Lily Kimble took the footpath and walked briskly uphill. The path skirted the side of a wood, on the other side the hill rose steeply covered with heather and gorse.
Someone stepped out from the trees and Lily Kimble jumped.
“My, you did give me a start,” she exclaimed. “I wasn’t expecting to meet you here.”
“Gave you a surprise, did I? I’ve got another surprise for you.”
It was very lonely in among the trees. There was no one to hear a cry or a struggle. Actually there was no cry and the struggle was very soon over.
A wood-pigeon, disturbed, flew out of the wood….
III
“What can have become of the woman?” demanded Dr. Kennedy irritably.
The hands of the clock pointed to ten minutes to five.
“Could she have lost her way coming from the station?”
“I gave her explicit directions. In any case it’s quite simple. Turn to the left when she got out of the station and then take the first road to the right. As I say, it’s only a few minutes’ walk.”
“Perhaps she’s changed her mind,” said Giles.
“It looks like it.”
“Or missed the train,” suggested Gwenda.
Kennedy said slowly, “No, I think it’s more likely that she decided not to come after all. Perhaps her husband stepped in. All these country people are quite incalculable.”
He walked up and down the room.
Then he went to the telephone and asked for a number.
“Hullo? Is that the station? This is Dr. Kennedy speaking. I was expecting someone by the four thirty-five. Middle-aged country woman. Did anyone ask to be directed to me? Or—what do you say?”
The others were near enough to hear the soft lazy accent of Woodleigh Bolton’s one porter.
“Don’t think as there could be anyone for you, Doctor. Weren’t no strangers on the four thirty-five. Mr. Narracotts from Meadows, and Johnnie Lawes, and old Benson’s daughter. Weren’t no other passengers at all.”
“So she changed her mind,” said Dr. Kennedy. “Well, I can offer you tea. The kettle’s on. I’ll go out and make it.”
He returned with the teapot and they sat down.
“It’s only a temporary check,” he said more cheerfully. “We’ve got her address. We’ll go over and see her, perhaps.”
The telephone rang and the doctor got up to answer.
“Dr. Kennedy?”
“Speaking.”
“This is Inspector Last, Longford police station. Were you expecting a woman called Lily Kimble—Mrs. Lily Kimble—to call upon you this afternoon?”
“I was. Why? Has there been an accident?”
“Not what you’d call an accident exactly. She’s dead. We found a letter from you on the body. That’s why I rang you up. Can you make it convenient to come along to Longford police station as soon as possible?”
“I’ll come at once.”
IV
“Now let’s get this quite clear,” Inspector Last was saying.
He looked from Kennedy to Giles and Gwenda who had accompanied the doctor. Gwenda was very pale and held her hands tightly clasped together. “You were expecting this woman by the train that leaves Dillmouth Junction at four-five? And gets to Woodleigh Bolton at four thirty-five?”
Dr. Kennedy nodded.
Inspector Last looked down at the letter he had taken from the dead woman’s body. It was quite clear.
Dear Mrs. Kimble (Dr. Kennedy had written)
I shall be glad to advise you to the best of my power. As you will see from the heading of this letter I no longer live in Dillmouth. If you will take the train leaving Coombeleigh at 3.30, change at Dillmouth Junction, and come by the Lonsbury Bay train to Woodleigh Bolton, my house is only a few minutes’ walk. Turn to the left as you come out of the station, then take the first road on the right. My house is at the end of it on the right. The name is on the gate.
Yours truly,
James Kennedy.
“There was no question of her coming by an earlier train?”
“An earlier train?” Dr. Kennedy looked astonished.
“Because that’s what she did. She left Coombeleigh, not at three thirty but at one thirty—caught the two-five from Dillmouth Junction and got out, not at Woodleigh Bolton, but at Matchings Halt, the station before it.”
“But that’s extraordinary!”
“Was she consulting you professionally, Doctor?”
“No. I retired from practice some years ago.”
“That’s what I thought. You knew her well?”
Kennedy shook his head.
“I hadn’t seen her for nearly twenty years.”
“But you—er—recognized her just now?”
Gwenda shivered, but dead bodies did not affect a doctor and Kennedy replied thoughtfully: “Under the circumstances it is hard to say if I recognized her or not. She was strangled, I presume?”
“She was strangled. The body was found in a copse a short way along the track leading from Matchings Halt to Woodleigh Camp. It was found by a hiker coming down from the Camp at about ten minutes to four. Our police surgeon puts the time of death at between two fifteen and three o’clock. Presumably she was killed shortly after she left the station. No other passenger got out at Matchings Halt. She was the only person to get out of the train there.
“Now why did she get out at Matchings Halt? Did she mistake the station? I hardly think so. In any case she was two hours early for her appointment with you, and had not come by the train you suggested, although she had your letter with her.
“Now just what was her business with you, Doctor?”
Dr. Kennedy felt in his pocket and brought out Lily’s letter.
“I brought this with me. The enclosed cutting and the insertion put in the local paper by Mr. and Mrs. Reed here.”
Inspector Last read Lily Kimble’s letter and the enclosure. Then he looked from Dr. Kennedy to Giles and Gwenda.
“Can I have the story behind all this? It goes back a long way, I gather?”
“Eighteen years,” said Gwenda.
Piecemeal, with additions, and parentheses, the story came out. Inspector Last was a good listener. He let the three people in front of him tell things in their own way. Kennedy was dry, and factual, Gwenda was slightly incoherent, but her narrative had imaginative power. Giles gave, perhaps, the most valuable contribution. He was clear and to the point, with less reserve than Kennedy, and with more coherence than Gwenda. It took a long time.
Then Inspector Last sighed and summed up.
“Mrs. Halliday was Dr. Kennedy’s sister and your stepmother, Mrs. Reed. She disappeared from the house you are at present living in eighteen years ago. Lily Kimble (whose maiden name was Abbott) was a servant (house-parlourmaid) in the house at the time. For some reason Lily Kimble inclines (after the passage of years) to the theory that there was foul play. At the time it was assumed that Mrs. Halliday had gone away with a man (identity unknown). Major Halliday died in a mental establishment fifteen years ago still under the delusion that he had strangled his wife—if it was a delusion—”
He paused.
“These are all interesting but somewhat unrelated facts. The crucial point seems to be, is Mrs. Halliday alive or dead? If dead, when did she die? And what did Lily Kimble know?”
“It seems, on the face of it, that she must have known something rather important. So important that she was killed in order to prevent her talking about it.”
Gwenda cried, “But how could anyone possibly know she was going to talk about it—except us?”
Inspector Last turned his thoughtful eyes on her.
“It is a significant point, Mrs. Reed, that she took the two-five instead of the four-five train from Dillmouth Junction. There must be some reason for that. Also, she got out at the station before Woodleigh Bolton. Why? It seems possible to me that, after writing to the doctor, she wrote to someone else, suggesting a rendezvous at Woodleigh Camp, pe
rhaps, and that she proposed after that rendezvous, if it was unsatisfactory, to go on to Dr. Kennedy and ask his advice. It is possible that she had suspicions of some definite person, and she may have written to that person hinting at her knowledge and suggesting a rendezvous.”
“Blackmail,” said Giles bluntly.
“I don’t suppose she thought of it that way,” said Inspector Last. “She was just greedy and hopeful—and a little muddled about what she could get out of it all. We’ll see. Maybe the husband can tell us more.”
V
“Warned her, I did,” said Mr. Kimble heavily. “‘Don’t have nought to do with it,’ them were my words. Went behind my back, she did. Thought as she knew best. That were Lily all over. Too smart by half.”
Questioning revealed that Mr. Kimble had little to contribute.
Lily had been in service at St. Catherine’s before he met her and started walking out with her. Fond of the pictures, she was, and told him that likely as not, she’d been in a house where there’d been a murder.
“Didn’t pay much account, I didn’t. All imagination, I thought. Never content with plain fact, Lily wasn’t. Long rigmarole she told me, about the master doing in the missus and maybe putting the body in the cellar—and something about a French girl what had looked out of the window and seen something or somebody. ‘Don’t you pay no attention to foreigners, my girl,’ I said. ‘One and all they’re liars. Not like us.’ And when she run on about it, I didn’t listen because, mark you, she was working it all up out of nothing. Liked a bit of crime, Lily did. Used to take the Sunday News what was running a series about Famous Murderers. Full of it, she was, and if she liked to think she’d been in a house where there was a murder, well, thinking don’t hurt nobody. But when she was on at me about answering this advertisement—‘You leave it alone,’ I says to her. ‘It’s no good stirring up trouble.’ And if she’d done as I telled her, she’d be alive today.”
He thought for a moment or two.
“Ar,” he said. “She’d be alive right now. Too smart by half, that was Lily.”
Twenty-three
WHICH OF THEM?
Giles and Gwenda had not gone with Inspector Last and Dr. Kennedy to interview Mr. Kimble. They arrived home about seven o’clock. Gwenda looked white and ill. Dr. Kennedy had said to Giles: “Give her some brandy and make her eat something, then get her to bed. She’s had a bad shock.”
“It’s so awful, Giles,” Gwenda kept saying. “So awful. That silly woman, making an appointment with the murderer, and going along so confidently—to be killed. Like a sheep to the slaughter.”
“Well, don’t think about it, darling. After all, we did know there was someone—a killer.”
“No, we didn’t. Not a killer now. I mean, it was then—eighteen years ago. It wasn’t, somehow, quite real … It might all have been a mistake.”
“Well, this proves that it wasn’t a mistake. You were right all the time, Gwenda.”
Giles was glad to find Miss Marple at Hillside. She and Mrs. Cocker between them fussed over Gwenda who refused brandy because she said it always reminded her of Channel steamers, but accepted some hot whisky and lemon, and then, coaxed by Mrs. Cocker, sat down and ate an omelette.
Giles would have talked determinedly of other things, but Miss Marple, with what Giles admitted to be superior tactics, discussed the crime in a gentle aloof manner.
“Very dreadful, my dear,” she said. “And of course a great shock, but interesting, one must admit. And of course I am so old that death doesn’t shock me as much as it does you—only something lingering and painful like cancer really distresses me. The really vital thing is that this proves definitely and beyond any possible doubt that poor young Helen Halliday was killed. We’ve thought so all along and now we know.”
“And according to you we ought to know where the body is,” said Giles. “The cellar, I suppose.”
“No, no, Mr. Reed. You remember Edith Pagett said she went down there on the morning after because she was disturbed by what Lily had said, and she found no signs of anything of the kind—and there would be signs, you know, if somebody was really looking for them.”
“Then what happened to it? Taken away in a car and thrown over a cliff into the sea?”
“No. Come now, my dears, what struck you first of all when you came here—struck you, Gwenda, I should say. The fact that from the drawing room window, you had no view down to the sea. Where you felt, very properly, that steps should lead down to the lawn—there was instead a plantation of shrubs. The steps, you found subsequently, had been there originally, but had at some time been transferred to the end of the terrace. Why were they moved?”
Gwenda stared at her with dawning comprehension.
“You mean that that’s where—”
“There must have been a reason for making the change, and there doesn’t really seem to be a sensible one. It is, frankly, a stupid place to have steps down to the lawn. But that end of the terrace is a very quiet place—it’s not overlooked from the house except by one window—the window of the nursery, on the first floor. Don’t you see, that if you want to bury a body the earth will be disturbed and there must be a reason for its being disturbed. The reason was that it had been decided to move the steps from in front of the drawing room to the end of the terrace. I’ve learnt already from Dr. Kennedy that Helen Halliday and her husband were very keen on the garden, and did a lot of work in it. The daily gardener they employed used merely to carry out their orders, and if he arrived to find that this change was in progress and some of the flags had already been moved, he would only have thought that the Hallidays had started on the work when he wasn’t there. The body, of course, could have been buried at either place, but we can be quite certain, I think, that it is actually buried at the end of the terrace and not in front of the drawing room window.”
“Why can we be sure?” asked Gwenda.
“Because of what poor Lily Kimble said in her letter—that she changed her mind about the body being in the cellar because of what Léonie saw when she looked out of the window. That makes it very clear, doesn’t it? The Swiss girl looked out of the nursery window at some time during the night and saw the grave being dug. Perhaps she actually saw who it was digging it.”
“And never said anything to the police?”
“My dear, there was no question at the time of a crime having occurred. Mrs. Halliday had run away with a lover—that was all that Léonie would grasp. She probably couldn’t speak much English anyway. She did mention to Lily, perhaps not at the time, but later, a curious thing she had observed from her window that night, and that stimulated Lily’s belief in a crime having occurred. But I’ve no doubt that Edith Pagett told Lily off for talking nonsense, and the Swiss girl would accept her point of view and would certainly not wish to be mixed-up with the police. Foreigners always seem to be particularly nervous about the police when they are in a strange country. So she went back to Switzerland and very likely never thought of it again.”
Giles said: “If she’s alive now—if she can be traced—”
Miss Marple nodded her head. “Perhaps.”
Giles demanded: “How can we set about it?”
Miss Marple said: “The police will be able to do that much better than you can.”
“Inspector Last is coming over here tomorrow morning.”
“Then I think I should tell him—about the steps.”
“And about what I saw—or think I saw—in the hall?” asked Gwenda nervously.
“Yes, dear. You’ve been very wise to say nothing of that until now. Very wise. But I think the time has come.”
Giles said slowly: “She was strangled in the hall, and then the murderer carried her upstairs and put her on the bed. Kelvin Halliday came in, passed out with doped whisky, and in his turn was carried upstairs to the bedroom. He came to, and thought he had killed her. The murderer must have been watching somewhere near at hand. When Kelvin went off to Dr. Kennedy’s, the mur
derer took away the body, probably hid it in the shrubbery at the end of the terrace and waited until everybody had gone to bed and was presumably asleep, before he dug the grave and buried the body. That means he must have been here, hanging about the house, pretty well all that night?”
Miss Marple nodded.
“He had to be—on the spot. I remember your saying that that was important. We’ve got to see which of our three suspects fits in best with the requirements. We’ll take Erskine first. Now he definitely was on the spot. By his own admission he walked up here with Helen Kennedy from the beach at round about nine o’clock. He said good-bye to her. But did he say good-bye to her? Let’s say instead that he strangled her.”
“But it was all over between them,” cried Gwenda. “Long ago. He said himself that he was hardly ever alone with Helen.”
“But don’t you see, Gwenda, that the way we must look at it now, we can’t depend on anything anyone says.”
“Now I’m so glad to hear you say that,” said Miss Marple. “Because I’ve been a little worried, you know, by the way you two have seemed willing to accept, as actual fact, all the things that people have told you. I’m afraid I have a sadly distrustful nature, but, especially in a matter of murder, I make it a rule to take nothing that is told to me as true, unless it is checked. For instance, it does seem quite certain that Lily Kimble mentioned the clothes packed and taken away in a suitcase were not the ones Helen Halliday would herself have taken, because not only did Edith Pagett tell us that Lily said so to her, but Lily herself mentioned the fact in her letter to Dr. Kennedy. So that is one fact. Dr. Kennedy told us that Kelvin Halliday believed that his wife was secretly drugging him, and Kelvin Halliday in his diary confirms that—so there is another fact—and a very curious fact it is, don’t you think? However, we will not go into that now.
“But I would like to point out that a great many of the assumptions you have made have been based upon what has been told you—possibly told you very plausibly.”
Giles stared hard at her.
Gwenda, her colour restored, sipped coffee, and leaned across the table.
The Complete Miss Marple Collection Page 239