“This morning. All of a sudden like. Said she’d got the chance of a free trip.”
“Perhaps you wouldn’t mind giving me her address.”
The fair-haired girl shook her head. “Haven’t got an address,” she said. “Gladys said she’d send us her address as soon as she knew where she was going to stay. As like as not she won’t though,” she added. “Last summer she went to Newquay and never sent us as much as a postcard. She’s slack that way and besides, she says, why do mothers have to bother all the time?”
“Did somebody stand her this holiday?”
“Must have,” said the girl. “She’s pretty hard up at the moment. Went to the sales last week.”
“And you’ve no idea at all who gave her this trip or—er—paid for her going there?”
The fair girl bristled suddenly.
“Now don’t get any wrong ideas. Our Gladys isn’t that sort. She and her boyfriend may like to go to the same place for holidays in August, but there’s nothing wrong about it. She pays for herself. So don’t you get ideas, mister.”
Tiddler said meekly that he wouldn’t get ideas but he would like the address if Gladys Dixon should send a postcard.
He returned to the station with the result of his various inquiries. From the studios, he had learnt that Gladys Dixon had rung up that day and said she wouldn’t be able to come to work for about a week. He had also learned some other things.
“No end of a shemozzle there’s been there lately,” he said. “Marina Gregg’s been having hysterics most days. Said some coffee she was given was poisoned. Said it tasted bitter. Awful state of nerves she was in. Her husband took it and threw it down the sink and told her not to make so much fuss.”
“Yes?” said Craddock. It seemed plain there was more to come.
“But word went round as Mr. Rudd didn’t throw it all away. He kept some and had it analysed and it was poison.”
“It sounds to me,” said Craddock, “very unlikely. I’ll have to ask him about that.”
II
Jason Rudd was nervous, irritable.
“Surely, Inspector Craddock,” he said, “I was only doing what I had a perfect right to do.”
“If you suspected anything was wrong with that coffee, Mr. Rudd, it would have been much better if you’d turned it over to us.”
“The truth of it is that I didn’t suspect for a moment that anything was wrong with it.”
“In spite of your wife saying that it tasted odd?”
“Oh, that!” A faintly rueful smile came to Rudd’s face. “Ever since the date of the fête everything that my wife has eaten or drunk has tasted odd. What with that and the threatening notes that have been coming—”
“There have been more of them?”
“Two more. One through the window down there. The other one was slipped in the letter box. Here they are if you would like to see them.”
Craddock looked. They were printed, as the first one had been. One ran:
It won’t be long now. Prepare yourself.
The other had a rough drawing of a skull and crossbones and below it was written: This means you, Marina.
Craddock’s eyebrows rose.
“Very childish,” he said.
“Meaning you discount them as dangerous?”
“Not at all,” said Craddock. “A murderer’s mind usually is childish. You’ve really no idea at all, Mr. Rudd, who sent these?”
“Not the least,” said Jason. “I can’t help feeling it’s more like a macabre joke than anything else. It seemed to me perhaps—” he hesitated.
“Yes, Mr. Rudd?”
“It could be somebody local, perhaps, who—who had been excited by the poisoning on the day of the fête. Someone perhaps, who has a grudge against the acting profession. There are rural pockets where acting is considered to be one of the devil’s weapons.”
“Meaning that you think Miss Gregg is not actually threatened? But what about this business of the coffee?”
“I don’t even know how you got to hear about that,” said Rudd with some annoyance.
Craddock shook his head.
“Everyone’s talked about that. It always comes to one’s ears sooner or later. But you should have come to us. Even when you got the result of the analysis you didn’t let us know, did you?”
“No,” said Jason. “No, I didn’t. But I had other things to think about. Poor Ella’s death for one thing. And now this business of Giuseppe. Inspector Craddock, when can I get my wife away from here? She’s half frantic.”
“I can understand that. But there will be the inquests to attend.”
“You do realize that her life is still in danger?”
“I hope not. Every precaution will be taken—”
“Every precaution! I’ve heard that before, I think… I must get her away from here, Craddock. I must.”
III
Marina was lying on the chaise longue in her bedroom, her eyes closed. She looked grey with strain and fatigue.
Her husband stood there for a moment looking at her. Her eyes opened.
“Was that that Craddock man?”
“Yes.”
“What did he come about? Ella?”
“Ella—and Giuseppe.”
Marina frowned.
“Giuseppe? Have they found out who shot him?”
“Not yet.”
“It’s all a nightmare… Did he say we could go away?”
“He said—not yet.”
“Why not? We must. Didn’t you make him see that I can’t go on waiting day after day for someone to kill me. It’s fantastic.”
“Every precaution will be taken.”
“They said that before. Did it stop Ella being killed? Or Giuseppe? Don’t you see, they’ll get me in the end… There was something in my coffee that day at the studio. I’m sure there was…if only you hadn’t poured it away! If we’d kept it, we could have had it analysed or whatever you call it. We’d have known for sure….”
“Would it have made you happier to know for sure?”
She stared at him, the pupils of her eyes widely dilated.
“I don’t see what you mean. If they’d known for sure that someone was trying to poison me, they’d have let us leave here, they’d have let us get away.”
“Not necessarily.”
“But I can’t go on like this! I can’t… I can’t… You must help me, Jason. You must do something. I’m frightened. I’m so terribly frightened… There’s an enemy here. And I don’t know who it is… It might be anyone—anyone. At the studios—or here in the house. Someone who hates me—but why?… Why?… Someone who wants me dead… But who is it? Who is it? I thought—I was almost sure—it was Ella. But now—”
“You thought it was Ella?” Jason sounded astonished. “But why?”
“Because she hated me—oh yes she did. Don’t men ever see these things? She was madly in love with you. I don’t believe you had the least idea of it. But it can’t be Ella, because Ella’s dead. Oh, Jinks, Jinks—do help me—get me away from here—let me go somewhere safe…safe….”
She sprang up and walked rapidly up and down, turning and twisting her hands.
The director in Jason was full of admiration for those passionate, tortured movements. I must remember them, he thought. For Hedda Gabler, perhaps? Then, with a shock, he remembered that it was his wife he was watching.
“It’s all right, Marina—all right. I’ll look after you.”
“We must go away from this hateful house—at once. I hate this house—hate it.”
“Listen, we can’t go away immediately.”
“Why not? Why not?”
“Because,” said Rudd, “deaths cause complications…and there’s something else to consider. Will running away do any good?”
“Of course it will. We’ll get away from this person who hates me.”
“If there’s anyone who hates you that much, they could follow you easily enough.”
“You mean—y
ou mean—I shall never get away? I shall never be safe again?”
“Darling—it will be all right. I’ll look after you. I’ll keep you safe.”
She clung to him.
“Will you, Jinks? Will you see that nothing happens to me?”
She sagged against him, and he laid her down gently on the chaise longue.
“Oh, I’m a coward,” she murmured, “a coward…if I knew who it was—and why?… Get me my pills—the yellow ones—not the brown. I must have something to calm me.”
“Don’t take too many, for God’s sake, Marina.”
“All right—all right… Sometimes they don’t have any effect anymore…” She looked up in his face.
She smiled, a tender exquisite smile.
“You’ll take care of me, Jinks? Swear you’ll take care of me….”
“Always,” said Jason Rudd. “To the bitter end.”
Her eyes opened wide.
“You looked so—so odd when you said that.”
“Did I? How did I look?”
“I can’t explain. Like—like a clown laughing at something terribly sad, that no one else has seen….”
Twenty-one
I
It was a tired and depressed Inspector Craddock who came to see Miss Marple the following day.
“Sit down and be comfortable,” she said. “I can see you’ve had a very hard time.”
“I don’t like to be defeated,” said Inspector Craddock. “Two murders within twenty-four hours. Ah well, I’m poorer at my job than I thought I was. Give me a nice cup of tea, Aunt Jane, with some thin bread and butter and soothe me with your earliest remembrances of St. Mary Mead.”
Miss Marple clicked with her tongue in a sympathetic manner.
“Now it’s no good talking like that, my dear boy, and I don’t think bread and butter is at all what you want. Gentlemen, when they’ve had a disappointment, want something stronger than tea.”
As usual, Miss Marple said the word “gentlemen” in the way of someone describing a foreign species.
“I should advise a good stiff whisky and soda,” she said.
“Would you really, Aunt Jane? Well, I won’t say no.”
“And I shall get it for you myself,” said Miss Marple, rising to her feet.
“Oh, no, don’t do that. Let me. Or what about Miss What’s-her-name?”
“We don’t want Miss Knight fussing about in here,” said Miss Marple. “She won’t be bringing my tea for another twenty minutes so that gives us a little peace and quiet. Clever of you to come to the window and not through the front door. Now we can have a nice quiet little time by ourselves.”
She went to a corner cupboard, opened it and produced a bottle, a syphon of soda and a glass.
“You are full of surprises,” said Dermot Craddock. “I’d no idea that’s what you kept in your corner cupboard. Are you quite sure you’re not a secret drinker, Aunt Jane?”
“Now, now,” Miss Marple admonished him. “I have never been an advocate of teetotalism. A little strong drink is always advisable on the premises in case there is a shock or an accident. Invaluable at such times. Or, of course, if a gentleman should arrive suddenly. There!” said Miss Marple, handing him her remedy with an air of quiet triumph. “And you don’t need to joke anymore. Just sit quietly there and relax.”
“Wonderful wives there must have been in your young days,” said Dermot Craddock.
“I’m sure, my dear boy, you would find the young lady of the type you refer to as a very inadequate helpmeet nowadays. Young ladies were not encouraged to be intellectual and very few of them had university degrees or any kind of academic distinction.”
“There are things that are preferable to academic distinctions,” said Dermot. “One of them is knowing when a man wants whisky and soda and giving it to him.”
Miss Marple smiled at him affectionately.
“Come,” she said, “tell me all about it. Or as much as you are allowed to tell me.”
“I think you probably know as much as I do. And very likely you have something up your sleeve. How about your dogsbody, your dear Miss Knight? What about her having committed the crime?”
“Now why should Miss Knight have done such a thing?” demanded Miss Marple, surprised.
“Because she’s the most unlikely person,” said Dermot. “It so often seems to hold good when you produce your answer.”
“Not at all,” said Miss Marple with spirit. “I have said over and over again, not only to you, my dear Dermot—if I may call you so—that it is always the obvious person who has done the crime. One thinks so often of the wife or the husband and so very often it is the wife or the husband.”
“Meaning Jason Rudd?” He shook his head. “That man adores Marina Gregg.”
“I was speaking generally,” said Miss Marple, with dignity. “First we had Mrs. Badcock apparently murdered. One asked oneself who could have done such a thing and the first answer would naturally be the husband. So one had to examine that possibility. Then we decided that the real object of the crime was Marina Gregg and there again we have to look for the person most intimately connected with Marina Gregg, starting as I say with the husband. Because there is no doubt about it that husbands do, very frequently, want to make away with their wives, though sometimes, of course, they only wish to make away with their wives and do not actually do so. But I agree with you, my dear boy, that Jason Rudd really cares with all his heart for Marina Gregg. It might be very clever acting, though I can hardly believe that. And one certainly cannot see a motive of any kind for his doing away with her. If he wanted to marry somebody else there could, I should say, be nothing more simple. Divorce, if I may say so, seems second nature to film stars. A practical advantage does not seem to arise either. He is not a poor man by any means. He has his own career, and is, I understand, most successful in it. So we must go farther afield. But it certainly is difficult. Yes, very difficult.”
“Yes,” said Craddock, “it must hold particular difficulties for you because of course this film world is entirely new to you. You don’t know the local scandals and all the rest of it.”
“I know a little more than you may think,” said Miss Marple. “I have studied very closely various numbers of Confidential, Film Life, Film Talk and Film Topics.”
Dermot Craddock laughed. He couldn’t help it.
“I must say,” he said, “it tickles me to see you sitting there and telling me what your course of literature has been.”
“I found it very interesting,” said Miss Marple. “They’re not particularly well written, if I may say so. But it really is disappointing in a way that it is all so much the same as it used to be in my young days. Modern Society and Tit Bits and all the rest of them. A lot of gossip. A lot of scandal. A great preoccupation with who is in love with whom, and all the rest of it. Really, you know, practically exactly the same sort of thing goes on in St. Mary Mead. And in the Development too. Human nature, I mean, is just the same everywhere. One comes back, I think, to the question of who could have been likely to want to kill Marina Gregg, to want to so much that having failed once they sent threatening letters and made repeated attempts to do so. Someone perhaps a little—” very gently she tapped her forehead.
“Yes,” said Craddock, “that certainly seems indicated. And of course it doesn’t always show.”
“Oh, I know,” agreed Miss Marple, fervently. “Old Mrs. Pike’s second boy, Alfred, seemed perfectly rational and normal. Almost painfully prosaic, if you know what I mean, but actually, it seems, he had the most abnormal psychology, or so I understand. Really positively dangerous. He seems quite happy and contented, so Mrs. Pike told me, now that he is in Fairways Mental Home. They understand him there, and the doctors think him a most interesting case. That of course pleases him very much. Yes, it all ended quite happily, but she had one or two very near escapes.”
Craddock revolved in his mind the possibility of a parallel between someone in Marina Gregg’s entourage
and Mrs. Pike’s second son.
“The Italian butler,” continued Miss Marple, “the one who was killed. He went to London, I understand, on the day of his death. Does anyone know what he did there—if you are allowed to tell me, that is,” she added conscientiously.
“He arrived in London at eleven-thirty in the morning,” said Craddock, “and what he did in London nobody knows until a quarter to two he visited his bank and made a deposit of five hundred pounds in cash. I may say that there was no confirmation of his story that he went to London to visit an ill relative or a relative who had got into trouble. None of his relatives there had seen him.”
Miss Marple nodded her head appreciatively.
“Five hundred pounds,” she said. “Yes, that’s quite an interesting sum, isn’t it? I should imagine it would be the first instalment of a good many other sums, wouldn’t you?”
“It looks that way,” said Craddock.
“It was probably all the ready money the person he was threatening could raise. He may even have pretended to be satisfied with that or he may have accepted it as a down payment and the victim may have promised to raise further sums in the immediate future. It seems to knock out the idea that Marina Gregg’s killer could have been someone in humble circumstances who had a private vendetta against her. It would also knock out, I should say, the idea of someone who’d obtained work as a studio helper or attendant or a servant or a gardener. Unless”—Miss Marple pointed out—“such a person may have been the active agent whereas the employing agent may not have been in the neighbourhood. Hence the visit to London.”
“Exactly. We have in London Ardwyck Fenn, Lola Brewster and Margot Bence. All three were present at the party. All three of them could have met Giuseppe at an arranged meeting place somewhere in London between the hours of eleven and a quarter to two. Ardwyck Fenn was out of his office during those hours. Lola Brewster had left her suite to go shopping. Margot Bence was not in her studio. By the way—”
“Yes?” said Miss Marple. “Have you something to tell me?”
“You asked me,” said Dermot, “about the children. The children that Marina Gregg adopted before she knew she could have a child of her own.”
The Complete Miss Marple Collection Page 159