The Murder at the Vicarage Read online

  Gladdie paused out of breath, and Lawrence tried tactfully to get back to where the conversation had started.

  “Did you hear anything else?”

  “Well, it’s difficult to remember exactly, sir. It was all much the same. He said once or twice, ‘I don’t believe it.’ Just like that. ‘Whatever Haydock says, I don’t believe it.’”

  “He said that, did he? ‘Whatever Haydock says?’”

  “Yes. And he said it was all a plot.”

  “You didn’t hear the lady speak at all?”

  “Only just at the end. She must have got up to go and come nearer the window. And I heard what she said. Made my blood run cold, it did. I’ll never forget it. ‘By this time tomorrow night, you may be dead,’ she said. Wicked the way she said it. As soon as I heard the news, ‘There,’ I said to Rose. ‘There!’”

  Lawrence wondered. Principally he wondered how much of Gladys’s story was to be depended upon. True in the main, he suspected that it had been embellished and polished since the murder. In especial he doubted the accuracy of the last remark. He thought it highly possible that it owed its being to the fact of the murder.

  He thanked Gladys, rewarded her suitably, reassured her as to her misdoings being made known to Mrs. Pratt, and left Old Hall with a good deal to think over.

  One thing was clear, Mrs. Lestrange’s interview with Colonel Protheroe had certainly not been a peaceful one, and it was one which he was anxious to keep from the knowledge of his wife.

  I thought of Miss Marple’s churchwarden with his separate establishment. Was this a case resembling that?

  I wondered more than ever where Haydock came in. He had saved Mrs. Lestrange from having to give evidence at the inquest. He had done his best to protect her from the police.

  How far would he carry that protection?

  Supposing he suspected her of crime—would he still try and shield her?

  She was a curious woman—a woman of very strong magnetic charm. I myself hated the thought of connecting her with the crime in any way.

  Something in me said, “It can’t be her!” Why?

  And an imp in my brain replied: “Because she’s a very beautiful and attractive woman. That’s why.”

  There is, as Miss Marple would say, a lot of human nature in all of us.

  Twenty

  When I got back to the Vicarage I found that we were in the middle of a domestic crisis.

  Griselda met me in the hall and with tears in her eyes dragged me into the drawing room. “She’s going.”

  “Who’s going?”

  “Mary. She’s given notice.”

  I really could not take the announcement in a tragic spirit.

  “Well,” I said, “we’ll have to get another servant.”

  It seemed to me a perfectly reasonable thing to say. When one servant goes, you get another. I was at a loss to understand Griselda’s look of reproach.

  “Len—you are absolutely heartless. You don’t care.”

  I didn’t. In fact, I felt almost lighthearted at the prospect of no more burnt puddings and undercooked vegetables.

  “I’ll have to look for a girl, and find one, and train her,” continued Griselda in a voice of acute self-pity.

  “Is Mary trained?” I said.

  “Of course she is.”

  “I suppose,” I said, “that someone has heard her address us as sir or ma’am and has immediately wrested her from us as a paragon. All I can say is, they’ll be disappointed.”

  “It isn’t that,” said Griselda. “Nobody else wants her. I don’t see how they could. It’s her feelings. They’re upset because Lettice Protheroe said she didn’t dust properly.”

  Griselda often comes out with surprising statements, but this seemed to me so surprising that I questioned it. It seemed to me the most unlikely thing in the world that Lettice Protheroe should go out of her way to interfere in our domestic affairs and reprove our maid for slovenly housework. It was so completely unLettice-like, and I said so.

  “I don’t see,” I said, “what our dust has to do with Lettice Protheroe.”

  “Nothing at all,” said my wife. “That’s why it’s so unreasonable. I wish you’d go and talk to Mary yourself. She’s in the kitchen.”

  I had no wish to talk to Mary on the subject, but Griselda, who is very energetic and quick, fairly pushed me through the baize door into the kitchen before I had time to rebel.

  Mary was peeling potatoes at the sink.

  “Er—good afternoon,” I said nervously.

  Mary looked up and snorted, but made no other response.

  “Mrs. Clement tells me that you wish to leave us,” I said.

  Mary condescended to reply to this.

  “There’s some things,” she said darkly, “as no girl can be asked to put up with.”

  “Will you tell me exactly what it is that has upset you?”

  “Tell you that in two words, I can.” (Here, I may say, she vastly underestimated.) “People coming snooping round here when my back’s turned. Poking round. And what business of hers is it, how often the study is dusted or turned out? If you and the missus don’t complain, it’s nobody else’s business. If I give satisfaction to you that’s all that matters, I say.”

  Mary has never given satisfaction to me. I confess that I have a hankering after a room thoroughly dusted and tidied every morning. Mary’s practice of flicking off the more obvious deposit on the surface of low tables is to my thinking grossly inadequate. However, I realized that at the moment it was no good to go into side issues.

  “Had to go to that inquest, didn’t I? Standing up before twelve men, a respectable girl like me! And who knows what questions you may be asked. I’ll tell you this. I’ve never before been in a place where they had a murder in the house, and I never want to be again.”

  “I hope you won’t,” I said. “On the law of averages, I should say it was very unlikely.”

  “I don’t hold with the law. He was a magistrate. Many a poor fellow sent to jail for potting at a rabbit—and him with his pheasants and what not. And then, before he’s so much as decently buried, that daughter of his comes round and says I don’t do my work properly.”

  “Do you mean that Miss Protheroe has been here?”

  “Found her here when I come back from the Blue Boar. In the study she was. And ‘Oh!’ she says. ‘I’m looking for my little yellow berry—a little yellow hat. I left it here the other day.’ ‘Well,’ I says, ‘I haven’t seen no hat. It wasn’t here when I done the room on Thursday morning,’ I says. And ‘Oh!’ she says, ‘but I dare say you wouldn’t see it. You don’t spend much time doing a room, do you?’ And with that she draws her finger along the mantelshelf and looks at it. As though I had time on a morning like this to take off all them ornaments and put them back, with the police only unlocking the room the night before. ‘If the Vicar and his lady are satisfied that’s all that matters, I think, miss,’ I said. And she laughs and goes out of the windows and says, ‘Oh! but are you sure they are?’”

  “I see,” I said.

  “And there it is! A girl has her feelings! I’m sure I’d work my fingers to the bone for you and the missus. And if she wants a new-fangled dish tried, I’m always ready to try it.”

  “I’m sure you are,” I said soothingly.

  “But she must have heard something or she wouldn’t have said what she did. And if I don’t give satisfaction I’d rather go. Not that I take any notice of what Miss Protheroe says. She’s not loved up at the Hall, I can tell you. Never a please or a thank you, and everything scattered right and left. I wouldn’t set any store by Miss Lettice Protheroe myself for all that Mr. Dennis is so set upon her. But she’s the kind that can always twist a young gentleman round her little finger.”

  During all this, Mary had been extracting eyes from potatoes with such energy that they had been flying round the kitchen like hailstones. At this moment one hit me in the eye and caused a momentary pause in the conversation.
r />   “Don’t you think,” I said, as I dabbed my eye with my handkerchief, “that you have been rather too inclined to take offence where none is meant? You know, Mary, your mistress will be very sorry to lose you.”

  “I’ve nothing against the mistress—or against you, sir, for that matter.”

  “Well, then, don’t you think you’re being rather silly?”

  Mary sniffed.

  “I was a bit upset like—after the inquest and all. And a girl has her feelings. But I wouldn’t like to cause the mistress inconvenience.”

  “Then that’s all right,” I said.

  I left the kitchen to find Griselda and Dennis waiting for me in the hall. “Well?” exclaimed Griselda.

  “She’s staying,” I said, and sighed.

  “Len,” said my wife, “you have been clever.”

  I felt rather inclined to disagree with her. I did not think I had been clever. It is my firm opinion that no servant could be a worse one than Mary. Any change, I consider, would have been a change for the better.

  But I like to please Griselda. I detailed the heads of Mary’s grievance.

  “How like Lettice,” said Dennis. “She couldn’t have left that yellow beret of hers here on Wednesday. She was wearing it for tennis on Thursday.”

  “That seems to me highly probable,” I said.

  “She never knows where she’s left anything,” said Dennis, with a kind of affectionate pride and admiration that I felt was entirely uncalled for. “She loses about a dozen things every day.”

  “A remarkably attractive trait,” I observed.

  Any sarcasm missed Dennis.

  “She is attractive,” he said, with a deep sigh. “People are always proposing to her—she told me so.”

  “They must be illicit proposals if they’re made to her down here,” I remarked. “We haven’t got a bachelor in the place.”

  “There’s Dr. Stone,” said Griselda, her eyes dancing.

  “He asked her to come and see the barrow the other day,” I admitted.

  “Of course he did,” said Griselda. “She is attractive, Len. Even baldheaded archaeologists feel it.”

  “Lots of S.A.,” said Dennis sapiently.

  And yet Lawrence Redding is completely untouched by Lettice’s charm. Griselda, however, explained that with the air of one who knew she was right.

  “Lawrence has got lots of S.A. himself. That kind always likes the—how shall I put it—the Quaker type. Very restrained and diffident. The kind of woman whom everybody calls cold. I think Anne is the only woman who could ever hold Lawrence. I don’t think they’ll ever tire of each other. All the same, I think he’s been rather stupid in one way. He’s rather made use of Lettice, you know. I don’t think he ever dreamed she cared—he’s awfully modest in some ways—but I have a feeling she does.”

  “She can’t bear him,” said Dennis positively. “She told me so.”

  I have never seen anything like the pitying silence with which Griselda received this remark.

  I went into my study. There was, to my fancy, still a rather eerie feeling in the room. I knew that I must get over this. Once give in to that feeling, and I should probably never use the study again. I walked thoughtfully over to the writing table. Here Protheroe had sat, red-faced, hearty, self-righteous, and here, in a moment of time, he had been struck down. Here, where I was standing, an enemy had stood….

  And so—no more Protheroe….

  Here was the pen his fingers had held.

  On the floor was a faint dark stain—the rug had been sent to the cleaners, but the blood had soaked through.

  I shivered.

  “I can’t use this room,” I said aloud. “I can’t use it.”

  Then my eye was caught by something—a mere speck of bright blue. I bent down. Between the floor and the desk I saw a small object. I picked it up.

  I was standing staring at it in the palm of my hand when Griselda came in.

  “I forgot to tell you, Len. Miss Marple wants us to go over tonight after dinner. To amuse the nephew. She’s afraid of his being dull. I said we’d go.”

  “Very well, my dear.”

  “What are you looking at?”

  “Nothing.”

  I closed my hand, and looking at my wife, observed:

  “If you don’t amuse Master Raymond West, my dear, he must be very hard to please.”

  My wife said: “Don’t be ridiculous, Len,” and turned pink.

  She went out again, and I unclosed my hand.

  In the palm of my hand was a blue lapis lazuli earring set in seed pearls.

  It was rather an unusual jewel, and I knew very well where I had seen it last.

  Twenty-one

  I cannot say that I have at any time had a great admiration for Mr. Raymond West. He is, I know, supposed to be a brilliant novelist and has made quite a name as a poet. His poems have no capital letters in them, which is, I believe, the essence of modernity. His books are about unpleasant people leading lives of surpassing dullness.

  He has a tolerant affection for “Aunt Jane,” whom he alludes to in her presence as a “survival.”

  She listens to his talk with a flattering interest, and if there is sometimes an amused twinkle in her eye I am sure he never notices it.

  He fastened on Griselda at once with flattering abruptness. They discussed modern plays and from there went on to modern schemes of decoration. Griselda affects to laugh at Raymond West, but she is, I think, susceptible to his conversation.

  During my (dull) conversation with Miss Marple, I heard at intervals the reiteration “buried as you are down here.”

  It began at last to irritate me. I said suddenly:

  “I suppose you consider us very much out of the things down here?”

  Raymond West waved his cigarette.

  “I regard St. Mary Mead,” he said authoritatively, “as a stagnant pool.”

  He looked at us, prepared for resentment at his statement, but somewhat, I think, to his chagrin, no one displayed annoyance.

  “That is really not a very good simile, dear Raymond,” said Miss Marple briskly. “Nothing, I believe, is so full of life under the microscope as a drop of water from a stagnant pool.”

  “Life—of a kind,” admitted the novelist.

  “It’s all much the same kind, really, isn’t it?” said Miss Marple.

  “You compare yourself to a denizen of a stagnant pond, Aunt Jane?”

  “My dear, you said something of the sort in your last book, I remember.”

  No clever young man likes having his works quoted against himself. Raymond West was no exception.

  “That was entirely different,” he snapped.

  “Life is, after all, very much the same everywhere,” said Miss Marple in her placid voice. “Getting born, you know, and growing up—and coming into contact with other people—getting jostled—and then marriage and more babies—”

  “And finally death,” said Raymond West. “And not death with a death certificate always. Death in life.”

  “Talking of death,” said Griselda. “You know we’ve had a murder here?”

  Raymond West waved murder away with his cigarette.

  “Murder is so crude,” he said. “I take no interest in it.”

  That statement did not take me in for a moment. They say all the world loves a lover—apply that saying to murder and you have an even more infallible truth. No one can fail to be interested in a murder. Simple people like Griselda and myself can admit the fact, but anyone like Raymond West has to pretend to be bored—at any rate for the first five minutes.

  Miss Marple, however, gave her nephew away by remarking:

  “Raymond and I have been discussing nothing else all through dinner.”

  “I take a great interest in all the local news,” said Raymond hastily. He smiled benignly and tolerantly at Miss Marple.

  “Have you a theory, Mr. West?” asked Griselda.

  “Logically,” said Raymond West, again
flourishing his cigarette, “only one person could have killed Protheroe.”

  “Yes?” said Griselda.

  We hung upon his words with flattering attention.

  “The Vicar,” said Raymond, and pointed an accusing finger at me.

  I gasped.

  “Of course,” he reassured me, “I know you didn’t do it. Life is never what it should be. But think of the drama—the fitness—churchwarden murdered in the Vicar’s study by the Vicar. Delicious!”

  “And the motive?” I inquired.

  “Oh! That’s interesting.” He sat up—allowed his cigarette to go out. “Inferiority complex, I think. Possibly too many inhibitions. I should like to write the story of the affair. Amazingly complex. Week after week, year after year, he’s seen the man—at vestry meetings—at choirboys’ outings—handing round the bag in church—bringing it to the altar. Always he dislikes the man—always he chokes down his dislike. It’s unChristian, he won’t encourage it. And so it festers underneath, and one day—”

  He made a graphic gesture.

  Griselda turned to me.

  “Have you ever felt like that, Len?”

  “Never,” I said truthfully.

  “Yet I hear you were wishing him out of the world not so long ago,” remarked Miss Marple.

  (That miserable Dennis! But my fault, of course, for ever making the remark.)

  “I’m afraid I was,” I said. “It was a stupid remark to make, but really I’d had a very trying morning with him.”

  “That’s disappointing,” said Raymond West. “Because, of course, if your subconscious were really planning to do him in, it would never have allowed you to make that remark.”

  He sighed.

  “My theory falls to the ground. This is probably a very ordinary murder—a revengeful poacher or something of that sort.”

  “Miss Cram came to see me this afternoon,” said Miss Marple. “I met her in the village and I asked her if she would like to see my garden.”

  “Is she fond of gardens?” asked Griselda.

  “I don’t think so,” said Miss Marple, with a faint twinkle. “But it makes a very useful excuse for talk, don’t you think?”