Nemesis

by Agatha Christie

  Anthea’s reaction was different. It was quick, excited, almost pleasurable.

  “Verity? Verity, did you say? Did you know her? I’d no idea. It is Verity Hunt you mean?”

  Lavinia Glynne said, “It’s a Christian name?”

  “I never knew anyone of that name,” said Miss Marple, “but I did mean a Christian name. Yes. It is rather unusual, I think. Verity.” She repeated it thoughtfully.

  She let her purple wool ball fall and looked round with the slightly apologetic and embarrassed look of one who realizes she has made a serious faux pas, but not sure why.

  “I—I am so sorry. Have I said something I shouldn’t? It was only because….”

  “No, of course not,” said Mrs. Glynne. “It was just that it is—it is a name we know, a name with which we have—associations.”

  “It just came into my mind,” said Miss Marple, still apologetic, “because, you know, it was poor Miss Temple who said it. I went to see her, you know, yesterday afternoon. Professor Wanstead took me. He seemed to think that I might be able to—to—I don’t know if it’s the proper word—to rouse her, in some way. She was in a coma and they thought—not that I was a friend of hers at any time, but we had chatted together on the tour and we often sat beside each other, as you know, on some of the days and we had talked. And he thought perhaps I might be of some use. I’m afraid I wasn’t though. Not at all. I just sat there and waited and then she did say one or two words, but they didn’t seem to mean anything. But finally, just when it was time for me to go, she did open her eyes and looked at me—I don’t know if she was mistaking me for someone—but she did say that word. Verity! And, well of course it stuck in my mind, especially with her passing away yesterday evening. It must have been someone or something that she had in her mind. But of course it might just mean—well, of course it might just mean Truth. That’s what verity means, doesn’t it?”

  She looked from Clotilde to Lavinia to Anthea.

  “It was the Christian name of a girl we knew,” said Lavinia Glynne. “That is why it startled us.”

  “Especially because of the awful way she died,” said Anthea.

  Clotilde said in her deep voice, “Anthea! there’s no need to go into these details.”

  “But after all, everyone knows quite well about her,” said Anthea. She looked towards Miss Marple. “I thought perhaps you might have known about her because you knew Mr. Rafiel, didn’t you? Well, I mean, he wrote to us about you so you must have known him. And I thought perhaps—well, he’d mentioned the whole thing to you.”

  “I’m so sorry,” said Miss Marple, “I’m afraid I don’t quite understand what you’re talking about.”

  “They found her body in a ditch,” said Anthea.

  There was never any holding Anthea, Miss Marple thought, not once she got going. But she thought that Anthea’s vociferous talk was putting additional strain on Clotilde. She had taken out a handkerchief now in a quiet, noncommittal way. She brushed tears from her eyes and then sat upright, her back very straight, her eyes deep and tragic.

  “Verity,” she said, “was a girl we cared for very much. She lived here for a while. I was very fond of her—”

  “And she was very fond of you,” said Lavinia.

  “Her parents were friends of mine,” said Clotilde. “They were killed in a plane accident.”

  “She was at school at Fallowfield,” explained Lavinia. “I suppose that was how Miss Temple came to remember her.”

  “Oh I see,” said Miss Marple. “Where Miss Temple was Headmistress, is that it? I have heard of Fallowfield often, of course. It’s a very fine school, isn’t it?”

  “Yes,” said Clotilde. “Verity was a pupil there. After her parents died she came to stay with us for a time while she could decide what she wanted to do with her future. She was eighteen or nineteen. A very sweet girl and a very affectionate and loving one. She thought perhaps of training for nursing, but she had very good brains and Miss Temple was very insistent that she ought to go to university. So she was studying and having coaching for that when—when this terrible thing happened.”

  She turned her face away.

  “I—do you mind if we don’t talk about it any more just now?”

  “Oh, of course not,” said Miss Marple. “I’m so sorry to have impinged on some tragedy. I didn’t know. I—I haven’t heard … I thought—well I mean …” She became more and more incoherent.

  II

  That evening she heard a little more. Mrs. Glynne came to her bedroom when she was changing her dress to go out and join the others at the hotel.

  “I thought I ought to come and explain a little to you,” said Mrs. Glynne, “about—about the girl Verity Hunt. Of course you couldn’t know that our sister Clotilde was particularly fond of her and that her really horrible death was a terrible shock. We never mention her if we can help it, but—I think it would be easier if I told you the facts completely and you will understand. Apparently Verity had, without our knowledge, made friends with an undesirable—a more than undesirable—it turned out to be a dangerous—young man who already had a criminal record. He came here to visit us when he was passing through once. We knew his father very well.” She paused. “I think I’d better tell you the whole truth if you don’t know, and you don’t seem to. He was actually Mr. Rafiel’s son, Michael—”

  “Oh dear,” said Miss Marple, “not—not—I can’t remember his name but I do remember hearing that there was a son—and, that he hadn’t been very satisfactory.”

  “A little more than that,” said Mrs. Glynne. “He’d always given trouble. He’d been had up in court once or twice for various things. Once assaulting a teenager—other things of that type. Of course I consider myself that the magistrates are too lenient with that kind of thing. They don’t want to upset a young man’s university career. And so they let them off with a—I forget what they call it—a suspended sentence, something of that kind. If these boys were sent to gaol at once it would perhaps warn them off that type of life. He was a thief, too. He had forged cheques, he pinched things. He was a thoroughly bad lot. We were friends of his mother’s. It was lucky for her, I think, that she died young before she had time to be upset by the way her son was turning out. Mr. Rafiel did all he could, I think. Tried to find suitable jobs for the boy, paid fines for him and things like that. But I think it was a great blow to him, though he pretended to be more or less indifferent and to write it off as one of those things that happen. We had, as probably people here in the village will tell you, we had a bad outbreak of murders and violence in this district. Not only here. They were in different parts of the country, twenty miles away, sometimes fifty miles away. One or two, it’s suspected by the police, were nearly a hundred miles away. But they seemed to centre more or less on this part of the world. Anyway, Verity one day went out to visit a friend and—well, she didn’t come back. We went to the police about it, the police sought for her, searched the whole countryside but they couldn’t find any trace of her. We advertised, they advertised, and they suggested that she’d gone off with a boyfriend. Then word began to get round that she had been seen with Michael Rafiel. By now the police had their eye on Michael as a possibility for certain crimes that had occurred, although they couldn’t find any direct evidence. Verity was said to have been seen, described by her clothing and other things, with a young man of Michael’s appearance and in a car that corresponded to a description of his car. But there was no further evidence until her body was discovered six months later, thirty miles from here in a rather wild part of wooded country, in a ditch covered with stones and piled earth. Clotilde had to go to identify it—it was Verity all right. She’d been strangled and her head beaten in. Clotilde has never quite got over the shock. There were certain marks, a mole and an old scar and of course her clothes and the contents of her handbag. Miss Temple was very fond of Verity. She must have thought of her just before she died.”

  “I’m sorry,” said Miss Marple. “I’m real
ly very, very sorry. Please tell your sister that I didn’t know. I had no idea.”

  Sixteen

  THE INQUEST

  I

  Miss Marple walked slowly along the village street on her way towards the market place where the inquest was to take place in the old-fashioned Georgian building which had been known for a hundred years as the Curfew Arms. She glanced at her watch. There was still a good twenty minutes before she need be there. She looked into the shops. She paused before the shop that sold wool and babies’ jackets, and peered inside for a few moments. A girl in the shop was serving. Small woolly coats were being tried on two children. Further along the counter there was an elderly woman.

  Miss Marple went into the shop, went along the counter to a seat opposite the elderly woman, and produced a sample of pink wool. She had run out, she explained, of this particular brand of wool and had a little jacket she needed to finish. The match was soon made, some more samples of wool that Miss Marple had admired were brought out for her to look at, and soon she was in conversation. Starting with the sadness of the accident which had just taken place. Mrs. Merrypit, if her name was identical with that which was written up outside the shop, was full of the importance of the accident, and the general difficulties of getting local governments to do anything about the dangers of footpaths and public rights of way.

  “After the rain, you see, you get all the soil washed off and then the boulders get loose and then down they comes. I remember one year they had three falls—three accidents there was. One boy nearly killed, he was, and then later that year, oh six months later, I think, there was a man got his arm broken, and the third time it was poor old Mrs. Walker. Blind she was and pretty well deaf too. She never heard nothing or she could have got out of the way, they say. Somebody saw it and they called out to her, but they was too far away to reach her or to run to get her. And so she was killed.”

  “Oh how sad,” said Miss Marple, “how tragic. The sort of thing that’s not easily forgotten, is it.”

  “No indeed. I expect the Coroner’ll mention it today.”

  “I expect he will,” said Miss Marple. “In a terrible way it seems quite a natural thing to happen, doesn’t it, though of course there are accidents sometimes by pushing things about, you know. Just pushing, making stones rock. That sort of thing.”

  “Ah well, there’s boys as be up to anything. But I don’t think I’ve ever seen them up that way, fooling about.”

  Miss Marple went on to the subject of pullovers. Bright coloured pullovers.

  “It’s not for myself,” she said, “it’s for one of my great-nephews. You know he wants a polo-necked pullover and very bright colours he’d like.”

  “Yes, they do like bright colours nowadays, don’t they?” agreed Mrs. Merrypit. “Not in jeans. Black jeans they like. Black or dark blue. But they like a bit of brightness up above.”

  Miss Marple described a pullover of check design in bright colours. There appeared to be quite a good stock of pullovers and jerseys, but anything in red and black did not seem to be on display, nor even was anything like it mentioned as having been lately in stock. After looking at a few samples Miss Marple prepared to take her departure, chatting first about the former murders she had heard about which had happened in this part of the world.

  “They got the fellow in the end,” said Mrs. Merrypit. “Nice looking boy, hardly have thought it of him. He’d been well brought up, you know. Been to university and all that. Father was very rich, they say. Touched in the head, I suppose. Not that they sent him to Broadway, or whatever the place is. No, they didn’t do that, but I think myself he must have been a mental case—there was five or six other girls, so they said. The police had one after another of the young men round hereabouts to help them. Geoffrey Grant they had up. They were pretty sure it was him to begin with. He was always a bit queer, ever since he was a boy. Interfered with little girls going to school, you know. He used to offer them sweets and get them to come down the lanes with him and see the primroses, or something like that. Yes, they had very strong suspicions about him. But it wasn’t him. And then there was another one. Bert Williams, but he’d been far away on two occasions, at least—what they call an alibi, so it couldn’t be him. And then at last it came to this—what’sis-name, I can’t remember him now. Luke I think his name was—no Mike something. Very nice looking, as I say, but he had a bad record. Yes, stealing, forging cheques, all sorts of things like that. And two what-you-call ’em paternity cases, no, I don’t mean that, but you know what I mean. When a girl’s going to have a baby. You know and they make an order and make the fellow pay. He’d got two girls in the family way before this.”

  “Was this girl in the family way?”

  “Oh yes, she was. At first we thought when the body was found it might have been Nora Broad. That was Mrs. Broad’s niece, down at the mill shop. Great one for going with the boys, she was. She’d gone away missing from home in the same way. Nobody knew where she was. So when this body turned up six months later they thought at first it was her.”

  “But it wasn’t?”

  “No—someone quite different.”

  “Did her body ever turn up?”

  “No. I suppose it might some day, but they think on the whole it was pushed into the river. Ah well, you never know, do you? You never know what you may dig up off a ploughed field or something like that. I was taken once to see all that treasure. Luton Loo was it—some name like that? Somewhere in the East Counties. Under a ploughed field it was. Beautiful. Gold ships and Viking ships and gold plate, enormous great platters. Well, you never know. Any day you may turn up a dead body or you may turn up a gold platter. And it may be hundreds of years old like that gold plate was, or it may be a three-or four-years-old body, like Mary Lucas who’d been missing for four years, they say. Somewhere near Reigate she was found. Ah well, all these things! It’s a sad life. Yes, it’s a very sad life. You never know what’s coming.”

  “There was another girl who’d lived here, wasn’t there?” said Miss Marple, “who was killed.”

  “You mean the body they thought was Nora Broad’s but it wasn’t? Yes. I’ve forgotten her name now. Hope, it was, I think. Hope or Charity. One of those sort of names, if you know what I mean. Used to be used a lot in Victorian times but you don’t hear them so much nowadays. Lived at the Manor House, she did. She’d been there for some time after her parents were killed.”

  “Her parents died in an accident, didn’t they?”

  “That’s right. In a plane going to Spain or Italy, one of those places.”

  “And you say she came to live here? Were they relations of hers?”

  “I don’t know if they were relations, but Mrs. Glynne as she is now, was I think a great friend of her mother’s or something that way. Mrs. Glynne, of course, was married and gone abroad but Miss Clotilde—that’s the eldest one, the dark one—she was very fond of the girl. She took her abroad, to Italy and France and all sorts of places, and she had her trained a bit of typewriting and shorthand and that sort of thing, and art classes too. She’s very arty, Miss Clotilde is. Oh, she was mighty fond of the girl. Brokenhearted she was when she disappeared. Quite different to Miss Anthea—”

  “Miss Anthea is the youngest one, isn’t she?”

  “Yes. Not quite all there, some people say. Scatty like, you know, in her mind. Sometimes you see her walking along, talking to herself, you know, and tossing her head in a very queer way. Children get frightened of her sometimes. They say she’s a bit queer about things. I don’t know. You hear everything in a village, don’t you? The great-uncle who lived here before, he was a bit peculiar too. Used to practise revolver shooting in the garden. For no reason at all so far as anyone could see. Proud of his marksmanship, he said he was, whatever marksmanship is.”

  “But Miss Clotilde is not peculiar?”

  “Oh no, she’s clever, she is. Knows Latin and Greek, I believe. Would have liked to go to university but she had to look after her
mother who was an invalid for a long time. But she was very fond of Miss—now, what was her name?—Faith perhaps. She was very fond of her and treated her like a daughter. And then along comes this young what’s-his-name, Michael I think it was—and then one day the girl just goes off without saying a word to anyone. I don’t know if Miss Clotilde knew as she was in the family way.”

  “But you knew,” said Miss Marple.

  “Ah well, I’ve got a lot of experience. I usually know when a girl’s that way. It’s plain enough to the eye. It’s not only the shape, as you might say, you can tell by the look in their eyes and the way they walk and sit, and the sort of giddy fits they get and sick turns now and again. Oh yes, I thought to myself, here’s another one of them. Miss Clotilde had to go and identify the body. Nearly broke her up, it did. She was like a different woman for weeks afterwards. Fairly loved that girl, she did.”

  “And the other one—Miss Anthea?”

  “Funnily enough, you know, I thought she had a kind of pleased look as though she was—yes, just pleased. Not nice, eh? Farmer Plummer’s daughter used to look like that. Always used to go and see pigs killed. Enjoyed it. Funny things goes on in families.”

  Miss Marple said good-bye, saw she had another ten minutes to go and passed on to the post office. The post office and general store of Jocelyn St. Mary was just off the Market Square.

  Miss Marple went into the post office, bought some stamps, looked at some of the postcards and then turned her attention to various paperback books. A middle-aged woman with rather a vinegary face presided behind the postal counter. She assisted Miss Marple to free a book from the wire support in which the books were.

  “Stick a bit sometimes, they do. People don’t put them back straight, you see.”