“Don’t get mixed up in any more murders, Aunt Jane. It isn’t good for you.”
Well, she hadn’t wished to get mixed up in any murders, but it just happened. That was all. Simply because of an elderly Major with a glass eye who had insisted on telling her some very long and boring stories. Poor Major—now what was his name? She’d forgotten that now. Mr. Rafiel and his secretary, Mrs.—Mrs. Walters, yes, Esther Walters, and his masseur-attendant, Jackson. It all came back. Well, well. Poor Mr. Rafiel. So Mr. Rafiel was dead. He had known he was going to die before very long. He had practically told her so. It seemed as though he had lasted longer than the doctors had thought. He was a strong man, an obstinate man—a very rich man.
Miss Marple remained in thought, her knitting needles working regularly, but her mind not really on her knitting. Her mind was on the late Mr. Rafiel, and remembering what she could remember about him. Not an easy man to forget, really. She could conjure his appearance up mentally quite well. Yes, a very definite personality, a difficult man, an irritable man, shockingly rude sometimes. Nobody ever resented his being rude, though. She remembered that also. They didn’t resent his being rude because he was so rich. Yes, he had been very rich. He had had his secretary with him and a valet attendant, a qualified masseur. He had not been able to get about very well without help.
Rather a doubtful character that nurse-attendant had been, Miss Marple thought. Mr. Rafiel had been very rude to him sometimes. He had never seemed to mind. And that, again, of course was because Mr. Rafiel was so rich.
“Nobody else would pay him half what I do,” Mr. Rafiel had said, “and he knows it. He’s good at his job, though.”
Miss Marple wondered whether Jackson?—Johnson? had stayed on with Mr. Rafiel. Stayed on for what must have been—another year? A year and three or four months. She thought probably not. Mr. Rafiel was one who liked a change. He got tired of people, tired of their ways, tired of their faces, tired of their voices.
Miss Marple understood that. She had felt the same sometimes. That companion of hers, that nice, attentive, maddening woman with her cooing voice.
“Ah,” said Miss Marple, “what a change for the better since—” oh dear, she’d forgotten her name now—Miss—Miss Bishop?—no, not Miss Bishop. Oh dear, how difficult it was.
Her mind went back to Mr. Rafiel and to—no, it wasn’t Johnson, it had been Jackson, Arthur Jackson.
“Oh, dear,” said Miss Marple again, “I always get all the names wrong. And of course, it was Miss Knight I was thinking of. Not Miss Bishop. Why do I think of her as Miss Bishop?” The answer came to her. Chess, of course. A chess piece. A knight. A bishop.
“I shall be calling her Miss Castle next time I think of her, I suppose, or Miss Rook. Though, really, she’s not the sort of person who would ever rook anybody. No, indeed. And now what was the name of that nice secretary that Mr. Rafiel had. Oh yes, Esther Walters. That was right. I wonder what has happened to Esther Walters? She’d inherited money? She would probably inherit money now.”
Mr. Rafiel, she remembered, had told her something about that, or she had—oh, dear, what a muddle things were when you tried to remember with any kind of exactitude. Esther Walters. It had hit her badly, that business in the Caribbean, but she would have got over it. She’d been a widow, hadn’t she? Miss Marple hoped that Esther Walters had married again, some nice, kindly, reliable man. It seemed faintly unlikely. Esther Walters, she thought, had had rather a genius for liking the wrong kind of men to marry.
Miss Marple went back to thinking about Mr. Rafiel. No flowers, it had said. Not that she herself would have dreamed of sending flowers to Mr. Rafiel. He could buy up all the nurseries in England if he’d wanted to. And anyway, they hadn’t been on those terms. They hadn’t been—friends, or on terms of affection. They had been—what was the word she wanted?—allies. Yes, they had been allies for a very short time. A very exciting time. And he had been an ally worth having. She had known so. She’d known it as she had gone running through a dark, tropical night in the Caribbean and had come to him. Yes, she remembered, she’d been wearing that pink wool—what used they to call them when she was young?—a fascinator. That nice pink wool kind of shawl-scarf that she’d put round her head, and he had looked at her and laughed, and later when she had said—she smiled at the remembrance—one word she had used and he had laughed, but he hadn’t laughed in the end. No, he’d done what she asked him and therefore—“Ah!” Miss Marple sighed, it had been, she had to admit it, all very exciting. And she’d never told her nephew or dear Joan about it because, after all, it was what they’d told her not to do, wasn’t it? Miss Marple nodded her head. Then she murmured softly,
“Poor Mr. Rafiel, I hope he didn’t—suffer.”
Probably not. Probably he’d been kept by expensive doctors under sedatives, easing the end. He had suffered a great deal in those weeks in the Caribbean. He’d nearly always been in pain. A brave man.
A brave man. She was sorry he was dead because she thought that though he’d been elderly and an invalid and ill, the world had lost something through his going. She had no idea what he could have been like in business. Ruthless, she thought, and rude and overmastering and aggressive. A great attacker. But—but a good friend, she thought. And somewhere in him a deep kind of kindness that he was very careful never to show on the surface. A man she admired and respected. Well, she was sorry he was gone and she hoped he hadn’t minded too much and that his passing had been easy. And now he would be cremated no doubt and put in some large, handsome marble vault. She didn’t even know if he’d been married. He had never mentioned a wife, never mentioned children. A lonely man? Or had his life been so full that he hadn’t needed to feel lonely? She wondered.
She sat there quite a long time that afternoon, wondering about Mr. Rafiel. She had never expected to see him again after she had returned to England and she never had seen him again. Yet in some queer way she could at any moment have felt she was in touch with him. If he had approached her or had suggested that they meet again, feeling perhaps a bond because of a life that had been saved between them, or of some other bond. A bond—
“Surely,” said Miss Marple, aghast at an idea that had come into her mind, “there can’t be a bond of ruthlessness between us?” Was she, Jane Marple—could she ever be—ruthless? “D’you know,” said Miss Marple to herself, “it’s extraordinary, I never thought about it before. I believe, you know, I could be ruthless….”
The door opened and a dark, curly head was popped in. It was Cherry, the welcome successor to Miss Bishop—Miss Knight.
“Did you say something?” said Cherry.
“I was speaking to myself,” said Miss Marple, “I just wondered if I could ever be ruthless.”
“What, you?” said Cherry. “Never! You’re kindness itself.”
“All the same,” said Miss Marple, “I believe I could be ruthless if there was due cause.”
“What would you call due cause?”
“In the cause of justice,” said Miss Marple.
“You did have it in for little Gary Hopkins I must say,” said Cherry. “When you caught him torturing his cat that day. Never knew you had it in you to go for anyone like that! Scared him stiff, you did. He’s never forgotten it.”
“I hope he hasn’t tortured anymore cats.”
“Well, he’s made sure you weren’t about if he did,” said Cherry. “In fact I’m not at all sure as there isn’t other boys as got scared. Seeing you with your wool and the pretty things you knits and all that—anyone would think you were gentle as a lamb. But there’s times I could say you’d behave like a lion if you was goaded into it.”
Miss Marple looked a little doubtful. She could not quite see herself in the rôle in which Cherry was now casting her. Had she ever—she paused on the reflection, recalling various moments—there had been intense irritation with Miss Bishop—Knight. (Really, she must not forget names in this way.) But her irritation had shown itself in more or
less ironical remarks. Lions, presumably, did not use irony. There was nothing ironical about a lion. It sprang. It roared. It used its claws, presumably it took large bites at its prey.
“Really,” said Miss Marple, “I don’t think I have ever behaved quite like that.”
Walking slowly along her garden that evening with the usual feelings of vexation rising in her, Miss Marple considered the point again. Possibly the sight of a plant of snapdragons recalled it to her mind. Really, she had told old George again and again that she only wanted sulphur-coloured antirrhinums, not that rather ugly purple shade that gardeners always seemed so fond of. “Sulphur yellow,” said Miss Marple aloud.
Someone the other side of the railing that abutted on the lane past her house turned her head and spoke.
“I beg your pardon? You said something?”
“I was talking to myself, I’m afraid,” said Miss Marple, turning to look over the railing.
This was someone she did not know, and she knew most people in St. Mary Mead. Knew them by sight even if not personally. It was a thickset woman in a shabby but tough tweed skirt, and wearing good country shoes. She wore an emerald pullover and a knitted woollen scarf.
“I’m afraid one does at my age,” added Miss Marple.
“Nice garden you’ve got here,” said the other woman.
“Not particularly nice now,” said Miss Marple. “When I could attend to it myself—”
“Oh I know. I understand just what you feel. I suppose you’ve got one of those—I have a lot of names for them, mostly very rude—elderly chaps who say they know all about gardening. Sometimes they do, sometimes they don’t know a thing about it. They come and have a lot of cups of tea and do a little very mild weeding. They’re quite nice, some of them, but all the same it does make one’s temper rise.” She added, “I’m quite a keen gardener myself.”
“Do you live here?” asked Miss Marple, with some interest.
“Well, I’m boarding with a Mrs. Hastings. I think I’ve heard her speak of you. You’re Miss Marple, aren’t you?”
“Oh yes.”
“I’ve come as a sort of companion-gardener. My name is Bartlett, by the way. Miss Bartlett. There’s not really much to do there,” said Miss Bartlett. “She goes in for annuals and all that. Nothing you can really get your teeth into.” She opened her mouth and showed her teeth when making this remark. “Of course I do a few odd jobs as well. Shopping, you know, and things like that. Anyway, if you want any time put in here, I could put in an hour or two for you. I’d say I might be better than any chap you’ve got now.”
“That would be easy,” said Miss Marple. “I like flowers best. Don’t care so much for vegetables.”
“I do vegetables for Mrs. Hastings. Dull but necessary. Well, I’ll be getting along.” Her eyes swept over Miss Marple from head to foot, as though memorizing her, then she nodded cheerfully and tramped off.
Mrs. Hastings? Miss Marple couldn’t remember the name of any Mrs. Hastings. Certainly Mrs. Hastings was not an old friend. She had certainly never been a gardening chum. Ah, of course, it was probably those newly built houses at the end of Gibraltar Road. Several families had moved in in the last year. Miss Marple sighed, looked again with annoyance at the antirrhinums, saw several weeds which she yearned to root up, one or two exuberant suckers she would like to attack with her secateurs, and finally, sighing, and manfully resisting temptation, she made a detour round by the lane and returned to her house. Her mind recurred again to Mr. Rafiel. They had been, he and she—what was the title of that book they used to quote so much when she was young? Ships that pass in the night. Rather apt it was really, when she came to think of it. Ships that pass in the night … It was in the night that she had gone to him to ask—no, to demand—help. To insist, to say no time must be lost. And he had agreed, and put things in train at once! Perhaps she had been rather lionlike on that occasion? No. No, that was quite wrong. It had not been anger she had felt. It had been insistence on something that was absolutely imperative to be put in hand at once. And he’d understood.
Poor Mr. Rafiel. The ship that had passed in the night had been an interesting ship. Once you got used to his being rude, he might have been quite an agreeable man? No! She shook her head. Mr. Rafiel could never have been an agreeable man. Well, she must put Mr. Rafiel out of her head.
Ships that pass in the night, and speak each other in passing;
Only a signal shown and a distant voice in the darkness.
She would probably never think of him again. She would look out perhaps to see if there was an obituary of him in The Times. But she did not think it was very likely. He was not a very well known character, she thought. Not famous. He had just been very rich. Of course, many people did have obituaries in the paper just because they were very rich; but she thought that Mr. Rafiel’s richness would possibly not have been of that kind. He had not been prominent in any great industry, he had not been a great financial genius, or a noteworthy banker. He had just all his life made enormous amounts of money….
Two
CODE WORD NEMESIS
I
It was about a week or so after Mr. Rafiel’s death that Miss Marple picked up a letter from her breakfast tray, and looked at it for a moment before opening it. The other two letters that had come by this morning’s post were bills, or just possibly receipts for bills. In either case they were not of any particular interest. This letter might be.
A London postmark, typewritten address, a long, good quality envelope. Miss Marple slit it neatly with the paper knife she always kept handy on her tray. It was headed, Messrs. Broadribb and Schuster, Solicitors and Notaries Public, with an address in Bloomsbury. It asked her, in suitable courteous and legal phraseology, to call upon them one day in the following week, at their office, to discuss a proposition that might be to her advantage. Thursday, the 24th was suggested. If that date was not convenient, perhaps she would let them know what date she would be likely to be in London in the near future. They added that they were the solicitors to the late Mr. Rafiel, with whom they understood she had been acquainted.
Miss Marple frowned in some slight puzzlement. She got up rather more slowly than usual, thinking about the letter she had received. She was escorted downstairs by Cherry, who was meticulous in hanging about in the hall so as to make sure that Miss Marple did not come to grief walking by herself down the staircase, which was of the old-fashioned kind which turned a sharp corner in the middle of its run.
“You take very good care of me, Cherry,” said Miss Marple.
“Got to,” said Cherry, in her usual idiom. “Good people are scarce.”
“Well, thank you for the compliment,” said Miss Marple, arriving safely with her last foot on the ground floor.
“Nothing the matter, is there?” asked Cherry. “You look a bit rattled like, if you know what I mean.”
“No, nothing’s the matter,” said Miss Marple. “I had rather an unusual letter from a firm of solicitors.”
“Nobody is suing you for anything, are they?” said Cherry, who was inclined to regard solicitors’ letters as invariably associated with disaster of some kind.
“Oh no, I don’t think so,” said Miss Marple. “Nothing of that kind. They just asked me to call upon them next week in London.”
“Perhaps you’ve been left a fortune,” said Cherry, hopefully.
“That, I think, is very unlikely,” said Miss Marple.
“Well, you never know,” said Cherry.
Settling herself in her chair, and taking her knitting out of its embroidered knitting bag, Miss Marple considered the possibility of Mr. Rafiel having left her a fortune. It seemed even more unlikely than when Cherry had suggested it. Mr. Rafiel, she thought, was not that kind of a man.
It was not possible for her to go on the date suggested. She was attending a meeting of the Women’s Institute to discuss the raising of a sum for building a small additional couple of rooms. But she wrote, naming a day in the follow
ing week. In due course her letter was answered and the appointment definitely confirmed. She wondered what Messrs. Broadribb and Schuster were like. The letter had been signed by J. R. Broadribb who was, apparently, the senior partner. It was possible, Miss Marple thought, that Mr. Rafiel might have left her some small memoir or souvenir in his will. Perhaps some book on rare flowers that had been in his library and which he thought would please an old lady who was keen on gardening. Or perhaps a cameo brooch which had belonged to some great-aunt of his. She amused herself by these fancies. They were only fancies, she thought, because in either case it would merely be a case of the Executors—if these lawyers were the Executors—forwarding her by post any such object. They would not have wanted an interview.
“Oh well,” said Miss Marple, “I shall know next Tuesday.”
II
“Wonder what she’ll be like,” said Mr. Broadribb to Mr. Schuster, glancing at the clock as he did so.
“She’s due in a quarter of an hour,” said Mr. Schuster. “Wonder if she’ll be punctual?”
The Complete Miss Marple Collection Page 201