The Regatta Mystery and Other Stories

by Agatha Christie

  I knew just what he meant, because a young

  niece of mine not ing before had hurried her

  child off to a very ell-known specialist in skin

  diseases without consulting her own doctor whom

  she considered an old dodderer, and the specialist

  had ordered some vegY expensive treatment, and

  later they found that all the child was suffering

  from was rather an un0sual form of measles.

  I just mention this--though I have a horror of digressing--to show that I appreciated Mr.

  Petherick's point--bui I still hadn't any idea of

  what he was driving at.

  "If Mr. Rhodes is ill--" I said, and stopped--because

  the poor ma gave the most dreadful

  laugh.

  He said: "I expect t( die of a broken neck in a

  few months' time."

  And then it all came out. There had been a case

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  of murder lately in Barnchester--a town about

  twenty miles away. I'm afraid I hadn't paid much

  attention to it at the time, because we had been

  having a lot of excitement in the village about our

  district nurse, and outside occurrences like an

  earthquake in India and a murder in Barnchester,

  although of course far more important really--had

  given way to our own little local excitements.

  I'm afraid villages are like that. Still, I did

  remember having read about a woman having

  been stabbed in a hotel, though I hadn't remem-bered

  her name. But now it seemed that this

  woman had been Mr. Rhodes' wife--and as if that

  wasn't bad enough--he was actually under suspi-cion

  of having murdered her himself.

  All this Mr. Petherick explained to me very

  clearly, saying that, although the Coroner's jury

  had brought in a verdict of murder by a person or

  persons unknown, Mr. Rhodes had reason to be-lieve

  that he would probably be arrested within a

  day or two, and that he had come to Mr. Petherick

  and placed himself in his hands. Mr. Petherick

  went on to say that they had that afternoon con-suited

  Sir Malcolm Olde, K.C., and that in the

  event of the case coming to trial Sir Malcolm had

  been briefed to defend Mr. Rhodes.

  Sir Malcolm was a young man, Mr. Petherick

  said, very up to date in his methods, and he had

  indicated a certain line of defense. But with that

  line of defense Mr. Petherick was not entirely

  satisfied.

  "You see, my dear lady," he said, "it is tainted

  with what I call the specialist's point of view. Give

  Sir Malcolm a case and he sees only one point--

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  133

  the most likely line of defense. But even the best

  line of defense may ignore completely what is, to

  my mind, the vital point. It takes no account of

  what actually happened."

  Then he went on to say some very kind and flattering

  things about my acumen and judgment and

  my knowledge of human nature, and asked permission

  to tell me the story of the case in the hopes

  that I might be able to suggest some explanation.

  I could see that Mr. Rhodes was highly skeptical

  of my being of any use anl that he was annoyed at

  being brought here. But Mr. Petherick took no

  notice and proceeded to give me the fasts of what

  occurred on the night of March 8th.

  Mr. and Mrs. Rhodes had been staying at the

  Crown Hotel in Barncheater. Mrs. Rhodes who

  (so I gathered from Mr. Petherick's careful language)

  was perhaps just a shade of a hypochondriac,

  had retired to bed in, mediately after dinner.

  She and her husband occupied adjoining rooms

  with a connecting door. Mr. Rhodes, who is

  writing a book on prehistoric flints, settled down

  to work in the adjoining from. At eleven o'clock

  he tidied up his papers and prepared to go to bed.

  Before doing so, he just glanced into his wife's

  room to make sure that there was nothing she

  wanted. He discovered the electric light on and his

  wife lying in bed stabbed through the heart. She

  had been dead at least an hour--probably longer.

  The following were the POints made. There was

  another door in Mrs. Rholes' room leading into

  the corridor. This door was locked and bolted

  on the inside. The only wirdow in the room was

  closed and latched. According to Mr. Rhodes no

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  body had passed through the room in which he

  was sitting except a chambermaid bringing hot

  water bottles. The weapon found in the wound

  was a stiletto dagger which had been lying on Mrs.

  Rhodes' dressing-table. She was in the habit of using

  it as a paper knife. There were no fingerprints

  on it.

  The situation boiled down to this--no one but

  Mr. Rhodes and the chambermaid had entered the

  victim's room.

  I inquired about the chambermaid.

  "That was our first line of inquiry," said Mr.

  Petherick. "Mary Hill is a local woman. She has

  been chambermaid at the Crown for ten years;

  There seems absolutely no reason why she should

  commit a sudden assault on a guest. She is, in any

  case, extraordinarily stupid, almost half-witted.

  Her story has never varied. She brought Mrs.

  Rhodes her hot water bottle and says the lady was

  drowsy--just dropping off to sleep. Frankly, I

  cannot believe, and I am sure no jury would believe,

  that she committed the crime."

  Mr. Petherick went on to mention a few additional

  details. At the head of the staircase in the

  Crown Hotel is a kind of miniature lounge where

  people sometimes sit and have coffee. A passage

  goes off to the right and the last door in it is the

  door into the room occupied by Mr. Rhodes. The

  passage then turns sharply to the right again and

  the first door round the corner is the door into

  Mrs. Rhodes' room. As it happened, both these

  doors could be seen by witnesses. The first door--that

  into Mr. Rhodes' room, which I will call A,

  could be seen by four people, two commercial

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  135

  travelers and an elderly married couple who were

  having coffee. According to them nobody went in

  or out of door A except Mr. Rhodes and the

  chambermaid. As to the other door in passage B,

  there was an electrician at work there and he also

  swears that nobody entered or left door B except

  the chambermaid.

  It was certainly a very curious and interesting

  case. On the face of it, it looked as though Mr.

  Rhodes must have murdered his wife. But I could

  see that Mr. Petherick was quite convinced of his

  client's innocence and Mr. Petherick was a very

  shrewd man.

  At the inquest Mr. Rhodes had told a hesitating

  and rambling story about some woman who had

  written threatening letters to his wife. His story, I

  gathere
d, had been unconvincing in the extreme.

  Appealed to by Mr. Petherick, he explained him-self.

  "Frankly," he said, "I never believed it. I

  thought Amy had made most of it up."

  Mrs. Rhodes, I gathered, was one of those ro-mantic

  liars who go through life embroidering

  everything that happens to them. The amount of

  adventures that, according to her own account,

  happened to her in a year was simply incredible. If

  she slipped on a bit of banana peel it was a case of

  near escape from death. If a lamp-shade caught

  fire, she was rescued from a burning building at

  the hazard of her life. Her husband got into the

  habit of discounting her statements. Her tale as to

  some woman whose child she had injured .in a

  motor accident and who had vowed vengeance on

  her--wellmMr. Rhodes had simply not taken any

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  notice of it. The incident had happened before he

  married his wife and although she had read him

  letters couched in crazy language, he had suso

  pected her of composing them herself. She had ac-tually

  done such a thing once or twice before. She

  was a woman of hysterical tendencies who craved

  ceaselessly for excitement.

  Now, all that seemed to me very natural--indeed,

  we have a young woman in the village who

  does much the same thing. The danger with such

  people is that when anything at all extraordinary

  really does happen to them, nobody believes they

  are speaking the truth. It seemed to me that that

  was what had happened in this case. The police, I

  gathered, merely believed that Mr. Rhodes was

  making up this unconvincing tale in order to avert

  suspicion from himself.

  I asked if there had been any women staying by

  themselves in the Hotel. It seems there were two

  --a Mrs. Granby, an Anglo-Indian widow, and a

  Miss Carruthers, rather a horsey spinster who

  dropped her g's. Mr. Petherick added that the

  most minute inquiries had failed to elicit anyone

  who had seen either of them near the scene of the

  crime and there was nothing to connect either of

  them with it in any way. I asked him to describe

  their personal appearance. He said that Mrs.

  Granby had reddish hair rather untidily done, was

  sallow-faced and about fifty years of age. Her

  clothes were rather picturesque, being made

  mostly of native silks, etc. Miss Carruthers was

  about forty, wore pince-nez, had close-cropped

  hair like a man and wore mannish coats and skirts.

  "Dear me," I said, "that makes it very dif-ficult.''

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  Mr. Petherick looked inquiringly at me, but I

  didn't want to say any more just then, so I asked

  what Sir Malcolm Olde had said.

  Sir Malcolm Olde, it seemed, was going all out

  for suicide. Mr. Petherick said the medical evi-dence

  was dead against this, and there was the ab-sence

  of fingerprints, but Sir Malcolm was confi-dent

  of being able to call conflicting medical testi-mony

  and to suggest some way of getting over the

  fingerprint difficulty. I asked Mr. Rhodes what

  he thought and he said all doctors were fools but

  he himself couldn't really believe his wife had

  killed herself. "She wasn't that kind of woman,"

  he said simply--and I believed him. Hysterical

  people don't usually commit suicide.

  I thought a minute and then I asked if the door

  from Mrs. Rhodes' room led straight into the cor-ridor.

  Mr. Rhodes said no--there was a little hall-way

  with bathroom and lavatory. It was the door

  from the bedroom to the hallway that was locked

  and bolted on the inside.

  "In that case," I said, "the whole thing seems

  to me remarkably simple."

  And really, you know, it did .... The simplest

  thing in the world. And yet no one seemed to have

  seen it that way.

  Both Mr. Petherick and Mr. Rhodes were star-ing

  at me so that I felt quite embarrassed.

  "Perhaps," said Mr. Rhodes, "Miss Marple

  hasn't quite appreciated the difficulties."

  "Yes," I said, "I think I have. There are four

  possibilities. Either Mrs. Rhodes was killed by her

  husband, or by the chambermaid, or she com-mitted

  suicide, or she was killed by an outsider

  whom nobody saw enter or leave."

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  "And that's impossible," Mr. Rhodes broke in.

  "Nobody could come in or go out through my

  room without my seeing them, and even if anyone

  did manage to come in through my wife's room

  without the electrician seeing them, how the devil

  could they get out again leaving the door locked

  and bolted on the inside?"

  Mr. Petherick looked at me and said: "Well,

  Miss Marple?" in an encouraging manner.

  "I should like," I said, "to ask a question. Mr.

  Rhodes, what did the chambermaid look like?"

  He said he wasn't sure--she was tallish, he

  thought--he didn't remember if she was fair or

  dark. I turned to Mr. Petherick and asked him the

  same question.

  He said she was of medium height, had fairish

  hair and blue eyes and rather a high color.

  Mr. Rhodes said: "You are a better observer

  than I am, Petherick."

  I ventured to disagree. I then asked Mr. Rhodes

  if he could describe the maid in my house. Neither

  he nor Mr. Petherick could do so.

  "Don't you see what that means?" I said. "You

  both came here full of your own affairs and the

  person who let you in was only a parlorrnaid. The

  same applies to Mr. Rhodes at the Hotel. He saw

  only a chambermaid. He saw her uniform and her

  apron. He was engrossed by his work. But Mr.

  Petherick has interviewed the same woman in a

  different capacity. He has looked at her as a

  person.

  "That's what the woman who did the murder

  counted upon."

  As they still didn't see, I had to explain.

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  139

  "I think," I said, "that this is how it went. The

  chambermaid came in by door A, passed through

  Mr. Rhodes' room into Mrs. Rhodes' room with

  the hot water bottle and went out through the hall-way

  into passage B. X--as I will call our murder-ess--came

  in by door B into the little hallway,

  concealed herself in--well, in a certain apartment,

  ahem--and waited until the chambermaid had

  passed out. Then she entered Mrs. Rhodes' room,

  took the stiletto from the dressing-table--(she had

  doubtless explored the room earlier in the day)

  went up to the bed, stabbed the dozing woman,

  wiped the handle of the stiletto, locked and bolted

  the door by which she had entered, and then

  passed out through the room where Mr. Rhodes

  was working."

  Mr. Rhodes cried out: "But I should have seen

&nb
sp; her. The electrician would have seen her go in."

  "No," I said. "That's where you're wrong.

  You wouldn't see her--not if she were dressed as a

  chambermaid." I let it sink in, then I went on,

  "You were engrossed in your work--out of the

  tail of your eye you saw a chambermaid come in,

  go into your wife's room, come back and go out.

  It was the same dress--but not the same woman.

  That's what the people having coffee saw--a

  chambermaid go in and a chambermaid come

  out. The electrician did the same. I daresay if a

  chambermaid were very pretty a gentleman might

  notice her face--human nature being what it is

  --but if she were just an ordinary middle-aged

  woman--well--it would be the chambermaid's

  dressyou would see--not the woman herself."

  Mr. Rhodes cried: "Who was she?"

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  "Well," I said, "that is going to be a little dif-ficult.

  It must be either Mrs. Granby or Miss Car-ruthers.

  Mrs. Granby sounds as though she might

  wear a wig normally--so she could wear her own

  hair as a chambermaid. On the other hand, Miss

  Carruthers with her close-cropped mannish head

  might easily put on a wig to play her part: I

  daresay you will find out easily enough which of

  them it is. Personally, I incline myself to think it

  will be Miss Carruthers."

  And really, my dears, that is the end of the

  story. Carruthers was a false name, but she was

  the woman all right. There was insanity in her

  family. Mrs. Rhodes, who was a most reckless and

  dangerous driver, had run over her little girl, and

  it had driven the poor woman off her head. She

  concealed her madness very cunningly except for

  writing distinctly insane letters to her intended vic-tim.