“And the time,” continued Miss Wetherby, leaning forward mysteriously, “was just before six o’clock.”
“On which day?”
Miss Wetherby gave a little scream.
“The day of the murder, of course, didn’t I say so?”
“I inferred it,” I replied. “And the name of the lady?”
“Begins with an L,” said Wetherby, nodding her head several times.
Feeling that I had got to the end of the information Miss Wetherby had to impart, I rose to my feet.
“You won’t let the police cross-question me, will you?” said Miss Wetherby, pathetically, as she clasped my hand in both of hers. “I do shrink from publicity. And to stand up in court!”
“In special cases,” I said, “they let witnesses sit down.”
And I escaped.
There was still Mrs. Price Ridley to see. That lady put me in my place at once.
“I will not be mixed up in any police court business,” she said grimly, after shaking my hand coldly. “You understand that, on the other hand, having come across a circumstance which needs explaining, I think it should be brought to the notice of the authorities.”
“Does it concern Mrs. Lestrange?” I asked.
“Why should it?” demanded Mrs. Price Ridley coldly.
She had me at a disadvantage there.
“It’s a very simple matter,” she continued. “My maid, Clara, was standing at the front gate, she went down there for a minute or two—she says to get a breath of fresh air. Most unlikely, I should say. Much more probable that she was looking out for the fishmonger’s boy—if he calls himself a boy—impudent young jackanapes, thinks because he’s seventeen he can joke with all the girls. Anyway, as I say, she was standing at the gate and she heard a sneeze.”
“Yes,” I said, waiting for more.
“That’s all. I tell you she heard a sneeze. And don’t start telling me I’m not so young as I once was and may have made a mistake, because it was Clara who heard it and she’s only nineteen.”
“But,” I said, “why shouldn’t she have heard a sneeze?”
Mrs. Price Ridley looked at me in obvious pity for my poorness of intellect.
“She heard a sneeze on the day of the murder at a time when there was no one in your house. Doubtless the murderer was concealed in the bushes waiting his opportunity. What you have to look for is a man with a cold in his head.”
“Or a sufferer from hay fever,” I suggested. “But as a matter of fact, Mrs. Price Ridley, I think that mystery has a very easy solution. Our maid, Mary, has been suffering from a severe cold in the head. In fact, her sniffing has tried us very much lately. It must have been her sneeze your maid heard.”
“It was a man’s sneeze,” said Mrs. Price Ridley firmly. “And you couldn’t hear your maid sneeze in your kitchen from our gate.”
“You couldn’t hear anyone sneezing in the study from your gate,” I said. “Or at least, I very much doubt it.”
“I said the man might have been concealed in the shrubbery,” said Mrs. Price Ridley. “Doubtless when Clara had gone in, he effected an entrance by the front door.”
“Well, of course, that’s possible,” I said.
I tried not to make my voice consciously soothing, but I must have failed, for Mrs. Price Ridley glared at me suddenly.
“I am accustomed not to be listened to, but I might mention also that to leave a tennis racquet carelessly flung down on the grass without a press completely ruins it. And tennis racquets are very expensive nowadays.”
There did not seem to be rhyme or reason in this flank attack. It bewildered me utterly.
“But perhaps you don’t agree,” said Mrs. Price Ridley.
“Oh! I do—certainly.”
“I am glad. Well, that is all I have to say. I wash my hands of the whole affair.”
She leaned back and closed her eyes like one weary of this world. I thanked her and said good-bye.
On the doorstep, I ventured to ask Clara about her mistress’s statement.
“It’s quite true, sir, I heard a sneeze. And it wasn’t an ordinary sneeze—not by any means.”
Nothing about a crime is ever ordinary. The shot was not an ordinary kind of shot. The sneeze was not a usual kind of sneeze. It was, I presume, a special murderer’s sneeze. I asked the girl what time this had been, but she was very vague, some time between a quarter and half past six she thought. Anyway, “it was before the mistress had the telephone call and was took bad.”
I asked her if she had heard a shot of any kind. And she said the shots had been something awful. After that, I placed very little credence in her statements.
I was just turning in at my own gate when I decided to pay a friend a visit.
Glancing at my watch, I saw that I had just time for it before taking Evensong. I went down the road to Haydock’s house. He came out on the doorstep to meet me.
I noticed afresh how worried and haggard he looked. This business seemed to have aged him out of all knowledge.
“I’m glad to see you,” he said. “What’s the news?”
I told him the latest Stone development.
“A high-class thief,” he commented. “Well, that explains a lot of things. He’d read up his subject, but he made slips from time to time to me. Protheroe must have caught him out once. You remember the row they had. What do you think about the girl? Is she in it too?”
“Opinion as to that is undecided,” I said. “For my own part, I think the girl is all right.
“She’s such a prize idiot,” I added.
“Oh! I wouldn’t say that. She’s rather shrewd, is Miss Gladys Cram. A remarkably healthy specimen. Not likely to trouble members of my profession.”
I told him that I was worried about Hawes, and that I was anxious that he should get away for a real rest and change.
Something evasive came into his manner when I said this. His answer did not ring quite true.
“Yes,” he said slowly. “I suppose that would be the best thing. Poor chap. Poor chap.”
“I thought you didn’t like him.”
“I don’t—not much. But I’m sorry for a lot of people I don’t like.” He added after a minute or two: “I’m even sorry for Protheroe. Poor fellow—nobody ever liked him much. Too full of his own rectitude and too self-assertive. It’s an unlovable mixture. He was always the same—even as a young man.”
“I didn’t know you knew him then.”
“Oh, yes! When we lived in Westmorland, I had a practice not far away. That’s a long time ago now. Nearly twenty years.”
I sighed. Twenty years ago Griselda was five years old. Time is an odd thing….
“Is that all you came to say to me, Clement?”
I looked up with a start. Haydock was watching me with keen eyes.
“There’s something else, isn’t there?” he said.
I nodded.
I had been uncertain whether to speak or not when I came in, but now I decided to do so. I like Haydock as well as any man I know. He is a splendid fellow in every way. I felt that what I had to tell might be useful to him.
I recited my interviews with Miss Hartnell and Miss Wetherby.
He was silent for a long time after I’d spoken.
“It’s quite true, Clement,” he said at last. “I’ve been trying to shield Mrs. Lestrange from any inconvenience that I could. As a matter of fact, she’s an old friend. But that’s not my only reason. That medical certificate of mine isn’t the put-up job you all think it was.”
He paused, and then said gravely:
“This is between you and me, Clement. Mrs. Lestrange is doomed.”
“What?”
“She’s a dying woman. I give her a month at longest. Do you wonder that I want to keep her from being badgered and questioned?”
He went on:
“When she turned into this road that evening it was here she came—to this house.”
“You haven’t said so before.”<
br />
“I didn’t want to create talk. Six to seven isn’t my time for seeing patients, and everyone knows that. But you can take my word for it that she was here.”
“She wasn’t here when I came for you, though. I mean, when we discovered the body.”
“No,” he seemed perturbed. “She’d left—to keep an appointment.”
“In what direction was the appointment? In her own house?”
“I don’t know, Clement. On my honour, I don’t know.”
I believed him, but—
“And supposing an innocent man is hanged?” I said.
“No,” he said. “No one will be hanged for the murder of Colonel Protheroe. You can take my word for that.”
But that is just what I could not do. And yet the certainty in his voice was very great.
“No one will be hanged,” he repeated.
“This man, Archer—”
He made an impatient movement.
“Hasn’t got brains enough to wipe his fingerprints off the pistol.”
“Perhaps not,” I said dubiously.
Then I remembered something, and taking the little brownish crystal I had found in the wood from my pocket, I held it out to him and asked him what it was.
“H’m,” he hesitated. “Looks like picric acid. Where did you find it?”
“That,” I replied, “is Sherlock Holmes’s secret.”
He smiled.
“What is picric acid?”
“Well, it’s an explosive.”
“Yes, I know that, but it’s got another use, hasn’t it?”
He nodded.
“It’s used medically—in solution for burns. Wonderful stuff.”
I held out my hand, and rather reluctantly he handed it back to me.
“It’s of no consequence probably,” I said. “But I found it in rather an unusual place.”
“You won’t tell me where?”
Rather childishly, I wouldn’t.
He had his secrets. Well, I would have mine.
I was a little hurt that he had not confided in me more fully.
Twenty-six
I was in a strange mood when I mounted the pulpit that night.
The church was unusually full. I cannot believe that it was the prospect of Hawes preaching which had attracted so many. Hawes’s sermons are dull and dogmatic. And if the news had got round that I was preaching instead, that would not have attracted them either. For my sermons are dull and scholarly. Neither, I am afraid, can I attribute it to devotion.
Everybody had come, I concluded, to see who else was there, and possibly exchange a little gossip in the church porch afterwards.
Haydock was in church, which is unusual, and also Lawrence Redding. And to my surprise, beside Lawrence I saw the white strained face of Hawes. Anne Protheroe was there, but she usually attends Evensong on Sundays, though I had hardly thought she would today. I was far more surprised to see Lettice. Churchgoing was compulsory on Sunday morning—Colonel Protheroe was adamant on that point, but I had never seen Lettice at evening service before.
Gladys Cram was there, looking rather blatantly young and healthy against a background of wizened spinsters, and I fancied that a dim figure at the end of the church who had slipped in late, was Mrs. Lestrange.
I need hardly say that Mrs. Price Ridley, Miss Hartnell, Miss Wetherby, and Miss Marple were there in full force. All the village people were there, with hardly a single exception. I don’t know when we have had such a crowded congregation.
Crowds are queer things. There was a magnetic atmosphere that night, and the first person to feel its influence was myself.
As a rule, I prepare my sermons beforehand. I am careful and conscientious over them, but no one is better aware than myself of their deficiencies.
Tonight I was of necessity preaching extempore, and as I looked down on the sea of upturned faces, a sudden madness entered my brain. I ceased to be in any sense a Minister of God. I became an actor. I had an audience before me and I wanted to move that audience—and more, I felt the power to move it.
I am not proud of what I did that night. I am an utter disbeliever in the emotional Revivalist spirit. Yet that night I acted the part of a raving, ranting evangelist.
I gave out my text slowly.
I came not to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance.
I repeated it twice, and I heard my own voice, a resonant, ringing voice unlike the voice of the everyday Leonard Clement.
I saw Griselda from her front pew look up in surprise and Dennis follow her example.
I held my breath for a moment or two, and then I let myself rip.
The congregation in that church were in a state of pent-up emotion, ripe to be played upon. I played upon them. I exhorted sinners to repentance. I lashed myself into a kind of emotional frenzy. Again and again I threw out a denouncing hand and reiterated the phrase.
“I am speaking to you.…”
And each time, from different parts of the church, a kind of sighing gasp went up.
Mass emotion is a strange and terrible thing.
I finished up with those beautiful and poignant words—perhaps the most poignant words in the whole Bible:
“This night thy soul shall be required of thee….”
It was a strange, brief possession. When I got back to the Vicarage I was my usual faded, indeterminate self. I found Griselda rather pale. She slipped her arm through mine.
“Len,” she said, “you were rather terrible tonight. I—I didn’t like it. I’ve never heard you preach like that before.”
“I don’t suppose you ever will again,” I said, sinking down wearily on the sofa. I was tired.
“What made you do it?”
“A sudden madness came over me.”
“Oh! It—it wasn’t something special?”
“What do you mean—something special?”
“I wondered—that was all. You’re very unexpected, Len. I never feel I really know you.”
We sat down to cold supper, Mary being out.
“There’s a note for you in the hall,” said Griselda. “Get it, will you, Dennis?”
Dennis, who had been very silent, obeyed.
I took it and groaned. Across the top left-hand corner was written: By hand—Urgent.
“This,” I said, “must be from Miss Marple. There’s no one else left.”
I had been perfectly correct in my assumption.
“Dear Mr. Clement,—I should so much like to have a little chat with you about one or two things that have occurred to me. I feel we should all try and help in elucidating this sad mystery. I will come over about half past nine if I may, and tap on your study window. Perhaps dear Griselda would be so very kind as to run over here and cheer up my nephew. And Mr. Dennis too, of course, if he cares to come. If I do not hear, I will expect them and will come over myself at the time I have stated.
Yours very sincerely,
Jane Marple.”
I handed the note to Griselda.
“Oh, we’ll go!” she said cheerfully. “A glass or two of homemade liqueur is just what one needs on Sunday evening. I think it’s Mary’s blancmange that is so frightfully depressing. It’s like something out of a mortuary.”
Dennis seemed less charmed at the prospect.
“It’s all very well for you,” he grumbled. “You can talk all this highbrow stuff about art and books. I always feel a perfect fool sitting and listening to you.”
“That’s good for you,” said Griselda serenely. “It puts you in your place. Anyway, I don’t think Mr. Raymond West is so frightfully clever as he pretends to be.”
“Very few of us are,” I said.
I wondered very much what exactly it was that Miss Marple wished to talk over. Of all the ladies in my congregation, I considered her by far the shrewdest. Not only does she see and hear practically everything that goes on, but she draws amazingly neat and apposite deductions from the facts that come under her notice.
If I were at any time to set out on a career of deceit, it would be of Miss Marple that I should be afraid.
What Griselda called the Nephew Amusing Party started off at a little after nine, and whilst I was waiting for Miss Marple to arrive I amused myself by drawing up a kind of schedule of the facts connected with the crime. I arranged them so far as possible in chronological order. I am not a punctual person, but I am a neat one, and I like things jotted down in a methodical fashion.
At half past nine punctually, there was a little tap on the window, and I rose and admitted Miss Marple.
She had a very fine Shetland shawl thrown over her head and shoulders and was looking rather old and frail. She came in full of little fluttering remarks.
“So good of you to let me come—and so good of dear Griselda—Raymond admires her so much—the perfect Greuze he always calls her … No, I won’t have a footstool.”
I deposited the Shetland shawl on a chair and returned to take a chair facing my guest. We looked at each other, and a little deprecating smile broke out on her face.
“I feel that you must be wondering why—why I am so interested in all this. You may possibly think it’s very unwomanly. No—please—I should like to explain if I may.”
She paused a moment, a pink colour suffusing her cheeks.
“You see,” she began at last, “living alone, as I do, in a rather out-of-the-way part of the world, one has to have a hobby. There is, of course, woolwork, and Guides, and Welfare, and sketching, but my hobby is—and always has been—Human Nature. So varied—and so very fascinating. And, of course, in a small village, with nothing to distract one, one has such ample opportunity for becoming what I might call proficient in one’s study. One begins to class people, quite definitely, just as though they were birds or flowers, group so-and-so, genus this, species that. Sometimes, of course, one makes mistakes, but less and less as time goes on. And then, too, one tests oneself. One takes a little problem—for instance, the gill of picked shrimps that amused dear Griselda so much—a quite unimportant mystery but absolutely incomprehensible unless one solves it right. And then there was that matter of the changed cough drops, and the butcher’s wife’s umbrella—the last absolutely meaningless unless on the assumption that the greengrocer was not behaving at all nicely with the chemist’s wife—which, of course, turned out to be the case. It is so fascinating, you know, to apply one’s judgment and find that one is right.”
The Complete Miss Marple Collection Page 20