”
“Then that is all right,” said Miss Marple. “We could of course have gone into a room to talk, but I prefer it like this. Here we are on the spot where the thing happened, which makes it so much easier to understand.”
“You are talking,” said Jason Rudd, “of the day of the fête here, the day when Heather Badcock was poisoned.”
“Yes,” said Miss Marple, “and I’m saying that it is all very simple if one only looks at it in the proper way. It all began, you see, with Heather Badcock being the kind of person she was. It was inevitable, really, that something of that kind should happen some day to Heather.”
“I don’t understand what you mean,” said Jason Rudd. “I don’t understand at all.”
“No, it has to be explained a little. You see, when my friend, Mrs. Bantry who was here, described the scene to me, she quoted a poem that was a great favourite in my youth, a poem of dear Lord Tennyson’s. ‘The Lady of Shalott.’” She raised her voice a little.
“The mirror crack’d from side to side;
‘The Curse is come upon me,’ cried
The Lady of Shalott.
That’s what Mrs. Bantry saw, or thought she saw, though actually she misquoted and said doom instead of curse—perhaps a better word in the circumstances. She saw your wife speaking to Heather Badcock and heard Heather Badcock speaking to your wife and she saw this look of doom on your wife’s face.”
“Haven’t we been over that a great many times?” said Jason Rudd.
“Yes, but we shall have to go over it once more,” said Miss Marple. “There was that expression on your wife’s face and she was looking not at Heather Badcock but at that picture. At a picture of a laughing, happy mother holding up a happy child. The mistake was that though there was doom foreshadowed in Marina Gregg’s face, it was not on her the doom would come. The doom was to come upon Heather. Heather was doomed from the first moment that she began talking and boasting of an incident in the past.”
“Could you make yourself a little clearer?” said Dermot Craddock.
Miss Marple turned to him.
“Of course I will. This is something that you know nothing about. You couldn’t know about it, because nobody has told you what it was Heather Badcock actually said.”
“But they have,” protested Dermot. “They’ve told me over and over again. Several people have told me.”
“Yes,” said Miss Marple, “but you don’t know because, you see, Heather Badcock didn’t tell it to you.”
“She hardly could tell it to me seeing she was dead when I arrived here,” said Dermot.
“Quite so,” said Miss Marple. “All you know is that she was ill but she got up from bed and came along to a celebration of some kind where she met Marina Gregg and spoke to her and asked for an autograph and was given one.”
“I know,” said Craddock with slight impatience. “I’ve heard all that.”
“But you didn’t hear the one operative phrase, because no one thought it was important,” said Miss Marple. “Heather Badcock was ill in bed—with German measles.”
“German measles? What on earth has that got to do with it?”
“It’s a very slight illness, really,” said Miss Marple. “It hardly makes you feel ill at all. You have a rash which is easy to cover up with powder, and you have a little fever, but not very much. You feel quite well enough to go out and see people if you want to. And of course in repeating all this the fact that it was German measles didn’t strike people particularly. Mrs. Bantry, for instance, just said that Heather had been ill in bed and mentioned chicken pox and nettlerash. Mr. Rudd here said that it was “flu, but of course he did that on purpose. But I think myself that what Heather Badcock said to Marina Gregg was that she had had German measles and got up from bed and went off to meet Marina. And that’s really the answer to the whole thing, because, you see, German measles is extremely infectious. People catch it very easily. And there’s one thing about it which you’ve got to remember. If a woman contracts it in the first four months of—” Miss Marple spoke the next word with a slight Victorian modesty “—of—er—pregnancy, it may have a terribly serious effect. It may cause an unborn child to be born blind or to be born mentally affected.”
She turned to Jason Rudd.
“I think I am correct in saying, Mr. Rudd, that your wife had a child who was born mentally afflicted and that she has never really recovered from the shock. She had always wanted a child and when at last the child came, this was the tragedy that happened. A tragedy she has never forgotten, that she has not allowed herself to forget and which ate into her as a kind of deep sore, an obsession.”
“It’s quite true,” said Jason Rudd. “Marina developed German measles early on in her pregnancy and was told by the doctor that the mental affliction of her child was due to that cause. It was not a case of inherited insanity or anything of that kind. He was trying to be helpful but I don’t think it helped her much. She never knew how, or when or from whom she had contracted the disease.”
“Quite so,” said Miss Marple, “she never knew until one afternoon here when a perfectly strange woman came up those stairs and told her the fact—told her, what was more—with a great deal of pleasure! With an air of being proud of what she’d done! She thought she’d been resourceful and brave and shown a lot of spirit in getting up from her bed, covering her face with makeup, and going along to meet the actress on whom she had such a crush and obtaining her autograph. It’s a thing she has boasted of all through her life. He
ather Badcock meant no harm. She never did mean harm but there is no doubt that people like Heather Badcock (and like my old friend Alison Wilde), are capable of doing a lot of harm because they lack—not kindness, they have kindness—but any real consideration for the way their actions may affect other people. She thought always of what an action meant to her, never sparing a thought to what it might mean to somebody else.”
Miss Marple nodded her head gently.
“So she died, you see, for a simple reason out of her own past. You must imagine what that moment meant to Marina Gregg. I think Mr. Rudd understands it very well. I think she had nursed all those years a kind of hatred for the unknown person who had been the cause of her tragedy. And here suddenly she meets that person face to face. And a person who is gay, jolly and pleased with herself. It was too much for her. If she had had time to think, to calm down, to be persuaded to relax—but she gave herself no time. Here was this woman who had destroyed her happiness and destroyed the sanity and health of her child. She wanted to punish her. She wanted to kill her. And unfortunately the means were to hand. She carried with her that well-known specific, Calmo. A somewhat dangerous drug because you had to be careful of the exact dosage. It was very easy to do. She put the stuff into her own glass. If by any chance anyone noticed what she was doing they were probably so used to her pepping herself up or soothing herself down in any handy liquid that they’d hardly notice it. It’s possible that one person did see her, but I rather doubt it. I think that Miss Zielinsky did no more than guess. Marina Gregg put her glass down on the table and presently she managed to jog Heather Badcock’s arm so that Heather Badcock spilt her own drink all down her new dress. And that’s where the element of puzzle has come into the matter, owing to the fact that people cannot remember to use their pronouns properly.
“It reminds me so much of that parlourmaid I was telling you about,” she added to Dermot. “I only had the account, you see, of what Gladys Dixon said to Cherry which simply was that she was worried about the ruin of Heather Badcock’s dress with the cocktail spilt down it. What seemed so funny, she said, was that she did it on purpose. But the ‘she’ that Gladys referred to was not Heather Badcock, it was Marina Gregg. As Gladys said: She did it on purpose! She jogged Heather’s arm. Not by accident but because she meant to do so. We do know that she must have been standing very close to Heather because we have heard that she mopped up both Heather’s dress and her own before pressing her cocktail on Heather. It was really,” said Miss Marple meditatively, “a very perfect murder; because, you see, it was committed on the spur of the moment without pausing to think or reflect. She wanted Heather Badcock dead and a few minutes later Heather Badcock was dead. She didn’t realize, perhaps, the seriousness of what she’d done and certainly not the danger of it until afterwards. But she realized it then. She was afraid, horribly afraid. Afraid that someone had seen her dope her own glass, that someone had seen her deliberately jog Heather’s elbow, afraid that someone would accuse her of having poisoned Heather. She could see only one way out. To insist that the murder had been aimed at her, that she was the prospective victim. She tried that idea first on her doctor. She refused to let him tell her husband because I think she knew that her husband would not be deceived. She did fantastic things. She wrote notes to herself and arranged to find them in extraordinary places and at extraordinary moments. She doctored her own coffee at the studios one day. She did things that could really have been seen through fairly easily if one had happened to be thinking that way. They were seen through by one person.”