Nemesis

by Agatha Christie

“Certain information about Verity?”

  “Yes.”

  “That is why she was coming to me. She wanted to know certain facts.”

  “She wanted to know,” said Miss Marple, “why Verity broke off her engagement to marry Mr. Rafiel’s son.”

  “Verity,” said Archdeacon Brabazon, “did not break off her engagement. I am certain of that. As certain as one can be of anything.”

  “Miss Temple did not know that, did she?”

  “No. I think she was puzzled and unhappy about what happened and was coming to me to ask me why the marriage did not take place.”

  “And why did it not take place?” asked Miss Marple. “Please do not think that I am unduly curious. It’s not idle curiosity that is driving me. I too am on—not a pilgrimage—but what I should call a mission. I too want to know why Michael Rafiel and Verity Hunt did not marry.”

  The Archdeacon studied her for a moment or two.

  “You are involved in some way,” he said. “I see that.”

  “I am involved,” said Miss Marple, “by the dying wishes of Michael Rafiel’s father. He asked me to do this for him.”

  “I have no reason not to tell you all I know,” said the Archdeacon slowly. “You are asking me what Elizabeth Temple would have been asking me, you are asking me something I do not know myself. Those two young people, Miss Marple, intended to marry. They had made arrangements to marry. I was going to marry them. It was a marriage, I gather, which was being kept a secret. I knew both these young people, I knew that dear child Verity from a long way back. I prepared her for confirmation, I used to hold services in Lent, for Easter, on other occasions, in Elizabeth Temple’s school. A very fine school it was, too. A very fine woman she was. A wonderful teacher with a great sense of each girl’s capabilities—for what she was best fitted for in studies. She urged careers on girls she thought would relish careers, and did not force girls that she felt were not really suited to them. She was a great woman and a very dear friend. Verity was one of the most beautiful children—girls, rather—that I have come across. Beautiful in mind, in heart, as well as in appearance. She had the great misfortune to lose her parents before she was truly adult. They were both killed in a charter plane going on a holiday to Italy. Verity went to live when she left school with a Miss Clotilde Bradbury-Scott whom you know, probably, as living here. She had been a close friend of Verity’s mother. There are three sisters, though the second one was married and living abroad, so there were only two of them living here. Clotilde, the eldest one, became extremely attached to Verity. She did everything possible to give her a happy life. She took her abroad once or twice, gave her art lessons in Italy and loved and cared for her dearly in every way. Verity, too, came to love her probably as much as she could have loved her own mother. She depended on Clotilde. Clotilde herself was an intellectual and well educated woman. She did not urge a university career on Verity, but this I gather was really because Verity did not really yearn after one. She preferred to study art and music and such subjects. She lived here at The Old Manor House and had, I think, a very happy life. She always seemed to be happy. Naturally, I did not see her after she came here since Fillminster, where I was in the cathedral, is nearly sixty miles from here. I wrote to her at Christmas and other festivals, and she remembered me always with a Christmas card. But I saw nothing of her until the day came when she suddenly turned up, a very beautiful and fully grown young woman by then, with an attractive young man whom I also happened to know slightly, Mr. Rafiel’s son, Michael. They came to me because they were in love with each other and wanted to get married.”

  “And you agreed to marry them?”

  “Yes, I did. Perhaps, Miss Marple, you may think that I should not have done so. They had come to me in secret, it was obvious. Clotilde Bradbury-Scott, I should imagine, had tried to discourage the romance between them. She was well within her rights in doing so. Michael Rafiel, I will tell you frankly, was not the kind of husband you would want for any daughter or relation of yours. She was too young really, to make up her mind, and Michael had been a source of trouble ever since his very young days. He had been had up before junior courts, he had had unsuitable friends, he had been drawn into various gangster activities, he’d sabotaged buildings and telephone boxes. He had been on intimate terms with various girls, had maintenance claims which he had had to meet. Yes, he was a bad lot with the girls as well as in other ways, yet he was extremely attractive and they fell for him and behaved in an extremely silly fashion. He had served two short jail sentences. Frankly, he had a criminal record. I was acquainted with his father, though I did not know him well, and I think that his father did all that he could—all that a man of his character could—to help his son. He came to his rescue, he got him jobs in which he might have succeeded. He paid up his debts, paid out damages. He did all this. I don’t know—”

  “But he could have done more, you think?”

  “No,” said the Archdeacon, “I’ve come to an age now when I know that one must accept one’s fellow human beings as being the kind of people and having the kind of, shall we say in modern terms, genetic makeup which gives them the characters they have. I don’t think that Mr. Rafiel had affection for his son, a great affection at any time. To say he was reasonably fond of him would be the most you could say. He gave him no love. Whether it would have been better for Michael if he had had love from his father, I do not know. Perhaps it would have made no difference. As it was, it was sad. The boy was not stupid. He had a certain amount of intellect and talent. He could have done well if he had wished to do well, and had taken the trouble. But he was by nature—let us admit it frankly—a delinquent. He had certain qualities one appreciated. He had a sense of humour, he was in various ways generous and kindly. He would stand by a friend, help a friend out of a scrape. He treated his girlfriends badly, got them into trouble as the local saying is, and then more or less abandoned them and took up with somebody else. So there I was faced with those two and—yes—I agreed to marry them. I told Verity, I told her quite frankly, the kind of boy she wanted to marry. I found that he had not tried to deceive her in any way. He’d told her that he’d always been in trouble both with the police, and in every other way. He told her that he was going, when he married her, to turn over a new leaf. Everything would be changed. I warned her that that would not happen, he would not change. People do not change. He might mean to change. Verity, I think, knew that almost as well as I did. She admitted that she knew it. She said, ‘I know what Mike is like. I know he’ll probably always be like it, but I love him. I may be able to help him and I may not. But I’ll take that risk.’ And I will tell you this, Miss Marple. I know—none better, I have done a lot with young people, I have married a lot of young people and I have seen them come to grief, I have seen them unexpectedly turn out well—but I know this and recognize it. I know when a couple are really in love with each other. And by that I do not mean just sexually attracted. There is too much talk about sex, too much attention is paid to it. I do not mean that anything about sex is wrong. That is nonsense. But sex cannot take the place of love, it goes with love but it cannot succeed by itself. To love means the words of the marriage service. For better, for worse, for richer for poorer, in sickness and in health. That is what you take on if you love and wish to marry. Those two loved each other. To love and to cherish until death do us part. And that,” said the Archdeacon, “is where my story ends. I cannot go on because I do not know what happened. I only know that I agreed to do as they asked, that I made the necessary arrangements; we settled a day, an hour, a time, a place. I think perhaps that I was to blame for agreeing to the secrecy.”

  “They didn’t want anyone to know?” said Miss Marple.

  “No. Verity did not want anyone to know, and I should say most certainly Mike did not want anyone to know. They were afraid of being stopped. To Verity, I think, besides love, there was also a feeling of escape. Natural, I think, owing to the circumstances of her life. She had lost
her real guardians, her parents, she had entered on her new life after their death, at an age when a school girl arrives at having a ‘crush’ on someone. An attractive mistress. Anything from the games mistress to the mathematics mistress, or a prefect or an older girl. A state that does not last for very long, is merely a natural part of life. Then from that you go on to the next stage when you realize that what you want in your life is what complements yourself. A relationship between a man and a woman. You start then to look about you for a mate. The mate you want in life. And if you are wise, you take your time, you have friends, but you are looking, as the old nurses used to say to children, for Mr. Right to come along. Clotilde Bradbury-Scott was exceptionally good to Verity, and Verity, I think, gave her what I should call hero worship. She was a personality as a woman. Handsome, accomplished, interesting. I think Verity adored her in an almost romantic way and I think Clotilde came to love Verity as though she were her own daughter. And so Verity grew to maturity in an atmosphere of adoration, lived an interesting life with interesting subjects to stimulate her intellect. It was a happy life, but I think little by little she was conscious—conscious without knowing she was conscious, shall we say—of a wish to escape. Escape from being loved. To escape, she didn’t know into what or where. But she did know after she met Michael. She wanted to escape to a life where male and female come together to create the next stage of living in this world. But she knew that it was impossible to make Clotilde understand how she felt. She knew that Clotilde would be bitterly opposed to her taking her love for Michael seriously. And Clotilde, I fear, was right in her belief … I know that now. He was not a husband that Verity ought to have taken or had. The road that she started out on led not to life, not to increased living and happiness. It led to shock, pain, death. You see, Miss Marple, that I have a grave feeling of guilt. My motives were good, but I didn’t know what I ought to have known. I knew Verity, but I didn’t know Michael. I understood Verity’s wish for secrecy because I knew what a strong personality Clotilde Bradbury-Scott had. She might have had a strong enough influence over Verity to persuade her to give up the marriage.”

  “You think then that that was what she did do? You think Clotilde told her enough about Michael to persuade her to give up the idea of marrying him?”

  “No, I do not believe that. I still do not. Verity would have told me if so. She would have got word to me.”

  “What did actually happen on that day?”

  “I haven’t told you that yet. The day was fixed. The time, the hour and the place, and I waited. Waited for a bride and bridegroom who didn’t come, who sent no word, no excuse, nothing. I didn’t know why! I never have known why. It still seems to me unbelievable. Unbelievable, I mean, not that they did not come, that could be explicable easily enough, but that they sent no word. Some scrawled line of writing. And that is why I wondered and hoped that Elizabeth Temple, before she died, might have told you something. Given you some message perhaps for me. If she knew or had any idea that she was dying, she might have wanted to get a message to me.”

  “She wanted information from you,” said Miss Marple. “That, I am sure, was the reason she was coming to you.”

  “Yes. Yes, that is probably true. It seemed to me, you see, that Verity would have said nothing to the people who could have stopped her. Clotilde and Anthea Bradbury-Scott, but because she had always been very devoted to Elizabeth Temple—and Elizabeth Temple had had great influence over her—it seems to me that she would have written and given her information of some kind.”

  “I think she did,” said Miss Marple.

  “Information, you think?”

  “The information she gave to Elizabeth Temple,” said Miss Marple, “was this. That she was going to marry Michael Rafiel. Miss Temple knew that. It was one of the things she said to me. She said: ‘I knew a girl called Verity who was going to marry Michael Rafiel’ and the only person who could have told her that was Verity herself. Verity must have written to her or sent some word to her. And then when I said ‘Why didn’t she marry him?’ she said: ‘She died.’”

  “Then we come to a full stop,” said Archdeacon Brabazon. He sighed. “Elizabeth and I know no more than those two facts. Elizabeth, that Verity was going to marry Michael. And I that those two were going to marry, that they had arranged it and that they were coming on a settled day and time. And I waited for them, but there was no marriage. No bride, no bridegroom, no word.”

  “And you have no idea what happened?” said Miss Marple.

  “I do not for one minute believe that Verity or Michael definitely parted, broke off.”

  “But something must have happened between them? Something that opened Verity’s eyes perhaps, to certain aspects of Michael’s character and personality, that she had not realized or known before.”

  “That is not a satisfying answer because still she would have let me know. She would not have left me waiting to join them together in holy matrimony. To put the most ridiculous side of it, she was a girl with beautiful manners, well brought up. She would have sent word. No. I’m afraid that only one thing could have happened.”

  “Death?” said Miss Marple. She was remembering that one word that Elizabeth Temple had said which had sounded like the deep tone of a bell.

  “Yes.” Archdeacon Brabazon sighed. “Death.”

  “Love,” said Miss Marple thoughtfully.

  “By that you mean—” he hesitated.

  “It’s what Miss Temple said to me. I said ‘What killed her?’ and she said ‘Love’ and that love was the most frightening word in the world. The most frightening word.”

  “I see,” said the Archdeacon. “I see—or I think I see.”

  “What is your solution?”

  “Split personality,” he sighed. “Something that is not apparent to other people unless they are technically qualified to observe it. Jekyll and Hyde are real, you know. They were not Stevenson’s invention as such. Michael Rafiel was a—must have been schizophrenic. He had a dual personality. I have no medical knowledge, no psychoanalytic experience. But there must have been in him the two parts of two identities. One, a well-meaning, almost lovable boy, a boy perhaps whose principal attraction was his wish for happiness. But there was also a second personality, someone who was forced by some mental deformation perhaps—something we as yet are not sure of—to kill—not an enemy, but the person he loved, and so he killed Verity. Not knowing perhaps why he had to or what it meant. There are very frightening things in this world of ours, mental quirks, mental disease or deformity of a brain. One of my parishioners was a very sad case in point. Two elderly women living together, pensioned. They had been friends in service together somewhere. They appeared to be a happy couple. And yet one day one of them killed the other. She sent for an old friend of hers, the vicar of her parish, and said: ‘I have killed Louisa. It is very sad,’ she said, ‘but I saw the devil looking out of her eyes and I knew I was being commanded to kill her.’ Things like that make one sometimes despair of living. One says why? and how? and yet one day knowledge will come. Doctors will find out or learn just some small deformity of a chromosome or gene. Some gland that overworks or leaves off working.”

  “So you think that’s what happened?” said Miss Marple.

  “It did happen. The body was not found, I know, for some time afterwards. Verity just disappeared. She went away from home and was not seen again….”

  “But it must have happened then—that very day—”

  “But surely at the trial—”

  “You mean after the body was found, when the police finally arrested Michael?”

  “He had been one of the first, you know, to be asked to come and give assistance to the police. He had been seen about with the girl, she had been noticed in his car. They were sure all along that he was the man they wanted. He was their first suspect, and they never stopped suspecting him. The other young men who had known Verity were questioned, and one and all had alibis or lack of evidence. They cont
inued to suspect Michael, and finally the body was found. Strangled and the head and face disfigured with heavy blows. A mad frenzied attack. He wasn’t sane when he struck those blows. Mr. Hyde, let us say, had taken over.”

  Miss Marple shivered.

  The Archdeacon went on, his voice low and sad. “And yet, even now sometimes, I hope and feel that it was some other young man who killed her. Someone who was definitely mentally deranged, though no one had any idea of it. Some stranger, perhaps, whom she had met in the neighborhood. Someone who she had met by chance, who had given her a lift in a car, and then—” He shook his head.

  “I suppose that could have been true,” said Miss Marple.

  “Mike made a bad impression in court,” said the Archdeacon. “Told foolish and senseless lies. Lied as to where his car had been. Got his friends to give him impossible alibis. He was frightened. He said nothing of his plan to marry. I believe his Counsel was of the opinion that that would tell against him—that she might have been forcing him to marry her and that he didn’t want to. It’s so long ago now, I remember no details. But the evidence was dead against him. He was guilty—and he looked guilty.

  “So you see, do you not, Miss Marple, that I’m a very sad and unhappy man. I made the wrong judgment, I encouraged a very sweet and lovely girl to go to her death, because I did not know enough of human nature. I was ignorant of the danger she was running. I believed that if she had had any fear of him, any sudden knowledge of something evil in him, she would have broken her pledge to marry him and have come to me and told me of her fear, of her knowledge of him. But nothing of that ever happened. Why did he kill her? Did he kill her because perhaps he knew she was going to have a child? Because by now he had formed a tie with some other girl and did not want to be forced to marry Verity? I can’t believe it. Or was it some entirely different reason. Because she had suddenly felt a fear of him, a knowledge of danger from him, and had broken off her association with him? Did that rouse his anger, his fury, and did that lead him to violence and to killing her? One does not know.”