A Murder Is Announced

by Agatha Christie

  Mitzi turned the taps on obediently.

  “You are not angry at what I say, Miss Blacklock?” she asked.

  “If I were to be angry at all the lies you tell, I should never be out of a temper,” said Miss Blacklock.

  “I will go and say to the Inspector that I make it all up, shall I?” asked Mitzi.

  “He knows that already,” said Miss Blacklock, pleasantly.

  Mitzi turned off the taps and as she did so two hands came up behind her head and with one swift movement forced it down into the water-filled sink.

  “Only I know that you’re telling the truth for once,” said Miss Blacklock viciously.

  Mitzi thrashed and struggled but Miss Blacklock was strong and her hands held the girl’s head firmly under water.

  Then, from somewhere quite close behind her, Dora Bunner’s voice rose piteously on the air:

  “Oh Lotty—Lotty—don’t do it … Lotty.”

  Miss Blacklock screamed. Her hands flew up in the air, and Mitzi, released, came up chocking and spluttering.

  Miss Blacklock screamed again and again. For there was no one there in the kitchen with her….

  “Dora, Dora, forgive me. I had to … I had to—”

  She rushed distractedly towards the scullery door—and the bulk of Sergeant Fletcher barred her way, just as Miss Marple stepped, flushed and triumphant, out of the broom cupboard.

  “I could always mimic people’s voices,” said Miss Marple.

  “You’ll have to come with me, Madam,” said Sergeant Fletcher. “I was a witness of your attempt to drown this girl. And there will be other charges. I must warn you, Letitia Blacklock—”

  “Charlotte Blacklock,” corrected Miss Marple. “That’s who she is, you know. Under that choker of pearls she always wears you’ll find the scar of the operation.”

  “Operation?”

  “Operation for goitre.”

  Miss Blacklock, quite calm now, looked at Miss Marple.

  “So you know all about it?” she said.

  “Yes, I’ve known for some time.”

  Charlotte Blacklock sat down by the table and began to cry.

  “You shouldn’t have done that,” she said. “Not made Dora’s voice come. I loved Dora. I really loved Dora.”

  Inspector Craddock and the others had crowded in the doorway.

  Constable Edwards, who added a knowledge of first aid and artificial respiration to his other accomplishments, was busy with Mitzi. As soon as Mitzi could speak she was lyrical with self-praise.

  “I do that good, do I not? I am clever! And I am brave! Oh, I am brave! Very very nearly was I murdered, too. But I was so brave I risk everything.”

  With a rush Miss Hinchcliffe thrust aside the others and leapt upon the weeping figure of Charlotte Blacklock by the table.

  It took all Sergeant Fletcher’s strength to hold her off.

  “Now then—” he said. “Now then—no, no, Miss Hinchcliffe—”

  Between clenched teeth Miss Hinchcliffe was muttering:

  “Let me get at her. Just let me get at her. It was she who killed Amy Murgatroyd.”

  Charlotte Blacklock looked up and sniffed.

  “I didn’t want to kill her. I didn’t want to kill anybody—I had to—but it’s Dora I mind about—after Dora was dead, I was all alone—ever since she died—I’ve been alone—oh, Dora—Dora—”

  And once again she dropped her head on her hands and wept.

  Twenty-three

  EVENING AT THE VICARAGE

  Miss Marple sat in the tall armchair. Bunch was on the floor in front of the fire with her arms round her knees.

  The Reverend Julian Harmon was leaning forward and was for once looking more like a schoolboy than a man foreshadowing his own maturity. And Inspector Craddock was smoking his pipe and drinking a whisky and soda and was clearly very much off duty. An outer circle was composed of Julia, Patrick, Edmund and Phillipa.

  “I think it’s your story, Miss Marple,” said Craddock.

  “Oh no, my dear boy. I only just helped a little, here and there. You were in charge of the whole thing, and conducted it all, and you know so much that I don’t.”

  “Well, tell it together,” said Bunch impatiently. “Bit each. Only let Aunt Jane start because I like the muddly way her mind works. When did you first think that the whole thing was a put-up job by Blacklock?”

  “Well, my dear Bunch, it’s hard to say. Of course, right at the very beginning, it did seem as though the ideal person—or rather the obvious person, I should say—to have arranged the hold-up was Miss Blacklock herself. She was the only person who was known to have been in contact with Rudi Scherz, and how much easier to arrange something like that when it’s your own house. The central heating, for instance. No fires—because that would have meant light in the room. But the only person who could have arranged not to have a fire was the mistress of the house herself.

  “Not that I thought of all that at the time—it just seemed to me that it was a pity it couldn’t be as simple as that! Oh, no, I was taken in like everyone else, I thought that someone really did want to kill Letitia Blacklock.”

  “I think I’d like to get clear first on what really happened,” said Bunch. “Did this Swiss boy recognize her?”

  “Yes. He’d worked in—”

  She hesitated and looked at Craddock.

  “In Dr. Adolf Koch’s clinic in Berne,” said Craddock. “Koch was a world-famous specialist on operations for goitre. Charlotte Blacklock went there to have her goitre removed and Rudi Scherz was one of the orderlies. When he came to England he recognized in the hotel a lady who had been a patient and on the spur of the moment he spoke to her. I dare say he mightn’t have done that if he’d paused to think, because he left the place under a cloud, but that was some time after Charlotte had been there, so she wouldn’t know anything about it.”

  “So he never said anything to her about Montreux and his father being a hotel proprietor?”

  “Oh, no, she made that up to account for his having spoken to her.”

  “It must have been a great shock to her,” said Miss Marple, thoughtfully. “She felt reasonably safe—and then—the almost impossible mischance of somebody turning up who had known her—not as one of the two Miss Blacklocks—she was prepared for that—but definitely as Charlotte Blacklock, a patient who’d been operated on for goitre.

  “But you wanted to go through it all from the beginning. Well, the beginning, I think—if Inspector Craddock agrees with me—was when Charlotte Blacklock, a pretty, lighthearted affectionate girl, developed that enlargement of the thryoid gland that’s called a goitre. It ruined her life, because she was a very sensitive girl. A girl, too, who had always set a lot of stress on her personal appearance. And girls just at that age in their teens are particularly sensitive about themselves. If she’d had a mother, or a reasonable father, I don’t think she would have got into the morbid state she undoubtedly did get into. She had no one, you see, to take her out of herself, and force her to see people and lead a normal life and not think too much about her infirmity. And, of course, in a different household, she might have been sent for an operation many years earlier.

  “But Dr. Blacklock, I think, was an old-fashioned, narrow-minded, tyrannical and obstinate man. He didn’t believe in these operations. Charlotte must take it from him that nothing could be done—apart from dosage with iodine and other drugs. Charlotte did take it from him, and I think her sister also placed more faith in Dr. Blacklock’s powers as a physician than he deserved.

  “Charlotte was devoted to her father in a rather weak and soppy way. She thought, definitely, that her father knew best. But she shut herself up more and more as the goitre became larger and more unsightly, and refused to see people. She was actually a kindly affectionate creature.”

  “That’s an odd description of a murderess,” said Edmund.

  “I don’t know that it is,” said Miss Marple. “Weak and kindly people are often very tre
acherous. And if they’ve got a grudge against life it saps the little moral strength that they may possess.

  “Letitia Blacklock, of course, had quite a different personality. Inspector Craddock told me that Belle Goedler described her as really good—and I think Letitia was good. She was a woman of great integrity who found—as she put it herself—a great difficulty in understanding how people couldn’t see what was dishonest. Letitia Blacklock, however tempted, would never have contemplated any kind of fraud for a moment.

  “Letitia was devoted to her sister. She wrote her long accounts of everything that happened in an effort to keep her sister in touch with life. She was worried by the morbid state Charlotte was getting into.

  “Finally Dr. Blacklock died. Letitia, without hesitation, threw up her position with Randall Goedler and devoted herself to Charlotte. She took her to Switzerland, to consult authorities there on the possibility of operating. It had been left very late—but as we know the operation was successful. The deformity was gone—and the scar this operation had left was easily hidden by a choker of pearls or beads.

  “The war had broken out. A return to England was difficult and the two sisters stayed in Switzerland doing various Red Cross and other work. That’s right, isn’t it, Inspector?”

  “Yes, Miss Marple.”

  “They got occasional news from England—amongst other things, I expect, they heard that Belle Goedler could not live long. I’m sure it would be only human nature for them both to have planned and talked together of the days ahead when a big fortune would be theirs to spend. One has got to realize, I think, that this prospect meant much more to Charlotte than it did to Letitia. For the first time in her life, Charlotte could go about feeling herself a normal woman, a woman at whom no one looked with either repulsion or pity. She was free at last to enjoy life—and she had a whole lifetime, as it were, to crowd into her remaining years. To travel, to have a house and beautiful grounds—to have clothes and jewels, and go to plays and concerts, to gratify every whim—it was all a kind of fairy tale come true to Charlotte.

  “And then Letitia, the strong healthy Letitia, got flu which turned to pneumonia and died within the space of a week! Not only had Charlotte lost her sister, but the whole dream existence she had planned for herself was cancelled. I think, you know, that she may have felt almost resentful towards Letitia. Why need Letitia have died, just then, when they had just had a letter saying Belle Goedler could not last long? Just one more month, perhaps, and the money would have been Letitia’s—and hers when Letitia died….

  “Now this is where I think the difference between the two came in. Charlotte didn’t really feel that what she suddenly thought of doing was wrong—not really wrong. The money was meant to come to Letitia—it would have come to Letitia in the course of a few months—and she regarded herself and Letitia as one.

  “Perhaps the idea didn’t occur to her until the doctor or someone asked her her sister’s Christian name—and then she realized how to nearly everyone they had appeared as the two Miss Blacklocks—elderly, well-bred Englishwomen, dressed much the same, with a strong family resemblance—(and, as I pointed out to Bunch, one elderly woman is so like another). Why shouldn’t it be Charlotte who had died and Letitia who was alive?

  “It was an impulse, perhaps, more than a plan. Letitia was buried under Charlotte’s name. ‘Charlotte’ was dead, ‘Letitia’ came to England. All the natural initiative and energy, dormant for so many years, were now in the ascendant. As Charlotte she had played second fiddle. She now assumed the airs of command, the feeling of command that had been Letitia’s. They were not really so unlike in mentality—though there was, I think, a big difference morally.

  “Charlotte had, of course, to take one or two obvious precautions. She bought a house in a part of England quite unknown to her. The only people she had to avoid were a few people in her own native town in Cumberland (where in any case she’d lived as a recluse) and, of course, Belle Goedler who had known Letitia so well that any impersonation would have been out of the question. Handwriting difficulties were got over by the arthritic condition of her hands. It was really very easy because so few people had ever really known Charlotte.”

  “But supposing she’d met people who’d known Letitia?” asked Bunch. “There must have been plenty of those.”

  “They wouldn’t matter in the same way. Someone might say: ‘I came across Letitia Blacklock the other day. She’s changed so much I really wouldn’t have known her.’ But there still wouldn’t be any suspicion in their minds that she wasn’t Letitia. People do change in the course of ten years. Her failure to recognize them could always be put down to her shortsightedness; and you must remember that she knew every detail of Letitia’s life in London—the people she met—the places she went. She’d got Letitia’s letters to refer to, and she could quickly have disarmed any suspicion by mention of some incident, or an inquiry after a mutual friend. No, it was recognition as Charlotte that was the only thing she had to fear.

  “She settled down at Little Paddocks, got to know her neighbours and, when she got a letter asking dear Letitia to be kind, she accepted with pleasure the visit of two young cousins she had never seen. Their acceptance of her as Aunt Letty increased her security.

  “The whole thing was going splendidly. And then—she made her big mistake. It was a mistake that arose solely from her kindness of heart and her naturally affectionate nature. She got a letter from an old school friend who had fallen on evil days, and she hurried to the rescue. Perhaps it may have been partly because she was, in spite of everything, lonely. Her secret kept her in a way apart from people. And she had been genuinely fond of Dora Bunner and remembered her as a symbol of her own gay carefree days at school. Anyway, on an impulse, she answered Dora’s letter in person. And very surprised Dora must have been! She’d written to Letitia and the sister who turned up in answer to her letter was Charlotte. There was never any question of pretending to be Letitia to Dora. Dora was one of the few old friends who had been admitted to see Charlotte in her lonely and unhappy days.

  “And because she knew that Dora would look at the matter in exactly the same way as she did herself, she told Dora what she had done. Dora approved wholeheartedly. In her confused muddle-headed mind it seemed only right that dear Lotty should not be done out of her inheritance by Letty’s untimely death. Lotty deserved a reward for all the patient suffering she had borne so bravely. It would have been most unfair if all that money should have gone to somebody nobody had ever heard of.

  “She quite understood that nothing must be allowed to get out. It was like an extra pound of butter. You couldn’t talk about it but there was nothing wrong about having it. So Dora came to Little Paddocks—and very soon Charlotte began to understand that she had made a terrible mistake. It was not merely the fact that Dora Bunner, with her muddles and her mistakes and her bungling, was quite maddening to live with. Charlotte could have put up with that—because she really cared for Dora, and anyway knew from the doctor that Dora hadn’t got a very long time to live. But Dora very soon became a real danger. Though Charlotte and Letitia had called each other by their full names, Dora was the kind of person who always used abbreviations. To her the sisters had always been Letty and Lotty. And though she schooled her tongue resolutely to call her friend Letty—the old name often slipped out. Memories of the past, too, were rather apt to come to her tongue—and Charlotte had constantly to be on the watch to check these forgetful allusions. It began to get on her nerves.

  “Still, nobody was likely to pay attention to Dora’s inconsistencies. The real blow to Charlotte’s security came, as I say, when she was recognized and spoken to by Rudi Scherz at the Royal Spa Hotel.

  “I think that the money Rudi Scherz used to replace his earlier defalcations at the hotel may have come from Charlotte Blacklock. Inspector Craddock doesn’t believe—and I don’t either—that Rudi Scherz applied to her for money with any idea of blackmail in his head.”

  “He
hadn’t the faintest idea he knew anything to blackmail her about,” said Inspector Craddock. “He knew that he was quite a personable young man—and he was aware by experience that personable young men sometimes can get money out of elderly ladies if they tell a hard-luck story convincingly enough.

  “But she may have seen it differently. She may have thought that it was a form of insidious blackmail, that perhaps he suspected something—and that later, if there was publicity in the papers as there might be after Belle Goedler’s death, he would realize that in her he had found a gold mine.

  “And she was committed to the fraud now. She’d established herself as Letitia Blacklock. With the Bank. With Mrs. Goedler. The only snag was this rather dubious Swiss hotel clerk, an unreliable character, and possibly a blackmailer. If only he were out of the way—she’d be safe.

  “Perhaps she made it all up as a kind of fantasy first. She’d been starved of emotion and drama in her life. She pleased herself by working out the details. How would she go about getting rid of him?

  “She made her plan. And at last she decided to act on it. She told her story of a sham hold-up at a party to Rudi Scherz, explained that she wanted a stranger to act the part of the ‘gangster,’ and offered him a generous sum for his cooperation.

  “And the fact that he agreed without any suspicion is what makes me quite certain that Scherz had no idea that he had any kind of hold over her. To him she was just a rather foolish old woman, very ready to part with money.

  “She gave him the advertisement to insert, arranged for him to pay a visit to Little Paddocks to study the geography of the house, and showed him the spot where she would meet him and let him into the house on the night in question. Dora Bunner, of course, knew nothing about all this.

  “The day came—” He paused.

  Miss Marple took up the tale in her gentle voice.