'Do you know that for a fact?'
'No. I suppose I only know it from what they've told me?But I really refuse to suspect them. Some day I might be worth murdering, but not now.'
'What do you mean by some day you might be worth murdering, Miss Blacklock?' Inspector Craddock pounced on the statement.
'Simply that one day—possibly quite soon—I may be a very rich woman.'
'That sounds interesting. Will you explain?'
'Certainly. You may not know it, but for more than twenty years I was secretary to and closely associated with Randall Goedler.'
Craddock was interested. Randall Goedler had been a big name in the world of finance. His daring speculations and the rather theatrical publicity with which he surrounded himself had made him a personality not quickly forgotten. He had died, if Craddock remembered rightly, in 1937 or 1938.
'He's rather before your time, I expect,' said Miss Blacklock. 'But you've probably heard of him.'
'Oh, yes. He was a millionaire, wasn't he?'
'Oh, several times over—though his finances fluctuated. He always risked most of what he made on some new coup.'
She spoke with a certain animation, her eyes brightened by memory.
'Anyway he died a very rich man. He had no children. He left his fortune in trust for his wife during her lifetime and after death to me absolutely.'
A vague memory stirred in the Inspector's mind.
IMMENSE FORTUNE TO COME TO FAITHFUL SECRETARY
—something of that kind.
'For the last twelve years or so,' said Miss Blacklock with a slight twinkle, 'I've had an excellent motive for murdering Mrs Goedler—but that doesn't help you, does it?'
'Did—excuse me for asking this—did Mrs Goedler resent her husband's disposition of his fortune?'
Miss Blacklock was now looking frankly amused.
'You needn't be so very discreet. What you really mean is, was I Randall Goedler's mistress? No, I wasn't. I don't think Randall ever gave me a sentimental thought, and I certainly didn't give him one. He was in love with Belle (his wife), and remained in love with her until he died. I think in all probability it was gratitude on his part that prompted his making his will. You see, Inspector, in the very early days, when Randall was still on an insecure footing, he came very near to disaster. It was a question of just a few thousands of actual cash. It was a big coup, and a very exciting one; daring, as all his schemes were; but he just hadn't got that little bit of cash to tide him over. I came to the rescue. I had a little money of my own. I believed in Randall. I sold every penny I had out and gave it to him. It did the trick. A week later he was an immensely wealthy man.
'After that, he treated me more or less as a junior partner. Oh! they were exciting days.' She sighed. 'I enjoyed it all thoroughly. Then my father died, and my only sister was left a hopeless invalid. I had to give it all up and go and look after her. Randall died a couple of years later. I had made quite a lot of money during our association and I didn't really expect him to leave me anything, but I was very touched, yes, and very proud to find that if Belle predeceased me (and she was one of those delicate creatures whom everyone always says won't live long) I was to inherit his entire fortune. I think really the poor man didn't know who to leave it to. Belle's a dear, and she was delighted about it. She's really a very sweet person. She lives up in Scotland. I haven't seen her for years—we just write at Christmas. You see, I went with my sister to a sanatorium in Switzerland just before the war. She died of consumption out there.'
She was silent for a moment or two, then said:
'I only came back to England just over a year ago.'
'You said you might be a rich woman very soon?How soon?'
'I heard from the nurse attendant who looks after Belle Goedler that Belle is sinking rapidly. It may be—only a few weeks.'
She added sadly:
'The money won't mean much to me now. I've got quite enough for my rather simple needs. Once I should have enjoyed playing the markets again—but now?Oh, well, one grows old. Still, you do see, Inspector, don't you, that if Patrick and Julia wanted to kill me for a financial reason they'd be crazy not to wait for another few weeks.'
'Yes, Miss Blacklock, but what happens if you should predecease Mrs Goedler? Who does the money go to then?'
'D'you know, I've never really thought. Pip and Emma, I suppose?'
Craddock stared and Miss Blacklock smiled.
'Does that sound rather crazy? I believe, if I predecease Belle, the money would go to the legal offspring—or whatever the term is—of Randall's only sister, Sonia. Randall had quarrelled with his sister. She married a man whom he considered a crook and worse.'
'And was he a crook?'
'Oh, definitely, I should say. But I believe a very attractive person to women. He was a Greek or a Roumanian or something—what was his name now—Stamfordis, Dmitri Stamfordis.'
'Randall Goedler cut his sister out of his will when she married this man?'
'Oh, Sonia was a very wealthy woman in her own right. Randall had already settled packets of money on her, as far as possible in a way so that her husband couldn't touch it. But I believe that when the lawyers urged him to put in someone in case I predeceased Belle, he reluctantly put down Sonia's offspring, simply because he couldn't think of anyone else and he wasn't the sort of man to leave money to charities.'
'And there were children of the marriage?'
'Well, there are Pip and Emma.' She laughed. 'I know it sounds ridiculous. All I know is that Sonia wrote once to Belle after her marriage, telling her to tell Randall that she was extremely happy and that she had just had twins and was calling them Pip and Emma. As far as I know she never wrote again. But Belle, of course, may be able to tell you more.'
Miss Blacklock had been amused by her own recital. The Inspector did not look amused.
'It comes to this,' he said. 'If you had been killed the other night, there are presumably at least two people in the world who would have come into a very large fortune. You are wrong, Miss Blacklock, when you say that there is no one who has a motive for desiring your death. There are two people, at least, who are vitally interested. How old would this brother and sister be?'
Miss Blacklock frowned.
'Let me see—1922—no—it's difficult to remember?I suppose about twenty-five or twenty-six.' Her face had sobered. 'But you surely don't think—?'
'I think somebody shot at you with the intent to kill you. I think it possible that that same person or persons might try again. I would like you, if you will, to be very very careful, Miss Blacklock. One murder has been arranged and did not come off. I think it possible that another murder may be arranged very soon.'
***
Phillipa Haymes straightened her back and pushed back a tendril of hair from her damp forehead. She was cleaning a flower border.
'Yes, Inspector?'
She looked at him inquiringly. In return he gave her a rather closer scrutiny than he had done before. Yes, a good-looking girl, a very English type with her pale ash-blonde hair and her rather long face. An obstinate chin and mouth. Something of repression—of tautness about her. The eyes were blue, very steady in their glance, and told you nothing at all. The sort of girl, he thought, who would keep a secret well.
'I'm sorry always to bother you when you're at work, Mrs Haymes,' he said, 'but I didn't want to wait until you came back for lunch. Besides, I thought it might be easier to talk to you here, away from Little Paddocks.'
'Yes, Inspector?'
No emotion and little interest in her voice. But was there a note of wariness—or did he imagine it?
'A certain statement has been made to me this morning. This statement concerns you.'
Phillipa raised her eyebrows very slightly.
'You told me, Mrs Haymes, that this man, Rudi Scherz, was quite unknown to you?'
'Yes.'
'That when you saw him there, dead, it was the first time you had set eyes on him. Is that s
o?'
'Certainly. I had never seen him before.'
'You did not, for instance, have a conversation with him in the summerhouse of Little Paddocks?'
'In the summer house?'
He was almost sure he caught a note of fear in her voice.
'Yes, Mrs Haymes.'
'Who says so?'
'I am told that you had a conversation with this man, Rudi Scherz, and that he asked you where he could hide and you replied that you would show him, and that a time, a quarter-past six, was definitely mentioned. It would be a quarter-past six, roughly, when Scherz would get here from the bus stop on the evening of the hold-up.'
There was a moment's silence. Then Phillipa gave a short scornful laugh. She looked amused.
'I don't know who told you that,' she said. 'At least I can guess. It's a very silly, clumsy story—spiteful, of course. For some reason Mitzi dislikes me even more than she dislikes the rest of us.'
'You deny it?'
'Of course it's not true?I never met or saw Rudi Scherz in my life, and I was nowhere near the house that morning. I was over here, working.'
Inspector Craddock said very gently:
'Which morning?'
There was a momentary pause. Her eyelids flickered.
'Every morning. I'm here every morning. I don't get away until one o'clock.'
She added scornfully:
'It's no good listening to what Mitzi tells you. She tells lies all the time.'
***
'And that's that,' said Craddock when he was walking away with Sergeant Fletcher. 'Two young women whose stories flatly contradict each other. Which one am I to believe?'
'Everyone seems to agree that this foreign girl tells whoppers,' said Fletcher. 'It's been my experience in dealing with aliens that lying comes more easy than truth-telling. Seems to be clear she's got a spite against this Mrs Haymes.'
'So, if you were me, you'd believe Mrs Haymes?'
'Unless you've got reason to think otherwise, sir.'
And Craddock hadn't, not really—only the remembrance of a pair of over-steady blue eyes and the glib enunciation of the words that morning. For to the best of his recollection he hadn't said whether the interview in the summerhouse had taken place in the morning or the afternoon.
Still, Miss Blacklock, or if not Miss Blacklock, certainly Miss Bunner, might have mentioned the visit of the young foreigner who had come to cadge his fare back to Switzerland. And Phillipa Haymes might have therefore assumed that the conversation was supposed to have taken place on that particular morning.
But Craddock still thought that there had been a note of fear in her voice as she asked:
'In the summer house?'
He decided to keep an open mind on the subject.
***
It was very pleasant in the Vicarage garden. One of those sudden spells of autumn warmth had descended upon England. Inspector Craddock could never remember if it was St Martin's or St Luke's Summer, but he knew that it was very pleasant—and also very enervating. He sat in a deck chair provided for him by an energetic Bunch, just on her way to a Mothers' Meeting, and, well protected with shawls and a large rug round her knees, Miss Marple sat knitting beside him. The sunshine, the peace, the steady click of Miss Marple's knitting needles, all combined to produce a soporific feeling in the Inspector. And yet, at the same time, there was a nightmarish feeling at the back of his mind. It was like a familiar dream where an undertone of menace grows and finally turns Ease into Terror?
He said abruptly, 'You oughtn't to be here.'
Miss Marple's needles stopped clicking for a moment. Her placid china-blue eyes regarded him thoughtfully.
She said, 'I know what you mean. You're a very conscientious boy. But it's perfectly all right. Bunch's father (he was vicar of our parish, a very fine scholar) and her mother (who is a most remarkable woman—real spiritual power) are very old friends of mine. It's the most natural thing in the world that when I'm at Medenham I should come on here to stay with Bunch for a little.'
'Oh, perhaps,' said Craddock. 'But—but don't snoop around. I've a feeling—I have really—that it isn't safe.'
Miss Marple smiled a little.
'But I'm afraid,' she said, 'that we old women always do moop. It would be very odd and much more noticeable if I didn't. Questions about mutual friends in different parts of the world and whether they remember so and so, and do they remember who it was that Lady Somebody's daughter married? All that helps, doesn't it?'
'Helps?' said the Inspector, rather stupidly.
'Helps to find out if people are who they say they are,' said Miss Marple.
She went on:
'Because that's what's worrying you, isn't it? And that's really the particular way the world has changed since the war. Take this place, Chipping Cleghorn, for instance. It's very much like St Mary Mead where I live. Fifteen years ago one knew who everybody was. The Bantrys in the big house—and the Hartnells and the Price Ridleys and the Weatherbys?They were people whose fathers and mothers and grandfathers and grandmothers, or whose aunts and uncles, had lived there before them. If somebody new came to live there, they brought letters of introduction, or they'd been in the same regiment or served in the same ship as someone there already. If anybody new—really new—really a stranger—came, well, they stuck out—everybody wondered about them and didn't rest till they found out.'
She nodded her head gently.
'But it's not like that any more. Every village and small country place is full of people who've just come and settled there without any ties to bring them. The big houses have been sold, and the cottages have been converted and changed. And people just come—and all you know about them is what they say of themselves. They've come, you see, from all over the world. People from India and Hong Kong and China, and people who used to live in France and Italy in little cheap places and odd islands. And people who've made a little money and can afford to retire. But nobody knows any more who anyone is. You can have Benares brassware in your house and talk about tiffin and chota Hazri —and you can have pictures of Taormina and talk about the English church and the library—like Miss Hinchcliffe and Miss Murgatroyd. You can come from the South of France, or have spent your life in the East. People take you at your own valuation. They don't wait to call until they've had a letter from a friend saying that the So-and-So's are delightful people and she's known them all their lives.'
And that, thought Craddock, was exactly what was oppressing him. He didn't know. There were just faces and personalities and they were backed up by ration books and identity cards—nice neat identity cards with numbers on them, without photographs or fingerprints. Anybody who took the trouble could have a suitable identity card—and partly because of that, the subtler links that had held together English social rural life had fallen apart. In a town nobody expected to know his neighbour. In the country now nobody knew his neighbour either, though possibly he still thought he did?
Because of the oiled door, Craddock knew that there had been somebody in Letitia Blacklock's drawing-room who was not the pleasant friendly country neighbour he or she pretended to be?
And because of that he was afraid for Miss Marple who was frail and old and who noticed things?
He said: 'We can, to a certain extent, check up on these people?' But he knew that that wasn't so easy. India and China and Hong Kong and the South of France?It wasn't as easy as it would have been fifteen years ago. There were people, as he knew only too well, who were going about the country with borrowed identities—borrowed from people who had met sudden death by 'incidents' in the cities. There were organizations who bought up identities, who faked identity and ration cards—there were a hundred small rackets springing into being. You could check up—but it would take time—and time was what he hadn't got, because Randall Goedler's widow was very near death.
It was then that, worried and tired, lulled by the sunshine, he told Miss Marple about Randall Goedler and about Pip and Emma.
'Just a couple of names,' he said. 'Nicknames at that! They mayn't exist. They may be respectable citizens living in Europe somewhere. On the other hand one, or both, of them may be here in Chipping Cleghorn.'
Twenty-five years old approximately—Who filled that description? He said, thinking aloud:
'That nephew and niece of hers—or cousins or whatever they are?I wonder when she saw them last—'
Miss Marple said gently: 'I'll find out for you, shall I?'
'Now, please, Miss Marple, don't—'
'It will be quite simple, Inspector, you really need not worry. And it won't be noticeable if I do it, because, you see, it won't be official. If there is anything wrong you don't want to put them on their guard.'
Pip and Emma, thought Craddock, Pip and Emma? He was getting obsessed by Pip and Emma. That attractive dare-devil young man, the good-looking girl with the cool stare?
He said: 'I may find out more about them in the next forty-eight hours. I'm going up to Scotland. Mrs Goedler, if she's able to talk, may know a good deal more about them.'
'I think that's a very wise move.' Miss Marple hesitated. 'I hope,' she murmured, 'that you have warned Miss Blacklock to be careful?'
'I've warned her, yes. And I shall leave a man here to keep an unobtrusive eye on things.'
He avoided Miss Marple's eye which said plainly enough that a policeman keeping an eye on things would be little good if the danger was in the family circle?
'And remember,' said Craddock, looking squarely at her, 'I've warned you.'
'I assure you, Inspector,' said Miss Marple, 'that I can take care of myself.'
Chapter 11. Miss Marple Comes to Tea
If Letitia Blacklock seemed slightly absent minded when Mrs Harmon came to tea and brought a guest who was staying with her, Miss Marple, the guest in question, was hardly likely to notice the fact since it was the first time she had met her.
The old lady was very charming in her gentle gossipy fashion. She revealed herself almost at once to be one of those old ladies who have a constant preoccupation with burglars.
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