2
It was very difficult, Inspector Curry thought, to get a true estimate of someone from what other people said.
Edgar Lawson had been described by a good many different people that morning, but looking at him now, Curry’s own impressions were almost ludicrously different.
Edgar did not impress him as “queer” or “dangerous” or “arrogant” or even as “abnormal.” He seemed a very ordinary young man, very much cast down and in a state of humility approaching that of Uriah Heep’s. He looked young and slightly common and rather pathetic.
He was only too anxious to talk and to apologize.
“I know I’ve done very wrong. I don’t know what came over me—really I don’t. Making that scene and kicking up such a row. And actually shooting off a pistol. At Mr. Serrocold, too, who’s been so good to me and so patient, too.”
He twisted his hands nervously. They were rather pathetic hands, with bony wrists.
“If I’ve got to be had up for it, I’ll come with you at once. I deserve it. I’ll plead guilty.”
“No charge has been made against you,” said Inspector Curry crisply. “So we’ve no evidence on which to act. According to Mr. Serrocold, letting off the pistol was an accident.”
“That’s because he’s so good. There never was a man as good as Mr. Serrocold! He’s done everything for me. And I go and repay him by acting like this.”
“What made you act as you did?”
Edgar looked embarrassed.
“I made a fool of myself.”
Inspector Curry said drily:
“So it seems. You told Mr. Serrocold in the presence of witnesses that you had discovered that he was your father. Was that true?”
“No, it wasn’t.”
“What put that idea into your head? Did someone suggest it to you?”
“Well, it’s a bit hard to explain.”
Inspector Curry looked at him thoughtfully, then said in a kindly voice:
“Suppose you try. We don’t want to make things hard for you.”
“Well, you see, I had rather a hard time of it as a kid. The other boys jeered at me. Because I hadn’t got a father. Said I was a little bastard—which I was, of course. Mum was usually drunk and she had men coming in all the time. My father was a foreign seaman, I believe. The house was always filthy and it was all pretty fair hell. And then I got to thinking suppose my Dad had been not just some foreign sailor, but someone important—and I used to make up a thing or two. Kid stuff first—changed at birth—really the rightful heir—that sort of thing. And then I went to a new school and I tried it on once or twice hinting things. Said my father was really an Admiral in the navy. I got to believing it myself. I didn’t feel so bad then.”
He paused and then went on.
“And then—later—I thought up some other ideas. I used to stay at hotels and told a lot of silly stories about being a fighter pilot—or about being in military intelligence. I got all sort of mixed up. I didn’t seem able to stop telling lies.
“Only I didn’t really try to get money by it. It was just swank so as to make people think a bit more of me. I didn’t want to be dishonest. Mr. Serrocold will tell you—and Dr. Maverick—they’ve got all the stuff about it.”
Inspector Curry nodded. He had already studied Edgar’s case history and his police record.
“Mr. Serrocold got me clear in the end and brought me down here. He said he needed a secretary to help him—and I did help him! I really did. Only the others laughed at me. They were always laughing at me.”
“What others? Mrs. Serrocold?”
“No, not Mrs. Serrocold. She’s a lady—she’s always gentle and kind. No, but Gina treated me like dirt. And Stephen Restarick. And Mrs. Strete looked down on me for not being a gentleman. So did Miss Bellever—and what’s she? She’s a paid companion, isn’t she?”
Curry noted the signs of rising excitement.
“So you didn’t find them very sympathetic?”
Edgar said passionately:
“It was because of me being a bastard. If I’d had a proper father they wouldn’t have gone on like that.”
“So you appropriated a couple of famous fathers?”
Edgar blushed.
“I always seem to get to telling lies,” he muttered.
“And finally, you said Mr. Serrocold was your father. Why?”
“Because that would stop them once for all, wouldn’t it? If he was my father they couldn’t do anything to me!”
“Yes. But you accused him of being your enemy—of persecuting you.”
“I know—” He rubbed his forehead. “I got things all wrong. There are times when I don’t—when I don’t get things quite right. I get muddled.”
“And you took the revolver from Mr. Walter Hudd’s room?”
Edgar looked puzzled.
“Did I? Is that where I got it?”
“Don’t you remember where you got it?”
Edgar said:
“I meant to threaten Mr. Serrocold with it. I meant to frighten him. It was kid stuff all over again.”
Inspector Curry said patiently, “How did you get the revolver?”
“You just said—out of Walter’s room.”
“You remember doing that now?”
“I must have got it from his room. I couldn’t have got hold of it any other way, could I?”
“I don’t know,” said Inspector Curry. “Somebody—might have given it to you?”
Edgar was silent—his face a blank.
“Is that how it happened?”
Edgar said passionately:
“I don’t remember. I was so worked up. I walked about the garden in a red mist of rage. I thought people were spying on me, watching me, trying to hound me down. Even that nice white-haired old lady … I can’t understand it all now. I feel I must have been mad. I don’t remember where I was and what I was doing half of the time!”
“Surely you remember who told you Mr. Serrocold was your father?”
Edgar gave the same blank stare.
“Nobody told me,” he said sullenly. “It just came to me.”
Inspector Curry sighed. He was not satisfied. But he judged he could make no further progress at present.
“Well, watch your step in future,” he said.
“Yes, sir. Yes, indeed, I will.”
As Edgar went Inspector Curry slowly shook his head.
“These pathological cases are the devil!”
“D’you think he’s mad, sir?”
“Much less mad than I’d imagined. Weak-headed, boastful, a liar—yet a certain pleasant simplicity about him. Highly suggestible I should imagine….”
“You think someone did suggest things to him?”
“Oh yes, old Miss Marple was right there. She’s a shrewd old bird. But I wish I knew who it was. He won’t tell. If we only knew that … Come on, Lake, let’s have a thorough reconstruction of the scene in the Hall.”
3
“That fixes it pretty well.”
Inspector Curry was sitting at the piano. Sergeant Lake was in a chair by the window overlooking the lake.
Curry went on.
“If I’m half-turned on the piano stool, watching the study door, I can’t see you.”
Sergeant Lake rose softly and edged quietly through the door to the library.
“All this side of the room was dark. The only lights that were on were the ones beside the study door. No, Lake, I didn’t see you go. Once in the library, you could go out through the other door to the corridor—two minutes to run along to the Oak Suite, shoot Gulbrandsen and come back through the library to your chair by the window.
“The women by the fire have their backs to you. Mrs. Serrocold was sitting here—on the right of the fireplace, near the study door. Everyone agrees she didn’t move and she’s the only one who’s in the line of direct vision. Miss Marple was here. She was looking past Mrs. Serrocold to the study. Mrs. Strete was on the left of the fireplace—c
lose to the door out of the Hall to the lobby, and it’s a very dark corner. She could have gone and come back. Yes, it’s possible.”
Curry grinned suddenly.
“And I could go.” He slipped off the music stool and sidled along the wall and out through the door. “The only person who might notice I wasn’t still at the piano would be Gina Hudd. And you remember what Gina said, ‘Stephen was at the piano to begin with. I don’t know where he was later.’”
“So you think it’s Stephen?”
“I don’t know who it is,” said Curry. “It wasn’t Edgar Lawson or Lewis Serrocold or Mrs. Serrocold or Miss Jane Marple. But for the rest—” He sighed. “It’s probably the American. Those fused lights were a bit too convenient—a coincidence. And yet, you know, I rather like the chap. Still, that isn’t evidence.”
He peered thoughtfully at some music on the side of the piano. “Hindemith? Who’s he? Never heard of him. Shostakovitch! What names these people have.” He got up and then looked down at the old-fashioned music stool. He lifted the top of it.
“Here’s the old-fashioned stuff. Handel’s Largo. Czerny’s Exercises. Dates back to old Gulbrandsen, most of this. ‘I know a lovely Garden’—Vicar’s wife used to sing that when I was a boy—”
He stopped—the yellow pages of the song in his hand. Beneath them, reposing on Chopin’s Preludes, was a small automatic pistol.
“Stephen Restarick,” exclaimed Sergeant Lake joyfully.
“Now don’t jump to conclusions,” Inspector Curry warned him. “Ten to one that’s what we’re meant to think.”
Fifteen
1
Miss Marple climbed the stairs and tapped on the door of Mrs. Serrocold’s bedroom.
“May I come in, Carrie Louise?”
“Of course, Jane dear.”
Carrie Louise was sitting in front of the dressing table, brushing her silvery hair. She turned her head over her shoulder.
“Is it the police? I’ll be ready in a few minutes.”
“Are you all right?”
“Yes, of course. Jolly insisted on my having my breakfast in bed. And Gina came into the room with it on tiptoe as though I might be at death’s door! I don’t think people realise that tragedies like Christian’s death are much less shock to someone old. Because one knows by then how anything may happen—and how little anything really matters that happens in this world.”
“Ye—es,” said Miss Marple dubiously.
“Don’t you feel the same, Jane? I should have thought you would.”
Miss Marple said slowly:
“Christian was murdered.”
“Yes … I see what you mean. You think that does matter?”
“Don’t you?”
“Not to Christian,” said Carrie Louise simply. “It matters, of course, to whoever murdered him.”
“Have you any idea who murdered him?”
Mrs. Serrocold shook her head in a bewildered fashion.
“No, I’ve absolutely no idea. I can’t even think of a reason. It must have been something to do with his being here before—just over a month ago. Because otherwise I don’t think he would have come here suddenly again for no particular reason. Whatever it was must have started off then. I’ve thought and I’ve thought, but I can’t remember anything unusual.”
“Who was here in the house?”
“Oh! the same people who are here now—yes, Alex was down from London about then. And—oh yes, Ruth was here.”
“Ruth?”
“Her usual flying visit.”
“Ruth,” said Miss Marple again. Her mind was active. Christian Gulbrandsen and Ruth? Ruth had come away worried and apprehensive, but had not known why. Something was wrong was all that Ruth could say. Christian Gulbrandsen had also been worried and apprehensive, but Christian Gulbrandsen had known or suspected something that Ruth did not. He had known or suspected that someone was trying to poison Carrie Louise. How had Christian Gulbrandsen come to entertain those suspicions? What had he seen or heard? Was it something that Ruth also had seen or heard but which she had failed to appreciate at its rightful significance? Miss Marple wished that she knew what it could possibly have been. Her own vague hunch that it (whatever it was) had to do with Edgar Lawson seemed unlikely since Ruth had not even mentioned him.
She sighed.
“You’re all keeping something from me, aren’t you?” asked Carrie Louise.
Miss Marple jumped a little as the quiet voice spoke.
“Why do you say that?”
“Because you are. Not Jolly. But everyone else. Even Lewis. He came in while I was having my breakfast, and he acted very oddly. He drank some of my coffee and even had a bit of toast and marmalade. That’s so unlike him, because he always has tea, and he doesn’t like marmalade, so he must have been thinking of something else—and I suppose he must have forgotten to have his own breakfast. He does forget things like meals, and he looked so concerned and preoccupied.”
“Murder—” began Miss Marple.
Carrie Louise said quickly:
“Oh, I know. It’s a terrible thing. I’ve never been mixed up in it before. You have, haven’t you, Jane?”
“Well—yes—actually I have,” Miss Marple admitted.
“So Ruth told me.”
“Did she tell you that last time she was down here?” asked Miss Marple curiously.
“No, I don’t think it was then. I can’t really remember.”
Carrie Louise spoke vaguely, almost absentmindedly.
“What are you thinking about, Carrie Louise?”
Mrs. Serrocold smiled and seemed to come back from a long way away.
“I was thinking of Gina,” she said. “And of what you said about Stephen Restarick. Gina’s a dear girl, you know, and she does really love Wally. I’m sure she does.”
Miss Marple said nothing.
“Girls like Gina like to kick up their heels a bit.” Mrs. Serrocold spoke in an almost pleading voice. “They’re young and they like to feel their power. It’s natural, really. I know Wally Hudd isn’t the sort of man we imagined Gina marrying. Normally she’d never have met him. But she did meet him, and fell in love with him—and presumably she knows her own business best.”
“Probably she does,” said Miss Marple.
“But it’s so very important that Gina should be happy.”
Miss Marple looked curiously at her friend.
“It’s important, I suppose, that everyone should be happy.”
“Oh yes. But Gina’s a very special case. When we took her mother—when we took Pippa—we felt that it was an experiment that had simply got to succeed. You see, Pippa’s mother—”
Carrie Louise paused.
Miss Marple said, “Who was Pippa’s mother?”
Carrie Louise said, “Eric and I agreed that we would never tell anybody that. She never knew herself.”
“I’d like to know,” said Miss Marple.
Mrs. Serrocold looked at her doubtfully.
“It isn’t just curiosity,” said Miss Marple. “I really—well—need to know. I can hold my tongue, you know.”
“You could always keep a secret, Jane,” said Carrie Louise with a reminiscent smile. “Dr. Galbraith—he’s the Bishop of Cromer now—he knows. But no one else. Pippa’s mother was Katherine Elsworth.”
“Elsworth? Wasn’t that the woman who administered arsenic to her husband? Rather a celebrated case.”
“Yes.”
“She was hanged?”
“Yes. But you know it’s not at all sure that she did it. The husband was an arsenic eater—they didn’t understand so much about those things then.”
“She soaked flypapers.”
“The maid’s evidence, we always thought, was definitely malicious.”
“And Pippa was her daughter?”
“Yes. Eric and I determined to give the child a fresh start in life—with love and care and all the things a child needs. We succeeded. Pippa was—herself. The sweetest, ha
ppiest creature imaginable.”
Miss Marple was silent a long time.
Carrie Louise turned away from the dressing table.
“I’m ready now. Perhaps you’ll ask the Inspector or whatever he is to come up to my sitting room. He won’t mind, I’m sure.”
2
Inspector Curry did not mind. In fact, he rather welcomed the chance of seeing Mrs. Serrocold on her own territory.
As he stood there waiting for her, he looked round him curiously. It was not his idea of what he termed to himself “a rich woman’s boudoir.”
It had an old-fashioned couch and some rather uncomfortable looking Victorian chairs with twisted woodwork backs. The chintzes were old and faded but of an attractive pattern displaying the Crystal Palace. It was one of the smaller rooms, though even then it was larger than the drawing room of most modern houses. But it had a cosy, rather crowded appearance with its little tables, its bric-a-brac, and its photographs. Curry looked at an old snapshot of two little girls, one dark and lively, the other plain, and staring out sulkily on the world from under a heavy fringe. He had seen that same expression that morning. “Pippa and Mildred” was written on the photograph. There was a photograph of Eric Gulbrandsen hanging on the wall, with a gold mount and a heavy ebony frame. Curry had just found a photograph of a good-looking man with eyes crinkling with laughter, whom he presumed was John Restarick, when the door opened and Mrs. Serrocold came in.
She wore black, a floating and diaphanous black. Her little pink-and-white face looked unusually small under its crown of silvery hair, and there was a frailness about her that caught sharply at Inspector Curry’s heart. He understood, at that moment, a good deal that had perplexed him earlier in the morning. He understood why people were so anxious to spare Caroline Louise Serrocold everything that could be spared her.
And yet, he thought, she isn’t the kind that would ever make a fuss….
She greeted him, asked him to sit down, and took a chair near him. It was less he who put her at her ease than she who put him at his. He started to ask his questions and she answered them readily and without hesitation. The failure of the lights, the quarrel between Edgar Lawson and her husband, the shot they had heard….