Miss Marple and Mystery

by Agatha Christie

  ‘Damn you!’ cried Vivien shrilly. ‘Why can’t you say it, you smooth-faced devil, instead of torturing me?’

  Clare looked shocked, and Vivien hastily recanted.

  ‘I didn’t mean that. I’m sorry, Clare. I am indeed. Only – my nerves are all to pieces, and your sitting here and talking about the weather – well, it got me all rattled.’

  ‘You’ll have a nervous breakdown if you’re not careful,’ said Clare coldly.

  Vivien gave a short laugh.

  ‘Go over the edge? No – I’m not that kind. I’ll never be a loony. Now tell me – what’s all this about?’

  Clare was silent for a moment, then she spoke, looking not at Vivien, but steadily out over the sea.

  ‘I thought it only fair to warn you that I can no longer keep silence about – about what happened last year.’

  ‘You mean – you’ll go to Gerald with the whole story?’

  ‘Unless you’ll tell him yourself. That would be infinitely the better way.’

  Vivien laughed sharply.

  ‘You know well enough I haven’t got the pluck to do that.’

  Clare did not contradict the assertion. She had had proof before of Vivien’s utterly craven temper.

  ‘It would be infinitely better,’ she repeated.

  Again Vivien gave that short, ugly laugh. ‘It’s your precious conscience, I suppose, that drives you to do this?’ she sneered.

  ‘I dare say it seems very strange to you,’ said Clare quietly. ‘But it honestly is that.’

  Vivien’s white, set face stared into hers. ‘My God!’ she said. ‘I really believe you mean it, too. You actually think that’s the reason.’

  ‘It is the reason.’

  ‘No, it isn’t. If so, you’d have done it before – long ago. Why didn’t you? No, don’t answer. I’ll tell you. You got more pleasure out of holding it over me – that’s why. You liked to keep me on tenterhooks, and make me wince and squirm. You’d say things – diabolical things – just to torment me and keep me perpetually on the jump. And so they did for a bit – till I got used to them.’

  ‘You got to feel secure,’ said Clare.

  ‘You saw that, didn’t you? But even then, you held back, enjoying your sense of power. But now we’re going away, escaping from you, perhaps even going to be happy – you couldn’t stick that at any price. So your convenient conscience wakes up!’

  She stopped, panting. Clare said, still very quietly:

  ‘I can’t prevent your saying all these fantastical things; but I can assure you they’re not true.’

  Vivien turned suddenly and caught her by the hand.

  ‘Clare – for God’s sake! I’ve been straight – I’ve done what you said. I’ve not seen Cyril again – I swear it.’

  ‘That’s nothing to do with it.’

  ‘Clare – haven’t you any pity – any kindness? I’ll go down on my knees to you.’

  ‘Tell Gerald yourself. If you tell him, he may forgive you.’

  Vivien laughed scornfully.

  ‘You know Gerald better than that. He’ll be rabid – vindictive. He’ll make me suffer – he’ll make Cyril suffer. That’s what I can’t bear. Listen, Clare – he’s doing so well. He’s invented something – machinery, I don’t understand about it, but it may be a wonderful success. He’s working it out now – his wife supplies the money for it, of course. But she’s suspicious – jealous. If she finds out, and she will find out if Gerald starts proceedings for divorce – she’ll chuck Cyril – his work, everything. Cyril will be ruined.’

  ‘I’m not thinking of Cyril,’ said Clare. ‘I’m thinking of Gerald. Why don’t you think a little of him, too?’

  ‘Gerald! I don’t care that –’ she snapped her fingers ‘for Gerald. I never have. We might as well have the truth now we’re at it. But I do care for Cyril. I’m a rotter, through and through, I admit it. I dare say he’s a rotter, too. But my feeling for him – that isn’t rotten. I’d die for him, do you hear? I’d die for him!’

  ‘That is easily said,’ said Clare derisively. ‘You think I’m not in earnest? Listen, if you go on with this beastly business, I’ll kill myself. Sooner than have Cyril brought into it and ruined, I’d do that.’

  Clare remained unimpressed.

  ‘You don’t believe me?’ said Vivien, panting. ‘Suicide needs a lot of courage.’

  Vivien flinched back as though she had been struck.

  ‘You’ve got me there. Yes, I’ve no pluck. If there were an easy way –’

  ‘There’s an easy way in front of you,’ said Clare. ‘You’ve only got to run straight down that green slope. It would be all over in a couple of minutes. Remember that child last year.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Vivien thoughtfully. ‘That would be easy – quite easy – if one really wanted to –’

  Clare laughed.

  Vivien turned to her.

  ‘Let’s have this out once more. Can’t you see that by keeping silence as long as you have, you’ve – you’ve no right to go back on it now? I’ll not see Cyril again. I’ll be a good wife to Gerald – I swear I will. Or I’ll go away and never see him again? Whichever you like. Clare –’

  Clare got up.

  ‘I advise you,’ she said, ‘to tell your husband yourself . . . otherwise – I shall.’

  ‘I see,’ said Vivien softly. ‘Well, I can’t let Cyril suffer . . .’

  She got up, stood still as though considering for a minute or two, then ran lightly down to the path, but instead of stopping, crossed it and went down the slope. Once she half turned her head and waved a hand gaily to Clare, then she ran on gaily, lightly, as a child might run, out of sight . . .

  Clare stood petrified. Suddenly she heard cries, shouts, a clamour of voices. Then – silence.

  She picked her way stiffly down to the path. About a hundred yards away a party of people coming up it had stopped. They were staring and pointing. Clare ran down and joined them.

  ‘Yes, Miss, someone’s fallen over the cliff. Two men have gone down – to see.’

  She waited. Was it an hour, or eternity, or only a few minutes?

  A man came toiling up the ascent. It was the Vicar in his shirt sleeves. His coat had been taken off to cover what lay below.

  ‘Horrible,’ he said, his face was very white. ‘Mercifully death must have been instantaneous.’

  He saw Clare, and came over to her.

  ‘This must have been a terrible shock to you. You were taking a walk together, I understand?’

  Clare heard herself answering mechanically.

  Yes. They had just parted. No, Lady Lee’s manner had been quite normal. One of the group interposed the information that the lady was laughing and waving her hand. A terribly dangerous place – there ought to be a railing along the path.

  The Vicar’s voice rose again. ‘An accident – yes, clearly an accident.’

  And then suddenly Clare laughed – a hoarse, raucous laugh that echoed along the cliff.

  ‘That’s a damned lie,’ she said. ‘I killed her.’

  She felt someone patting her shoulder, a voice spoke soothingly. ‘There, there. It’s all right. You’ll be all right presently.’

  But Clare was not all right presently. She was never all right again. She persisted in the delusion – certainly a delusion, since at least eight persons had witnessed the scene – that she had killed Vivien Lee.

  She was very miserable till Nurse Lauriston came to take charge. Nurse Lauriston was very successful with mental cases.

  ‘Humour them, poor things,’ she would say comfortably.

  So she told Clare that she was a wardress from Pentonville Prison. Clare’s sentence, she said, had been commuted to penal servitude for life. A room was fitted up as a cell.

  ‘And now, I think, we shall be quite happy and comfortable,’ said Nurse Lauriston to the doctor. ‘Round-bladed knives if you like, doctor, but I don’t think there’s the least fear of suicide. She’s not the type. Too self-ce
ntred. Funny how those are often the ones who go over the edge most easily.’

  Chapter 23

  The Tuesday Night Club

  ‘The Tuesday Night Club’ was first published in Royal Magazine, December 1927, and in the USA as ‘The Solving Six’ in Detective Story Magazine, 2 June 1928. This was Miss Marple’s debut, a full two years before her first appearance in a full-length novel, The Murder at the Vicarage (Collins, 1930).

  ‘Unsolved mysteries.’

  Raymond West blew out a cloud of smoke and repeated the words with a kind of deliberate self-conscious pleasure.

  ‘Unsolved mysteries.’

  He looked round him with satisfaction. The room was an old one with broad black beams across the ceiling and it was furnished with good old furniture that belonged to it. Hence Raymond West’s approving glance. By profession he was a writer and he liked the atmosphere to be flawless. His Aunt Jane’s house always pleased him as the right setting for her personality. He looked across the hearth to where she sat erect in the big grandfather chair. Miss Marple wore a black brocade dress, very much pinched in round the waist. Mechlin lace was arranged in a cascade down the front of the bodice. She had on black lace mittens, and a black lace cap surmounted the piled-up masses of her snowy hair. She was knitting – something white and soft and fleecy. Her faded blue eyes, benignant and kindly, surveyed her nephew and her nephew’s guests with gentle pleasure. They rested first on Raymond himself, self-consciously debonair, then on Joyce Lemprière, the artist, with her close-cropped black head and queer hazel-green eyes, then on that well-groomed man of the world, Sir Henry Clithering. There were two other people in the room, Dr Pender, the elderly clergyman of the parish, and Mr Petherick, the solicitor, a dried-up little man with eyeglasses which he looked over and not through. Miss Marple gave a brief moment of attention to all these people and returned to her knitting with a gentle smile upon her lips.

  Mr Petherick gave the dry little cough with which he usually prefaced his remarks.

  ‘What is that you say, Raymond? Unsolved mysteries? Ha – and what about them?’

  ‘Nothing about them,’ said Joyce Lemprière. ‘Raymond just likes the sound of the words and of himself saying them.’

  Raymond West threw her a glance of reproach at which she threw back her head and laughed.

  ‘He is a humbug, isn’t he, Miss Marple?’ she demanded. ‘You know that, I am sure.’

  Miss Marple smiled gently at her but made no reply.

  ‘Life itself is an unsolved mystery,’ said the clergyman gravely. Raymond sat up in his chair and flung away his cigarette with an impulsive gesture.

  ‘That’s not what I mean. I was not talking philosophy,’ he said. ‘I was thinking of actual bare prosaic facts, things that have happened and that no one has ever explained.’

  ‘I know just the sort of thing you mean, dear,’ said Miss Marple. ‘For instance Mrs Carruthers had a very strange experience yesterday morning. She bought two gills of picked shrimps at Elliot’s. She called at two other shops and when she got home she found she had not got the shrimps with her. She went back to the two shops she had visited but these shrimps had completely disappeared. Now that seems to me very remarkable.’

  ‘A very fishy story,’ said Sir Henry Clithering gravely. ‘There are, of course, all kinds of possible explanations,’ said Miss Marple, her cheeks growing slightly pinker with excitement. ‘For instance, somebody else –’

  ‘My dear Aunt,’ said Raymond West with some amusement, ‘I didn’t mean that sort of village incident. I was thinking of murders and disappearances – the kind of thing that Sir Henry could tell us about by the hour if he liked.’

  ‘But I never talk shop,’ said Sir Henry modestly. ‘No, I never talk shop.’

  Sir Henry Clithering had been until lately Commissioner of Scotland Yard.

  ‘I suppose there are a lot of murders and things that never are solved by the police,’ said Joyce Lemprière.

  ‘That is an admitted fact, I believe,’ said Mr Petherick. ‘I wonder,’ said Raymond West, ‘what class of brain really succeeds best in unravelling a mystery? One always feels that the average police detective must be hampered by lack of imagination.’

  ‘That is the layman’s point of view,’ said Sir Henry dryly.

  ‘You really want a committee,’ said Joyce, smiling. ‘For psychology and imagination go to the writer –’

  She made an ironical bow to Raymond but he remained serious. ‘The art of writing gives one an insight into human nature,’ he said gravely. ‘One sees, perhaps, motives that the ordinary person would pass by.’

  ‘I know, dear,’ said Miss Marple, ‘that your books are very clever. But do you think that people are really so unpleasant as you make them out to be?’

  ‘My dear Aunt,’ said Raymond gently, ‘keep your beliefs. Heaven forbid that I should in any way shatter them.’

  ‘I mean,’ said Miss Marple, puckering her brow a little as she counted the stitches in her knitting, ‘that so many people seem to me not to be either bad or good, but simply, you know, very silly.’

  Mr Petherick gave his dry little cough again.

  ‘Don’t you think, Raymond,’ he said, ‘that you attach too much weight to imagination? Imagination is a very dangerous thing, as we lawyers know only too well. To be able to sift evidence impartially, to take the facts and look at them as facts – that seems to me the only logical method of arriving at the truth. I may add that in my experience it is the only one that succeeds.’

  ‘Bah!’ cried Joyce, flinging back her black head indignantly. ‘I bet I could beat you all at this game. I am not only a woman – and say what you like, women have an intuition that is denied to men – I am an artist as well. I see things that you don’t. And then, too, as an artist I have knocked about among all sorts and conditions of people. I know life as darling Miss Marple here cannot possibly know it.’

  ‘I don’t know about that, dear,’ said Miss Marple. ‘Very painful and distressing things happen in villages sometimes.’

  ‘May I speak?’ said Dr Pender smiling. ‘It is the fashion nowadays to decry the clergy, I know, but we hear things, we know a side of human character which is a sealed book to the outside world.’

  ‘Well,’ said Joyce, ‘it seems to me we are a pretty representative gathering. How would it be if we formed a Club? What is today? Tuesday? We will call it The Tuesday Night Club. It is to meet every week, and each member in turn has to propound a problem. Some mystery of which they have personal knowledge, and to which, of course, they know the answer. Let me see, how many are we? One, two, three, four, five. We ought really to be six.’

  ‘You have forgotten me, dear,’ said Miss Marple, smiling brightly.

  Joyce was slightly taken aback, but she concealed the fact quickly.

  ‘That would be lovely, Miss Marple,’ she said. ‘I didn’t think you would care to play.’

  ‘I think it would be very interesting,’ said Miss Marple, ‘especially with so many clever gentlemen present. I am afraid I am not clever myself, but living all these years in St Mary Mead does give one an insight into human nature.’

  ‘I am sure your co-operation will be very valuable,’ said Sir Henry, courteously.

  ‘Who is going to start?’ said Joyce.

  ‘I think there is no doubt as to that,’ said Dr Pender, ‘when we have the great good fortune to have such a distinguished man as Sir Henry staying with us –’

  He left his sentence unfinished, making a courtly bow in the direction of Sir Henry.

  The latter was silent for a minute or two. At last he sighed and recrossed his legs and began:

  ‘It is a little difficult for me to select just the kind of thing you want, but I think, as it happens, I know of an instance which fits these conditions very aptly. You may have seen some mention of the case in the papers of a year ago. It was laid aside at the time as an unsolved mystery, but, as it happens, the solution came into my hands not very many day
s ago.

  ‘The facts are very simple. Three people sat down to a supper consisting, amongst other things, of tinned lobster. Later in the night, all three were taken ill, and a doctor was hastily summoned. Two of the people recovered, the third one died.’

  ‘Ah!’ said Raymond approvingly.

  ‘As I say, the facts as such were very simple. Death was considered to be due to ptomaine poisoning, a certificate was given to that effect, and the victim was duly buried. But things did not rest at that.’

  Miss Marple nodded her head.

  ‘There was talk, I suppose,’ she said, ‘there usually is.’

  ‘And now I must describe the actors in this little drama. I will call the husband and wife Mr and Mrs Jones, and the wife’s companion Miss Clark. Mr Jones was a traveller for a firm of manufacturing chemists. He was a good-looking man in a kind of coarse, florid way, aged about fifty. His wife was a rather commonplace woman, of about forty-five. The companion, Miss Clark, was a woman of sixty, a stout cheery woman with a beaming rubicund face. None of them, you might say, very interesting.

  ‘Now the beginning of the troubles arose in a very curious way. Mr Jones had been staying the previous night at a small commercial hotel in Birmingham. It happened that the blotting paper in the blotting book had been put in fresh that day, and the chambermaid, having apparently nothing better to do, amused herself by studying the blotter in the mirror just after Mr Jones had been writing a letter there. A few days later there was a report in the papers of the death of Mrs Jones as the result of eating tinned lobster, and the chambermaid then imparted to her fellow servants the words that she had deciphered on the blotting pad. They were as follows: Entirely dependent on my wife . . . when she is dead I will . . . hundreds and thousands . . . ‘You may remember that there had recently been a case of a wife being poisoned by her husband. It needed very little to fire the imagination of these maids. Mr Jones had planned to do away with his wife and inherit hundreds of thousands of pounds! As it happened one of the maids had relations living in the small market town where the Joneses resided. She wrote to them, and they in return wrote to her. Mr Jones, it seemed, had been very attentive to the local doctor’s daughter, a good-looking young woman of thirty-three. Scandal began to hum. The Home Secretary was petitioned. Numerous anonymous letters poured into Scotland Yard all accusing Mr Jones of having murdered his wife. Now I may say that not for one moment did we think there was anything in it except idle village talk and gossip. Nevertheless, to quiet public opinion an exhumation order was granted. It was one of these cases of popular superstition based on nothing solid whatever, which proved to be so surprisingly justified. As a result of the autopsy sufficient arsenic was found to make it quite clear that the deceased lady had died of arsenical poisoning. It was for Scotland Yard working with the local authorities to prove how that arsenic had been administered, and by whom.’