“You’re a beauty, too,” said Chief-Inspector Davy. “Your number plate’s the same as the last time I saw you. I rather fancy your number plate always is the same. And that should mean—” he broke off—“or should it?” he muttered. He looked up towards what could have been the sky. “Fog’s getting thicker,” he said to himself.
Outside the door to Bertram’s, the Irish commissionaire was standing swinging his arms backwards and forwards with some violence to keep himself warm. Chief-Inspector Davy said good evening to him.
“Good evening, sir. Nasty night.”
“Yes. I shouldn’t think anyone would want to go out tonight who hadn’t got to.”
The swing doors were pushed open and a middle-aged lady came out and paused uncertainly on the step.
“Want a taxi, ma’am?”
“Oh dear. I meant to walk.”
“I wouldn’t if I were you, ma’am. It’s very nasty, this fog. Even in a taxi it won’t be too easy.”
“Do you think you could find me a taxi?” asked the lady doubtfully.
“I’ll do my best. You go inside now and keep warm, and I’ll come in and tell you if I’ve got one.” His voice changed, modulated to a persuasive tone. “Unless you have to, ma’am, I wouldn’t go out tonight at all.”
“Oh dear. Perhaps you’re right. But I’m expected at some friends in Chelsea. I don’t know. It might be very difficult getting back here. What do you think?”
Michael Gorman took charge.
“If I were you, ma’am,” he said firmly, “I’d go in and telephone to your friends. It’s not nice for a lady like you to be out on a foggy night like this.”
“Well—really—yes, well, perhaps you’re right.”
She went back in again.
“I have to look after them,” said Micky Gorman, turning in an explanatory manner to Father. “That kind would get her bag snatched, she would. Going out this time of night in a fog and wandering about Chelsea or West Kensington or wherever she’s trying to go.”
“I suppose you’ve had a good deal of experience of dealing with elderly ladies?” said Davy.
“Ah yes, indeed. This place is a home from home to them, bless their ageing hearts. How about you, sir? Were you wanting a taxi?”
“Don’t suppose you could get me one if I did,” said Father. “There don’t seem to be many about in this. And I don’t blame them.”
“Ah, no, I might lay my hand on one for you. There’s a place round the corner where there’s usually a taxi driver got his cab parked, having a warm up and a drop of something to keep the cold out.”
“A taxi’s no good to me,” said Father with a sigh.
He jerked his thumb towards Bertram’s Hotel.
“I’ve got to go inside. I’ve got a job to do.”
“Indeed now? Would it be still the missing Canon?”
“Not exactly. He’s been found.”
“Found?” The man stared at him. “Found where?”
“Wandering about with concussion after an accident.”
“Ah, that’s just what one might expect of him. Crossed the road without looking, I expect.”
“That seems to be the idea,” said Father.
He nodded, and pushed through the doors into the hotel. There were not very many people in the lounge this evening. He saw Miss Marple sitting in a chair near the fire and Miss Marple saw him. She made, however, no sign of recognition. He went towards the desk. Miss Gorringe, as usual, was behind her books. She was, he thought, faintly discomposed to see him. It was a very slight reaction, but he noted the fact.
“You remember me, Miss Gorringe,” he said. “I came here the other day.”
“Yes, of course I remember you, Chief-Inspector. Is there anything more you want to know? Do you want to see Mr. Humfries?”
“No thank you. I don’t think that’ll be necessary. I’d just like one more look at your register if I may.”
“Of course.” She pushed it along to him.
He opened it and looked slowly down the pages. To Miss Gorringe he gave the appearance of a man looking for one particular entry. In actuality this was not the case. Father had an accomplishment which he had learnt early in life and had developed into a highly skilled art. He could remember names and addresses with a perfect and photographic memory. That memory would remain with him for twenty-four or even forty-eight hours. He shook his head as he shut the book and returned it to her.
“Canon Pennyfather hasn’t been in, I suppose?” he said in a light voice.
“Canon Pennyfather?”
“You know he’s turned up again?”
“No indeed. Nobody has told me. Where?”
“Some place in the country. Car accident it seems. Wasn’t reported to us. Some good Samaritan just picked him up and looked after him.”
“Oh! I am pleased. Yes, I really am very pleased. I was worried about him.”
“So were his friends,” said Father. “Actually I was looking to see if one of them might be staying here now. Archdeacon—Archdeacon—I can’t remember his name now, but I’d know it if I saw it.”
“Tomlinson?” said Miss Gorringe helpfully. “He is due next week. From Salisbury.”
“No, not Tomlinson. Well, it doesn’t matter.” He turned away.
It was quiet in the lounge tonight.
An ascetic-looking middle-aged man was reading through a badly typed thesis, occasionally writing a comment in the margin in such small crabbed handwriting as to be almost illegible. Every time he did this, he smiled in vinegary satisfaction.
There were one or two married couples of long-standing who had little need to talk to each other. Occasionally two or three people were gathered together in the name of the weather conditions, discussing anxiously how they or their families were going to get where they wanted to be.
“—I rang up and begged Susan not to come by car…it means the M1 and always so dangerous in fog—”
“They say it’s clearer in the Midlands….”
Chief-Inspector Davy noted them as he passed. Without haste, and with no seeming purpose, he arrived at his objective.
Miss Marple was sitting near the fire and observing his approach.
“So you’re still here, Miss Marple. I’m glad.”
“I go tomorrow,” said Miss Marple.
That fact had, somehow, been implicit in her attitude. She had sat, not relaxed, but upright, as one sits in an airport lounge, or a railway waiting room. Her luggage, he was sure, would be packed, only toilet things and night wear to be added.
“It is the end of my fortnight’s holiday,” she explained.
“You’ve enjoyed it, I hope?”
Miss Marple did not answer at once.
“In a way—yes….” She stopped.
“And in another way, no?”
“It’s difficult to explain what I mean—”
“Aren’t you, perhaps, a little too near the fire? Rather hot, here. Wouldn’t you like to move—into that corner perhaps?”
Miss Marple looked at the corner indicated, then she looked at Chief-Inspector Davy.
“I think you are quite right,” she said.
He gave her a hand up, carried her handbag and her book for her and established her in the quiet corner he had indicated.
“All right?”
“Quite all right.”
“You know why I suggested it?”
“You thought—very kindly—that it was too hot for me by the fire. Besides,” she added, “our conversation cannot be overheard here.”
“Have you got something you want to tell me, Miss Marple?”
“Now why should you think that?”
“You looked as though you had,” said Davy.
“I’m sorry I showed it so plainly,” said Miss Marple. “I didn’t mean to.”
“Well, what about it?”
“I don’t know if I ought to do so. I would like you to believe, Inspector, that I am not really fond of interfering. I am agai
nst interference. Though often well-meant, it can cause a great deal of harm.”
“It’s like that, is it? I see. Yes, it’s quite a problem for you.”
“Sometimes one sees people doing things that seem to one unwise—even dangerous. But has one any right to interfere? Usually not, I think.”
“Is this Canon Pennyfather you’re talking about?”
“Canon Pennyfather?” Miss Marple sounded very surprised. “Oh no. Oh dear me no, nothing whatever to do with him. It concerns—a girl.”
“A girl, indeed? And you thought I could help?”
“I don’t know,” said Miss Marple. “I simply don’t know. But I’m worried, very worried.”
Father did not press her. He sat there looking large and comfortable and rather stupid. He let her take her time. She had been willing to do her best to help him, and he was quite prepared to do anything he could to help her. He was not, perhaps, particularly interested. On the other hand, one never knew.
“One reads in the papers,” said Miss Marple in a low clear voice, “accounts of proceedings in court; of young people, children or girls ‘in need of care and protection.’ It’s just a sort of legal phrase, I suppose, but it could mean something real.”
“This girl you mentioned, you feel she is in need of care and protection?”
“Yes. Yes I do.”
“Alone in the world?”
“Oh no,” said Miss Marple. “Very much not so, if I may put it that way. She is to all outward appearances very heavily protected and very well cared for.”
“Sounds interesting,” said Father.
“She was staying in this hotel,” said Miss Marple, “with a Mrs. Carpenter, I think. I looked in the register to see the name. The girl’s name is Elvira Blake.”
Father looked up with a quick air of interest.
“She was a lovely girl. Very young, very much, as I say, sheltered and protected. Her guardian was a Colonel Luscombe, a very nice man. Quite charming. Elderly of course, and I am afraid terribly innocent.”
“The guardian or the girl?”
“I meant the guardian,” said Miss Marple. “I don’t know about the girl. But I do think she is in danger. I came across her quite by chance in Battersea Park. She was sitting at a refreshment place there with a young man.”
“Oh, that’s it, is it?” said Father. “Undesirable, I suppose. Beatnik—spiv—thug—”
“A very handsome man,” said Miss Marple. “Not so very young. Thirty-odd, the kind of man that I should say is very attractive to women, but his face is a bad face. Cruel, hawklike, predatory.”
“He mayn’t be as bad as he looks,” said Father soothingly.
“If anything he is worse than he looks,” said Miss Marple. “I am convinced of it. He drives a large racing car.”
Father looked up quickly.
“Racing car?”
“Yes. Once or twice I’ve seen it standing near this hotel.”
“You don’t remember the number, do you?”
“Yes, indeed I do. FAN 2266. I had a cousin who stuttered,” Miss Marple explained. “That’s how I remember it.”
Father looked puzzled.
“Do you know who he is?” demanded Miss Marple.
“As a matter of fact I do,” said Father slowly. “Half French, half Polish. Very well-known racing driver, he was world champion three years ago. His name is Ladislaus Malinowski. You’re quite right in some of your views about him. He has a bad reputation where women are concerned. That is to say, he is not a suitable friend for a young girl. But it’s not easy to do anything about that sort of thing. I suppose she is meeting him on the sly, is that it?”
“Almost certainly,” said Miss Marple.
“Did you approach her guardian?”
“I don’t know him,” said Miss Marple. “I’ve only just been introduced to him once by a mutual friend. I don’t like the idea of going to him in a tale-bearing way. I wondered if perhaps in some way you could do something about it.”
“I can try,” said Father. “By the way, I thought you might like to know that your friend, Canon Pennyfather, has turned up all right.”
“Indeed!” Miss Marple looked animated. “Where?”
“A place called Milton St. John.”
“How very odd. What was he doing there? Did he know?”
“Apparently—” Chief-Inspector Davy stressed the word—“he had had an accident.”
“What kind of an accident?”
“Knocked down by a car—concussed—or else, of course, he might have been conked on the head.”
“Oh! I see.” Miss Marple considered the point. “Doesn’t he know himself?”
“He says—” again the Chief-Inspector stressed the word—“that he does not know anything.”
“Very remarkable.”
“Isn’t it? The last thing he remembers is driving in a taxi to Kensington Air Station.”
Miss Marple shook her head perplexedly.
“I know it does happen that way in concussion,” she murmured. “Didn’t he say anything—useful?”
“He murmured something about the Walls of Jericho.”
“Joshua?” hazarded Miss Marple, “or Archaeology—excavations?—or I remember, long ago, a play—by Mr. Sutro, I think.”
“And all this week north of the Thames, Gaumont Cinemas—The Walls of Jericho, featuring Olga Radbourne and Bart Levinne,” said Father.
Miss Marple looked at him suspiciously.
“He could have gone to that film in the Cromwell Road. He could have come out about eleven and come back here—though if so, someone ought to have seen him—it would be well before midnight—”
“Took the wrong bus,” Miss Marple suggested. “Something like that—”
“Say he got back here after midnight,” Father said—“he could have walked up to his room without anyone seeing him—But if so, what happened then—and why did he go out again three hours later?”
Miss Marple groped for a word.
“The only idea that occurs to me is—oh!”
She jumped as a report sounded from the street outside.
“Car backfiring,” said Father soothingly.
“I’m sorry to be so jumpy—I am nervous tonight—that feeling one has—”
“That something’s going to happen? I don’t think you need worry.”
“I have never liked fog.”
“I wanted to tell you,” said Chief-Inspector Davy, “that you’ve given me a lot of help. The things you’ve noticed here—just little things—they’ve added up.”
“So there was something wrong with this place?”
“There was and is everything wrong with it.”
Miss Marple sighed.
“It seemed wonderful at first—unchanged you know—like stepping back into the past—to the part of the past that one had loved and enjoyed.”
She paused.
“But of course, it wasn’t really like that. I learned (what I suppose I really knew already) that one can never go back, that one should not ever try to go back—that the essence of life is going forward. Life is really a One Way Street, isn’t it?”
“Something of the sort,” agreed Father.
“I remember,” said Miss Marple, diverging from her main topic in a characteristic way, “I remember being in Paris with my mother and my grandmother, and we went to have tea at the Elysée Hotel. And my grandmother looked round, and she said suddenly, ‘Clara, I do believe I am the only woman here in a bonnet!’ And she was, too! When she got home she packed up all her bonnets, and her headed mantles too—and sent them off—”
“To the Jumble Sale?” inquired Father, sympathetically.
“Oh no. Nobody would have wanted them at a jumble sale. She sent them to a theatrical Repertory Company. They appreciated them very much. But let me see—” Miss Marple recovered her direction. “—Where was I?”
“Summing up this place.”
“Yes. It seemed all right—but it wasn�
��t. It was mixed-up—real people and people who weren’t real. One couldn’t always tell them apart.”
“What do you mean by not real?”
“There were retired military men, but there were also what seemed to be military men but who had never been in the Army. And clergymen who weren’t clergymen. And admirals and sea captains who’ve never been in the Navy. My friend, Selina Hazy—it amused me at first how she was always so anxious to recognize people she knew (quite natural, of course) and how often she was mistaken and they weren’t the people she thought they were. But it happened too often. And so—I began to wonder. Even Rose, the chambermaid—so nice—but I began to think that perhaps she wasn’t real, either.”
“If it interests you to know, she’s an ex-actress. A good one. Gets a better salary here than she ever drew on the stage.”
“But—why?”
“Mainly, as part of the décor. Perhaps there’s more than that to it.”
“I’m glad to be leaving here,” said Miss Marple. She gave a little shiver. “Before anything happens.”
Chief-Inspector Davy looked at her curiously.
“What do you expect to happen?” he asked.
“Evil of some kind,” said Miss Marple.
“Evil is rather a big word—”
“You think it is too melodramatic? But I have some experience—seem to have been—so often—in contact with murder.”
“Murder?” Chief-Inspector Davy shook his head. “I’m not suspecting murder. Just a nice cosy round-up of some remarkably clever criminals—”
“That’s not the same thing. Murder—the wish to do murder—is something quite different. It—how shall I say?—it defies God.”
He looked at her and shook his head gently and reassuringly.
“There won’t be any murders,” he said.
A sharp report, louder than the former one, came from outside. It was followed by a scream and another report.
Chief-Inspector Davy was on his feet, moving with a speed surprising in such a bulky man. In a few seconds he was through the swing doors and out in the street.
II
The screaming—a woman’s—was piercing the mist with a note of terror. Chief-Inspector Davy raced down Pond Street in the direction of the screams. He could dimly visualize a woman’s figure backed against a railing. In a dozen strides he had reached her. She wore a long pale fur coat, and her shining blonde hair hung down each side of her face. He thought for a moment that he knew who she was, then he realized that this only a slip of a girl. Sprawled on the pavement at her feet was the body of a man in uniform. Chief-Inspector Davy recognized him. It was Michael Gorman.
The Complete Miss Marple Collection Page 194