A Murder Is Announced

by Agatha Christie

  “How do you know, Mrs. Harmon?”

  “Mrs. Butt told me. She’s my daily. Or rather, my twice weekly. Being a military gentleman, she said, he’d naturally have a revolver and very handy it would be if burglars were to come along.”

  “When did she tell you this?”

  “Ages ago. About six months ago, I should think.”

  “Colonel Easterbrook?” murmured Craddock.

  “It’s like those pointer things at fairs, isn’t it?” said Bunch, still speaking through a mouthful of pins. “Go round and round and stop at something different every time.”

  “You’re telling me,” said Craddock and groaned.

  “Colonel Easterbrook was up at Little Paddocks to leave a book there one day. He could have oiled that door then. He was quite straightforward about being there though. Not like Miss Hinchcliffe.”

  Miss Marple coughed gently. “You must make allowances for the times we live in, Inspector,” she said.

  Craddock looked at her, uncomprehendingly.

  “After all,” said Miss Marple. “you are the Police, aren’t you? People can’t say everything they’d like to say to the Police, can they?”

  “I don’t see why not,” said Craddock. “Unless they’ve got some criminal matter to conceal.”

  “She means butter,” said Bunch, crawling actively round a table leg to anchor a floating bit of paper. “Butter and corn for hens, and sometimes cream—and sometimes, even, a side of bacon.”

  “Show him that note from Miss Blacklock,” said Miss Marple. “It’s some time ago now, but it reads like a first-class mystery story.”

  “What have I done with it? Is this the one you mean, Aunt Jane?”

  Miss Marple took it and looked at it.

  “Yes,” she said with satisfaction. “That’s the one.”

  She handed it to the Inspector.

  “I have made inquiries—Thursday is the day,” Miss Blacklock had written. “Any time after three. If there is any for me leave it in the usual place.”

  Bunch spat out her pins and laughed. Miss Marple was watching the Inspector’s face.

  The Vicar’s wife took it upon herself to explain.

  “Thursday is the day one of the farms round here makes butter. They let anybody they like have a bit. It’s usually Miss Hinchcliffe who collects it. She’s very much in with all the farmers—because of her pigs, I think. But it’s all a bit hush hush, you know, a kind of local scheme of barter. One person gets butter, and sends along cucumbers, or something like that—and a little something when a pig’s killed. And now and then an animal has an accident and has to be destroyed. Oh, you know the sort of thing. Only one can’t, very well, say it right out to the Police. Because I suppose quite a lot of this barter is illegal—only nobody really knows because it’s all so complicated. But I expect Hinch had slipped into Little Paddocks with a pound of butter or something and had put it in the usual place. That’s a flour bin under the dresser, by the way. It doesn’t have flour in it.”

  Craddock sighed.

  “I’m glad I came here to you ladies,” he said.

  “There used to be clothing coupons, too,” said Bunch. “Not usually bought—that wasn’t considered honest. No money passes. But people like Mrs. Butt or Mrs. Finch or Mrs. Huggins like a nice woollen dress or a winter coat that hasn’t seen too much wear and they pay for it with coupons instead of money.”

  “You’d better not tell me any more,” said Craddock. “It’s all against the law.”

  “Then there oughtn’t to be such silly laws,” said Bunch, filling her mouth up with pins again. “I don’t do it, of course, because Julian doesn’t like me to, so I don’t. But I know what’s going on, of course.”

  A kind of despair was coming over the Inspector.

  “It all sounds so pleasant and ordinary,” he said. “Funny and petty and simple. And yet one woman and a man have been killed, and another woman may be killed before I can get anything definite to go on. I’ve left off worrying about Pip and Emma for the moment. I’m concentrating on Sonia. I wish I knew what she looked like. There was a snapshot or two in with these letters, but none of the snaps could have been of her.”

  “How do you know it couldn’t have been her? Do you know what she looked like?”

  “She was small and dark, Miss Blacklock said.”

  “Really,” said Miss Marple, “that’s very interesting.”

  “There was one snap that reminded me vaguely of someone. A tall fair girl with her hair all done up on top of her head. I don’t know who she could have been. Anyway, it can’t have been Sonia. Do you think Mrs. Swettenham could have been dark when she was a girl?”

  “Not very dark,” said Bunch. “She’s got blue eyes.”

  “I hoped there might be a photo of Dmitri Stamfordis—but I suppose that was too much to hope for … Well”—he took up the letter—“I’m sorry this doesn’t suggest anything to you, Miss Marple.”

  “Oh! but it does,” said Miss Marple. “It suggests a good deal. Just read it through again, Inspector—especially where it says that Randall Goedler was making inquiries about Dmitri Stamfordis.”

  Craddock stared at her.

  The telephone rang.

  Bunch got up from the floor and went out into the hall where, in accordance with the best Victorian traditions, the telephone had originally been placed and where it still was.

  She reentered the room to say to Craddock:

  “It’s for you.”

  Slightly surprised, the Inspector went out to the instrument—carefully shutting the door of the living room behind him.

  “Craddock? Rydesdale here.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “I’ve been looking through your report. In the interview you had with Phillipa Haymes I see she states positively that she hasn’t seen her husband since his desertion from the Army?”

  “That’s right, sir—she was most emphatic. But in my opinion she wasn’t speaking the truth.”

  “I agree with you. Do you remember a case about ten days ago—man run over by a lorry—taken to Milchester General with concussion and a fractured pelvis?”

  “The fellow who snatched a child practically from under the wheels of a lorry, and got run down himself?”

  “That’s the one. No papers of any kind on him and nobody came forward to identify him. Looked as though he might be on the run. He died last night without regaining consciousness. But he’s been identified—deserter from the Army—Ronald Haymes, ex-Captain in the South Loamshires.”

  “Phillipa Haymes’ husband?”

  “Yes. He’d got an old Chipping Cleghorn bus ticket on him, by the way—and quite a reasonable amount of money.”

  “So he did get money from his wife? I always thought he was the man Mitzi overheard talking to her in the summerhouse. She denied it flatly, of course. But surely, sir, that lorry accident was before—”

  Rydesdale took the words out of his mouth.

  “Yes, he was taken to Milchester General on the 28th. The hold-up at Little Paddocks was on the 29th. That lets him out of any possible connection with it. But his wife, of course, knew nothing about the accident. She may have been thinking all along that he was concerned in it. She’d hold her tongue—naturally—after all he was her husband.”

  “It was a fairly gallant bit of work, wasn’t it, sir?” said Craddock slowly.

  “Rescuing that child from the lorry? Yes. Plucky. Don’t suppose it was cowardice that made Haymes desert. Well, all that’s past history. For a man who’d blotted his copybook, it was a good death.”

  “I’m glad for her sake,” said the Inspector. “And for that boy of theirs.”

  “Yes, he needn’t be too ashamed of his father. And the young woman will be able to marry again now.”

  Craddock said slowly:

  “I was thinking of that, sir … It opens up—possibilities.”

  “You’d better break the news to her as you’re on the spot.”

  “
I will, sir. I’ll push along there now. Or perhaps I’d better wait until she’s back at Little Paddocks. It may be rather a shock—and there’s someone else I rather want to have a word with first.”

  Nineteen

  RECONSTRUCTION OF THE CRIME

  I

  “I’ll put a lamp by you before I go,” said Bunch. “It’s so dark in here. There’s going to be a storm, I think.”

  She lifted the small reading lamp to the other side of the table where it would throw light on Miss Marple’s knitting as she sat in a wide highbacked chair.

  As the flex pulled across the table, Tiglath Pileser the cat leapt upon it and bit and clawed it violently.

  “No, Tiglath Pileser, you mustn’t … He really is awful. Look, he’s nearly bitten it through—it’s all frayed. Don’t you understand, you idiotic puss, that you may get a nasty electric shock if you do that?”

  “Thank you, dear,” said Miss Marple, and put out a hand to turn on the lamp.

  “It doesn’t turn on there. You have to press that silly little switch halfway along the flex. Wait a minute. I’ll take these flowers out of the way.”

  She lifted a bowl of Christmas roses across the table. Tiglath Pileser, his tail switching, put out a mischievous paw and clawed Bunch’s arm. She spilled some of the water out of the vase. It fell on the frayed area of flex and on Tiglath Pileser himself, who leapt to the floor with an indignant hiss.

  Miss Marple pressed the small pear-shaped switch. Where the water had soaked the frayed flex there was a flash and a crackle.

  “Oh, dear,” said Bunch. “It’s fused. Now I suppose all the lights in here are off.” She tried them. “Yes, they are. So stupid being all on the same thingummibob. And it’s made a burn on the table, too. Naughty Tiglath Pileser—it’s all his fault. Aunt Jane—what’s the matter? Did it startle you?”

  “It’s nothing, dear. Just something I saw quite suddenly which I ought to have seen before….”

  “I’ll go and fix the fuse and get the lamp from Julian’s study.”

  “No, dear, don’t bother. You’ll miss your bus. I don’t want any more light. I just want to sit quietly and—think about something. Hurry dear, or you won’t catch your bus.”

  When Bunch had gone, Miss Marple sat quite still for about two minutes. The air of the room was heavy and menacing with the gathering storm outside.

  Miss Marple drew a sheet of paper towards her.

  She wrote first: Lamp? and underlined it heavily.

  After a moment or two, she wrote another word.

  Her pencil travelled down the paper, making brief cryptic notes….

  II

  In the rather dark living room of Boulders with its low ceiling and latticed window panes, Miss Hinchcliffe and Miss Murgatroyd were having an argument.

  “The trouble with you, Murgatroyd,” said Miss Hinchcliffe, “is that you won’t try.”

  “But I tell you, Hinch, I can’t remember a thing.”

  “Now look here, Amy Murgatroyd, we’re going to do some constructive thinking. So far we haven’t shone on the detective angle. I was quite wrong over that door business. You didn’t hold the door open for the murderer after all. You’re cleared, Murgatroyd!”

  Miss Murgatroyd gave a rather watery smile.

  “It’s just our luck to have the only silent cleaning woman in Chipping Cleghorn,” continued Miss Hinchcliffe. “Usually I’m thankful for it, but this time it means we’ve got off to a bad start. Everybody else in the place knows about that second door in the drawing room being used—and we only heard about it yesterday—”

  “I still don’t quite understand how—”

  “It’s perfectly simple. Our original premises were quite right. You can’t hold open a door, wave a torch and shoot with a revolver all at the same time. We kept in the revolver and the torch and cut out the door. Well, we were wrong. It was the revolver we ought to have cut out.”

  “But he did have a revolver,” said Miss Murgatroyd. “I saw it. It was there on the floor beside him.”

  “When he was dead, yes. It’s all quite clear. He didn’t fire that revolver—”

  “Then who did?”

  “That’s what we’re going to find out. But whoever did it, the same person put a couple of poisoned aspirin tablets by Letty Blacklock’s bed—and thereby bumped off poor Dora Bunner. And that couldn’t have been Rudi Scherz, because he’s as dead as a doornail. It was someone who was in the room that night of the hold-up and probably someone who was at the birthday party, too. And the only person that lets out is Mrs. Harmon.”

  “You think someone put those aspirins there the day of the birthday party?”

  “Why not?”

  “But how could they?”

  “Well, we all went to the loo, didn’t we?” said Miss Hinchcliffe coarsely. “And I washed my hands in the bathroom because of that sticky cake. And little Sweetie Easterbrook powdered her grubby little face in Blacklock’s bedroom, didn’t she?”

  “Hinch! Do you think she—?”

  “I don’t know yet. Rather obvious, if she did. I don’t think if you were going to plant some tablets, that you’d want to be seen in the bedroom at all. Oh, yes, there were plenty of opportunities.”

  “The men didn’t go upstairs.”

  “There are back stairs. After all, if a man leaves the room, you don’t follow him to see if he really is going where you think he is going. It wouldn’t be delicate! Anyway, don’t argue, Murgatroyd. I want to get back to the original attempt on Letty Blacklock. Now, to begin with, get the facts firmly into your head, because it’s all going to depend upon you.”

  Miss Murgatroyd looked alarmed.

  “Oh, dear, Hinch, you know what a muddle I get into!”

  “It’s not a question of your brains, or the grey fluff that passes for brains with you. It’s a question of eyes. It’s a question of what you saw.”

  “But I didn’t see anything.”

  “The trouble with you is, Murgatroyd, as I said just now, that you won’t try. Now pay attention. This is what happened. Whoever it is that’s got it in for Letty Blacklock was there in that room that evening. He (I say he because it’s easier, but there’s no reason why it should be a man more than a woman except, of course, that men are dirty dogs), well, he has previously oiled that second door that leads out of the drawing room and which is supposed to be nailed up or something. Don’t ask me when he did it, because that confuses things. Actually, by choosing my time, I could walk into any house in Chipping Cleghorn and do anything I liked there for half an hour or so with no one being the wiser. It’s just a question of working out where the daily women are and when the occupiers are out and exactly where they’ve gone and how long they’ll be. Just good staff work. Now, to continue. He’s oiled that second door. It will open without a sound. Here’s the setup: Lights go out, door A (the regular door) opens with a flourish. Business with torch and hold-up lines. In the meantime, while we’re all goggling, X (that’s the best term to use) slips quietly out by door B into the dark hall, comes up behind that Swiss idiot, takes a couple of shots at Letty Blacklock and then shoots the Swiss. Drops the revolver, where lazy thinkers like you will assume it’s evidence that the Swiss did the shooting, and nips back into the room again by the time that someone gets a lighter going. Got it?”

  “Yes—ye-es, but who was it?”

  “Well, if you don’t know, Murgatroyd, nobody does!”

  “Me?” Miss Murgatroyd fairly twittered in alarm. “But I don’t know anything at all. I don’t really, Hinch!”

  “Use that fluff of yours you call a brain. To begin with, where was everybody when the lights went out?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Yes, you do. You’re maddening, Murgatroyd. You know where you were, don’t you? You were behind the door.”

  “Yes—yes, I was. It knocked against my corn when it flew open.”

  “Why don’t you go to a proper chiropodist instead of messing about yoursel
f with your feet?. You’ll give yourself blood poisoning one of these days. Come on, now—you’re behind the door. I’m standing against the mantelpiece with my tongue hanging out for a drink. Letty Blacklock is by the table near the archway, getting the cigarettes. Patrick Simmons has gone through the archway into the small room where Letty Blacklock has had the drinks put. Agreed?”

  “Yes, yes, I remember all that.”

  “Good, now somebody else followed Patrick into that room or was just starting to follow him. One of the men. The annoying thing is that I can’t remember whether it was Easterbrook or Edmund Swettenham. Do you remember?”

  “No, I don’t.”

  “You wouldn’t! And there was someone else who went through to the small room: Phillipa Haymes. I remember that distinctly because I remember noticing what a nice flat back she has, and I thought to myself ‘that girl would look well on a horse.’ I was watching her and thinking just that. She went over to the mantelpiece in the other room. I don’t know what it was she wanted there, because at that moment the lights went out.

  “So that’s the position. In the drawing room are Patrick Simmons, Phillipa Haymes, and either Colonel Easterbrook or Edmund Swettenham—we don’t know which. Now, Murgatroyd, pay attention. The most probable thing is that it was one of those three who did it. If anyone wanted to get out of that far door, they’d naturally take care to put themselves in a convenient place when the lights went out. So, as I say, in all probability, it’s one of those three. And in that case, Murgatroyd, there’s not a thing you can do about it!”

  Miss Murgatroyd brightened perceptibly.

  “On the other hand,” continued Miss Hinchcliffe, “there’s the possibility that it wasn’t one of those three. And that’s where you come in, Murgatroyd.”

  “But how should I know anything about it?”

  “As I said before if you don’t nobody does.”

  “But I don’t! I really don’t! I couldn’t see anything at all!”

  “Oh, yes, you could. You’re the only person who could see. You were standing behind the door. You couldn’t look at the torch—because the door was between you and it. You were facing the other way, the same way as the torch was pointing. The rest of us were just dazzled. But you weren’t dazzled.”