A Murder Is Announced

by Agatha Christie

  “So he had a police record all right,” said Rydesdale. “H’m—very much as one thought.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Jewellery … h’m, yes … falsified entries … yes … cheque … Definitely a dishonest fellow.”

  “Yes, sir—in a small way.”

  “Quite so. And small things lead to large things.”

  “I wonder, sir.”

  The Chief Constable looked up.

  “Worried, Craddock?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Why? It’s a straightforward story. Or isn’t it? Let’s see what all these people you’ve been talking to have to say.”

  He drew the report towards him and read it through rapidly.

  “The usual thing—plenty of inconsistencies and contradictions. Different people’s accounts of a few moments of stress never agree. But the main picture seems clear enough.”

  “I know, sir—but it’s an unsatisfactory picture. If you know what I mean—it’s the wrong picture.”

  “Well, let’s take the facts. Rudi Scherz took the 5:20 bus from Medenham to Chipping Cleghorn arriving there at six o’clock. Evidence of conductor and two passengers. From the bus stop he walked away in the direction of Little Paddocks. He got into the house with no particular difficulty—probably through the front door. He held up the company with a revolver, he fired two shots, one of which slightly wounded Miss Blacklock, then he killed himself with a third shot, whether accidentally or deliberately there is not sufficient evidence to show. The reasons why he did all this are profoundly unsatisfactory, I agree. But why isn’t really a question we are called upon to answer. A Coroner’s jury may bring it in suicide—or accidental death. Whichever verdict it is, it’s the same as far as we’re concerned. We can write finis.”

  “You mean we can always fall back upon Colonel Easterbrook’s psychology,” said Craddock gloomily.

  Rydesdale smiled.

  “After all, the Colonel’s probably had a good deal of experience,” he said. “I’m pretty sick of the psychological jargon that’s used so glibly about everything nowadays—but we can’t really rule it out.”

  “I still feel the picture’s all wrong, sir.”

  “Any reason to believe that somebody in the setup at Chipping Cleghorn is lying to you?”

  Craddock hesitated.

  “I think the foreign girl knows more than she lets on. But that may be just prejudice on my part.”

  “You think she might possibly have been in it with this fellow? Let him into the house? Put him up to it?”

  “Something of the kind. I wouldn’t put it past her. But that surely indicates that there really was something valuable, money or jewellery, in the house, and that doesn’t seem to have been the case. Miss Blacklock negatived it quite decidedly. So did the others. That leaves us with the proposition that there was something valuable in the house that nobody knew about—”

  “Quite a best-seller plot.”

  “I agree it’s ridiculous, sir. The only other point is Miss Bunner’s certainty that it was a definite attempt by Scherz to murder Miss Blacklock.”

  “Well, from what you say—and from her statement, this Miss Bunner—”

  “Oh, I agree, sir,” Craddock put in quickly, “she’s an utterly unreliable witness. Highly suggestible. Anyone could put a thing into her head—but the interesting thing is that this is quite her own theory—no one has suggested it to her. Everybody else negatives it. For once she’s not swimming with the tide. It definitely is her own impression.”

  “And why should Rudi Scherz want to kill Miss Blacklock?”

  “There you are, sir. I don’t know. Miss Blacklock doesn’t know—unless she’s a much better liar than I think she is. Nobody knows. So presumably it isn’t true.”

  He sighed.

  “Cheer up, Craddock,” said the Chief Constable. “I’m taking you off to lunch with Sir Henry and myself. The best that the Royal Spa Hotel in Medenham Wells can provide.”

  “Thank you, sir.” Craddock looked slightly surprised.

  “You see, we received a letter—” He broke off as Sir Henry Clithering entered the room. “Ah, there you are, Henry.”

  Sir Henry, informal this time, said, “Morning, Dermot.”

  “I’ve got something for you, Henry,” said the Chief Constable.

  “What’s that?”

  “Authentic letter from an old Pussy. Staying at the Royal Spa Hotel. Something she thinks we might like to know in connection with this Chipping Cleghorn business.”

  “The old Pussies,” said Sir Henry triumphantly. “What did I tell you? They hear everything. They see everything. And, unlike the famous adage, they speak all evil. What’s this particular one got hold of?”

  Rydesdale consulted the letter.

  “Writes just like my old grandmother,” he complained. “Spiky. Like a spider in the ink bottle, and all underlined. A good deal about how she hopes it won’t be taking up our valuable time, but might possibly be of some slight assistance, etc., etc. What’s her name? Jane—something—Murple—no, Marple, Jane Marple.”

  “Ye Gods and Little Fishes,” said Sir Henry, “can it be? George, it’s my own particular, one and only, four-starred Pussy. The super Pussy of all old Pussies. And she has managed somehow to be at Medenham Wells, instead of peacefully at home in St. Mary Mead, just at the right time to be mixed up in a murder. Once more a murder is announced—for the benefit and enjoyment of Miss Marple.”

  “Well, Henry,” said Rydesdale sardonically, “I’ll be glad to see your paragon. Come on! We’ll lunch at the Royal Spa and we’ll interview the lady. Craddock, here, is looking highly sceptical.”

  “Not at all, sir,” said Craddock politely.

  He thought to himself that sometimes his godfather carried things a bit far.

  II

  Miss Jane Marple was very nearly, if not quite, as Craddock had pictured her. She was far more benignant than he had imagined and a good deal older. She seemed indeed very old. She had snow-white hair and a pink crinkled face and very soft innocent blue eyes, and she was heavily enmeshed in fleecy wool. Wool round her shoulders in the form of a lacy cape and wool that she was knitting and which turned out to be a baby’s shawl.

  She was all incoherent delight and pleasure at seeing Sir Henry, and became quite flustered when introduced to the Chief Constable and Detective-Inspector Craddock.

  “But really, Sir Henry, how fortunate … how very fortunate. So long since I have seen you … Yes, my rheumatism. Very bad of late. Of course I couldn’t have afforded this hotel (really fantastic what they charge nowadays) but Raymond—my nephew, Raymond West, you may remember him—”

  “Everyone knows his name.”

  “Yes, the dear boy has been so successful with his clever books—he prides himself upon never writing about anything pleasant. The dear boy insisted on paying all my expenses. And his dear wife is making a name for herself too, as an artist. Mostly jugs of dying flowers and broken combs on windowsills. I never dare tell her, but I still admire Blair Leighton and Alma Tadema. Oh, but I’m chattering. And the Chief Constable himself—indeed I never expected—so afraid I shall be taking up his time—”

  “Completely ga-ga,” thought the disgusted Detective-Inspector Craddock.

  “Come into the Manager’s private room,” said Rydesdale. “We can talk better there.”

  When Miss Marple had been disentangled from her wool, and her spare knitting pins collected, she accompanied them, fluttering and protesting, to Mr. Rowlandson’s comfortable sitting-room.

  “Now, Miss Marple, let’s hear what you have to tell us,” said the Chief Constable.

  Miss Marple came to the point with unexpected brevity.

  “It was a cheque,” she said. “He altered it.”

  “He?”

  “The young man at the desk here, the one who is supposed to have staged that hold-up and shot himself.”

  “He altered a cheque, you say?”

  Mi
ss Marple nodded.

  “Yes. I have it here.” She extracted it from her bag and laid it on the table. “It came this morning with my others from the Bank. You can see, it was for seven pounds, and he altered it to seventeen. A stroke in front of the 7, and teen added after the word seven with a nice artistic little blot just blurring the whole word. Really very nicely done. A certain amount of practice, I should say. It’s the same ink, because I wrote the cheque actually at the desk. I should think he’d done it quite often before, wouldn’t you?”

  “He picked the wrong person to do it to, this time,” remarked Sir Henry.

  Miss Marple nodded agreement.

  “Yes. I’m afraid he would never have gone very far in crime. I was quite the wrong person. Some busy young married woman, or some girl having a love affair—that’s the kind who write cheques for all sorts of different sums and don’t really look through their passbooks carefully. But an old woman who has to be careful of the pennies, and who has formed habits—that’s quite the wrong person to choose. Seventeen pounds is a sum I never write a cheque for. Twenty pounds, a round sum, for the monthly wages and books. And as for my personal expenditure, I usually cash seven—it used to be five, but everything has gone up so.”

  “And perhaps he reminded you of someone?” prompted Sir Henry, mischief in his eye.

  Miss Marple smiled and shook her head at him.

  “You are very naughty, Sir Henry. As a matter of fact he did. Fred Tyler, at the fish shop. Always slipped an extra 1 in the shillings column. Eating so much fish as we do nowadays, it made a long bill, and lots of people never added it up. Just ten shillings in his pocket every time, not much but enough to get himself a few neckties and take Jessie Spragge (the girl in the draper’s) to the pictures. Cut a splash, that’s what these young fellows want to do. Well, the very first week I was here, there was a mistake in my bill. I pointed it out to the young man and he apologized very nicely and looked very much upset, but I thought to myself then: ‘You’ve got a shifty eye, young man.’

  “What I mean by a shifty eye,” continued Miss Marple, “is the kind that looks very straight at you and never looks away or blinks.”

  Craddock gave a sudden movement of appreciation. He thought to himself “Jim Kelly to the life,” remembering a notorious swindler he had helped to put behind bars not long ago.

  “Rudi Scherz was a thoroughly unsatisfactory character,” said Rydesdale. “He’s got a police record in Switzerland, we find.”

  “Made the place too hot for him, I suppose, and came over here with forged papers?” said Miss Marple.

  “Exactly,” said Rydesdale.

  “He was going about with the little red-haired waitress from the dining room,” said Miss Marple. “Fortunately I don’t think her heart’s affected at all. She just liked to have someone a bit ‘different,’ and he used to give her flowers and chocolates which the English boys don’t do much. Has she told you all she knows?” she asked, turning suddenly to Craddock. “Or not quite all yet?”

  “I’m not absolutely sure,” said Craddock cautiously.

  “I think there’s a little to come,” said Miss Marple. “She’s looking very worried. Brought me kippers instead of herrings this morning, and forgot the milk jug. Usually she’s an excellent waitress. Yes, she’s worried. Afraid she might have to give evidence or something like that. But I expect”—her candid blue eyes swept over the manly proportions and handsome face of Detective-Inspector Craddock with truly feminine Victorian appreciation—“that you will be able to persuade her to tell you all she knows.”

  Detective-Inspector Craddock blushed and Sir Henry chuckled.

  “It might be important,” said Miss Marple. “He may have told her who it was.”

  Rydesdale stared at her.

  “Who what was?”

  “I express myself so badly. Who it was who put him up to it, I mean.”

  “So you think someone put him up to it?”

  Miss Marple’s eyes widened in surprise.

  “Oh, but surely—I mean … Here’s a personable young man—who filches a little bit here and a little bit there—alters a small cheque, perhaps helps himself to a small piece of jewellery if it’s left lying around, or takes a little money from the till—all sorts of small petty thefts. Keeps himself going in ready money so that he can dress well, and take a girl about—all that sort of thing. And then suddenly he goes off, with a revolver, and holds up a room full of people, and shoots at someone. He’d never have done a thing like that—not for a moment! He wasn’t that kind of person. It doesn’t make sense.”

  Craddock drew in his breath sharply. That was what Letitia Blacklock had said. What the Vicar’s wife had said. What he himself felt with increasing force. It didn’t make sense. And now Sir Henry’s old Pussy was saying it, too, with complete certainty in her fluting old lady’s voice.

  “Perhaps you’ll tell us, Miss Marple,” he said, and his voice was suddenly aggressive, “what did happen, then?”

  She turned on him in surprise.

  “But how should I know what happened? There was an account in the paper—but it says so little. One can make conjectures, of course, but one has no accurate information.”

  “George,” said Sir Henry, “would it be very unorthodox if Miss Marple were allowed to read the notes of the interviews Craddock had with these people at Chipping Cleghorn?”

  “It may be unorthodox,” said Rydesdale, “but I’ve not got where I am by being orthodox. She can read them. I’d be curious to hear what she has to say.”

  Miss Marple was all embarrassment.

  “I’m afraid you’ve been listening to Sir Henry. Sir Henry is always too kind. He thinks too much of any little observations I may have made in the past. Really, I have no gifts—no gifts at all—except perhaps a certain knowledge of human nature. People, I find, are apt to be far too trustful. I’m afraid that I have a tendency always to believe the worst. Not a nice trait. But so often justified by subsequent events.”

  “Read these,” said Rydesdale, thrusting the typewritten sheets upon her. “They won’t take you long. After all, these people are your kind—you must know a lot of people like them. You may be able to spot something that we haven’t. The case is just going to be closed. Let’s have an amateur’s opinion on it before we shut up the files. I don’t mind telling you that Craddock here isn’t satisfied. He says, like you, that it doesn’t make sense.”

  There was silence whilst Miss Marple read. She put the typewritten sheets down at last.

  “It’s very interesting,” she said with a sigh. “All the different things that people say—and think. The things they see—or think that they see. And all so complex, nearly all so trivial and if one thing isn’t trivial, it’s so hard to spot which one—like a needle in a haystack.”

  Craddock felt a twinge of disappointment. Just for a moment or two, he wondered if Sir Henry might be right about this funny old lady. She might have put her finger on something—old people were often very sharp. He’d never, for instance, been able to conceal anything from his own great aunt Emma. She had finally told him that his nose twitched when he was about to tell a lie.

  But just a few fluffy generalities, that was all that Sir Henry’s famous Miss Marple could produce. He felt annoyed with her and said rather curtly:

  “The truth of the matter is that the facts are indisputable. Whatever conflicting details these people give, they all saw one thing. They saw a masked man with a revolver and a torch open the door and hold them up, and whether they think he said ‘Stick ’em up’ or ‘Your money or your life,’ or whatever phrase is associated with a hold-up in their minds, they saw him.”

  “But surely,” said Miss Marple gently. “They couldn’t—actually—have seen anything at all….”

  Craddock caught his breath. She’d got it! She was sharp, after all. He was testing her by that speech of his, but she hadn’t fallen for it. It didn’t actually make any difference to the facts, or to what happen
ed, but she’d realized, as he’d realized, that those people who had seen a masked man holding them up couldn’t really have seen him at all.

  “If I understand rightly,” Miss Marple had a pink flush on her cheeks, her eyes were bright and pleased as a child’s, “there wasn’t any light in the hall outside—and not on the landing upstairs either?”

  “That’s right,” said Craddock.

  “And so, if a man stood in the doorway and flashed a powerful torch into the room, nobody could see anything but the torch, could they?”

  “No, they couldn’t. I tried it out.”

  “And so when some of them say they saw a masked man, etc., they are really, though they don’t realize it, recapitulating from what they saw afterwards—when the lights came on. So it really all fits in very well, doesn’t it, on the assumption that Rudi Scherz was the—I think, ‘fall guy’ is the expression I mean?”

  Rydesdale stared at her in such surprise that she grew pinker still. “I may have got the term wrong,” she murmured.

  “I am not very clever about Americanisms—and I understand they change very quickly. I got it from one of Mr. Dashiel Hammett’s stories. (I understand from my nephew Raymond that he is considered at the top of the tree in what is called the ‘tough’ style of literature.) A ‘fall guy,’ if I understand it rightly, means someone who will be blamed for a crime really committed by someone else. This Rudi Scherz seems to me exactly the right type for that. Rather stupid really, you know, but full of cupidity and probably extremely credulous.”

  Rydesdale said, smiling tolerantly:

  “Are you suggesting that he was persuaded by someone to go out and take pot shots at a room full of people? Rather a tall order.”

  “I think he was told that it was a joke,” said Miss Marple. “He was paid for doing it, of course. Paid, that is, to put an advertisement in the newspaper, to go out and spy out the household premises, and then, on the night in question, he was to go there, assume a mask and a black cloak and throw open a door, brandishing a torch, and cry ‘Hands up!’”

  “And fire off a revolver?”